Toyota Brochure: Marketers Take Note

Toyota is a great company. When I was in high school in the 1970s, our family had a Corona. it was a pile of junk—I thought it was made of recycled beer cans.

Fast forward to the present: Toyota is kicking butt. The company stands for innovative engineering, high-quality manufacturing, and effective marketing. Compare, for example, Toyota’s hybrid engines (gas and electric) to GM’s solution to high gas prices.

Here is another example of Toyota’s excellence. This is a brochure about its hybrid engine. The document is informative, elegantly designed, and well illustrated. Companies should aspire to a document like this when they face the marketing challenge of selling new and complex products to “regular ole” consumers.

Toyota also has an interesting web site where people can custom-build a PDF. It starts here.

1. Run your cursor over “View PDF” in the upper right corner of the window.

2. Select a few topics in the next window.

3. Click on “View PDF” under the Prius outline on the right side of the screen. (But not the “View PDF” underneath this one—identical text in two places with different functions is a poor design.)

This starts a process that builds a custom PDF—pretty cool. However, in this case, the process gets in the way of disseminating information, but there are good uses for this capability. For example, when you want only one part of a long manual.

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Comments

[mike3k]

Unfortunately Toyota's web site is very Mac-unfriendly. When I bought my Prius I wasn't able to complete the customize/configure form in either Safari or Firefox. I ended up using IE in Parallels.

[olivier blanchard]

The only viable solution to high gas prices that I have been able to devise is to hold elections weekly instead of every 2-4 years.

I think that would work.

[Matt Langdon]

It's a pity they can't spell hybrid on the first page under the picture of the Prius. Hibrid?

[Harry Chong]

What will they think of next?