Toyota hybrid owners are Norway’s most loyal and satisfied car owners, but attracting new customers has been a challenge.
Forget about car salesmen for a moment.
What if people could experience Hybrids with the most satisfied car drivers in Norway? Or even better: with someone they know and trust?
Creative Execution
This completely new approach generated a lot of publicity. So then, head of PR at Toyota, challenged one of Norway’s biggest radio shows - with a hybrid sceptic show host – to Try his hybrid. Five days later the entire show was broadcasted live from a Prius.
Try my hybrid is about much more than test-drives. It shows that when a brand dares let go, their customers can be their greatest vehicles of communication.
Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.
Before launch, we recruited a base of hybrid owners all over Norway through Toyota’s Facebook page, so proud of their cars that they, without pay, volunteered to let strangers, friends and neighbors test drive their cars.
Selected owners were the faces and voices of the campaign locally and nationally when we kicked off. On the campaign site you could find Hybrid owners close to where you live. And logging in with Facebook, allowed you to find friends - and friends of friends, who's hybrid you could test drive.
Results
Letting strangers test-drive your car is asking a lot. Still we doubled our goal of 150 owners. In little Norway, 300 owners covered most of the country. Both geographically, and socially on Facebook (friends and friends of friends). 1/3 of the Norwegian population remember the campaign. 1,300 test-drive sign-ups. 10x the average of test-drive signups on toyota.no in the same period. One of Norway's biggets radio shows signed up and broadcasted the show live from a Prius. 55+ newspapers ran the story. This January, Auris outsold the category leader VW Golf for the fist time.