Toyota gets that feeling more than rivals on record sales

A sought-after Holy Grail it came so tantalisingly close to reaching last year.

For the industry, it will be a moment of triumph — but even more so for one manufacturer than any other.

Toyota, which entered the local market with its quirky little cars taking on the might of General Motors and Ford, will have sold around 70,000 more cars than any other manufacturer.

For Toyota's divisional manager of national marketing, Peter Webster, the most satisfying element of all was that in October Toyota outsold Ford and Holden combined for the first time.

You could forgive Webster for leaping in the air and shouting “Oh What a Feeling”.

Dominating 23 per cent of the market does not happen by accident and Webster says that marketing, more than any other factor, is the reason.

“Our job is to create the optimum environment for a sale to take place,” he says.

“So the brand image and the way consumers see Toyota is very much drawn by the marketing messages we put in the marketplace.

“This is a sales-focused company and I absolutely see the marketing department's role is to pave the way.”

Webster believes that consistency has been central to the success of the Toyota brand in the local market — not just at an umbrella brand level, but throughout its range of vehicles.

“Unlike many of the other brands, we have stuck with one key marketing slogan if you like, or marketing undertone which has been `Oh What a Feeling',” he said.

“That was a campaign that was launched back in about 1988 and is still relevant today, and I think the thing that put us in such good stead is that `Oh What a Feeling' is supposed to represent the overwhelming sense of satisfaction you have when you own and drive a Toyota.”

It is a message that has become a part of the vernacular — the elusive desire of any great marketing message.

“I still remember when Australia won the 2000 Olympics bid that photo that I think was on the front page of every newspaper the next day was John Fahey jumping out of his seat and the headline said `Oh What a Feeling', so it's in the landscape, it's in the spoken word.

“I think if you look at any other brand, that consistency of message has made a big impact on the way Toyota has come to market since the early 1990s.”

But beneath the banner the company has also made sure there have been single stand-out statements to represent each of its models. Hilux is presented as unbreakable, LandCruiser as king of the road.

“Our strength from a marketing perspective is our range. Our weakness from a marketing perspective is how do you present a broad range to individual consumers?

“So we have fundamentally worked on a philosophy that you demonstrate to customers the single-word attribute of that car. While the Hilux is unbreakable, the reason it gives that `Oh What a Feeling' was that `unbreakable' was the particular key thought we believed was applicable when the car was launched. So each vehicle has its own individual key thought.”

While most consumers would see the marketing messages aimed squarely at them, Webster admits that more than half of it is in fact aimed at talking to Toyota's own people. “Every single person who has worked in the Toyota marketing department for the 17 years that I have been here, every single advertising agency that we employ regardless of what sort of marketing discipline they are focused on, understands one statement we have made to everybody and that is 52 per cent of our advertising is directed at the dealer network,” he says.

“What the dealers see in the marketing sometimes reflects how they need to act in terms of representing the brand. You can't even explain the difference a motivated dealer makes to the success of a car franchise and we spend an inordinate amount of time communicating our messages with our dealer network.

“We often see advertising and marketing departments who are focused on the work that they are doing but not on actually communicating it to their relevant supplier base or their retail base.

“Every person in the Toyota marketing department has a little card that sits on their desk that says `I'm in the communications business' and that's really a reminder to them to say `I know what I'm doing but how do I make other people both internally and also the dealer network know what we are doing?”'

By the close of play on New Year's Eve, Webster expects to have sold around 238,000 vehicles under the Toyota banner as well as a further 8000 Lexus vehicles. It's a figure that gives what has become a very Australian company — key sponsor of the AFL — almost a quarter of the entire market.