The soft sell

My wife drives a Toyota. Having bought a car from them in the past makes us a prime marketing target for Toyota today. The theory goes "You liked us enough to buy from us one time...Consider us again when the time comes. And isn't now a good time?"

Recently we received a mailing inviting us to take a look at their new lineup of 2008 vehicles and consider one. But what struck me was the URL they were directing us to on every page of the fold-out: Toyota.com/shop. Just shop. No implied pressure. Come look, learn, compare.

This is very different from the Toyota ads I've seen on TV for the last few years. They all promoted the website BuyAToyota.com.

Now this could just be a matter of relationship marketing - current Toyota customers get sent to "shop" while new acquisitions go to "buy."

So I looked up some of the newer ads for Toyota like this one and this one, and they both end with simply "Toyota.com."

Not that Toyota has ever struggled with sales, but maybe we're seeing a shift from the hard sell to the soft sell.

Another car manufacturer, Mercury, struggling like many American car companies, says simply "You've got to put Mercury on your list."

With consumers being inundated with more advertising messages than ever, helpful, suggestive, but not pushy marketing seeems to be the current trend.

The Toyota way

One of the things that I like most about working on websites is that they are never "finished." In a way they are living things - always evolving, hopefully improving.

Incremental improvement is what it's all about at Toyota. The company is legendary in the business world for its automotive production techniques. This article from Fast Company is a great read and it reminds us all that, no matter what our job title or our specific objectives are, our job is to make things better.

Toyota's luxury division, Lexus, uses the tagline "the relentless pursuit of perfection." After reading that article, I have a new appreciation for those words.