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Blazing New Paths with Toyota and Trail Tracker
I've written before about how "content is marketing," and here's a terrific example of that big idea at work.
With SUVs becoming synonymous with suburban soccer moms, Toyota was looking for a way to reconnect with old-school SUV fans: the kind of drivers who love taking their vehicles off-road and treating them like midsize monster-trucks. For the marketing of its 2010 Toyota 4Runner, that meant taking the road less traveled – more specifically, passing on traditional TV spots and taking social media for a spin. To that end, Demand Media partnered with Toyota and their ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi LA, to provide content for Trail Tracker, an interactive community web site where true off-road aficionados can find and share their favorite trails. With what’s been described as a “Google street view for trails,” drivers can search a user-generated database of dirt roads and off-road obstacle courses, navigate through point-by-point trail overviews, and then download those routes directly to their dashboard GPS devices.  To help get Trail Tracker off and running, we contributed several killer trails from our own outdoors site Trails.com – but the real fun comes from users sharing their own adventures, by uploading GPS data and photos from their personal off-road excursions. Drivers can also annotate their journeys with comments and “trail tips,” assign difficulty ratings, and document trip distance, duration and average speed.  In another case of a brand understanding that it has authentic stories to share, Toyota also provided several of the treacherous trails its engineers used to road-test (er, off-road-test) their 4Runner prototypes. Blockbuster behind-the-scenes content like that puts valuable information directly into the hands of consumers, and earns their loyalty with enriching, one-of-a-kind experiences that last a whole lot longer than a 30-second commercial. The way we see it, when you empower your customers to embark on their own adventures, all roads lead back to you.
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