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“This generation is huge, and if you miss the boat with them, or alienate them entirely, you’ll have a hard time winning them back,” said Rebecca Lindland. “There are 75 million of them and they’re going to be a huge part of the buying market in the next 5 to 10 years.”

Toyota markets the Scion brand differently from the regular Toyota brand or luxury Lexus line, said Lindland. Scion tries to keep its models fresh and focuses on “underground” marketing tactics like the Second Life launch. Scion rarely advertises on television, she noted. Want proof hip marketing can make average cars cool? Just look at Toyota’s Scion franchise. Launched in California in mid-2003, Scion has shifted almost half a million cars in the United States. Not bad for a business based on selling recycled Japanese-market Toyotas.

The Toyota Scion, with its unconventional advertising (favoring a heavy presence on the Web and at lifestyle events over conventional TV and print spots) and potential mass customization (the cars are bare-bones basic, but all the extra stuff you can get to put in them is pretty neat) has become a case study for industry insiders obsessed with capturing the youth market (although almost half Toyota Scion buyers are in fact over 35). more..

“They really are trying a totally different type of marketing that will appeal to Generation Y — a group of people that really hasn’t adopted a brand yet,” Lindland said. “Scion has a really good grasp of the power that the Internet provides — it really is this generation’s mode of communication. They really haven’t known life without it.”Toyota execs amped up the hype, hinting Scion would be so cool, so hip that when its current models came to the end of their lives, they might be replaced by something completely different. But as Toyota gets ready to launch the first of a new generation of Scion products it’s all starting to look, well… just like a conventional automotive franchise.

Exhibit A: Scion’s best selling model, the xB is being replaced this year by… a new xB (pictured above). It’s a box on wheels like before, and in time-honored Detroit tradition, the new one is longer, wider, lower. Tradition? That’s a word that never appeared in the original Scion marketing playbook.

Here’s the thing: If you’ve built up a brand on the basis it’s hip to be outside the automotive mainstream (Sample tagline from a Scion xB ad: “So wrong for so many”), what happens when you start behaving too much like any other automaker, launching carefully contrived updates of your hit products?

If Toyota had simply discontinued the Scion xB at the end of the original’s model life, all those who had bought one would own a cool pop-culture icon, like a limited edition Casio G-Shock watch, a one-off Paul Frank handbag, or vintage loom Evisu jeans. Now when the new one launches they’ll just own an old Scion xB.

Toyota Scion available in the US only

Source: Motor Trends
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