Toyota Triumphs

The New York Times published a fascinating article on Toyota’s road to “world domination” last Sunday. To set the stage, here’s a paragraph on the car makers recent success:

By any measure, Toyota’s performance last year, in a tepid market for car sales, was so striking, so outsize, that there seem to be few analogs, at least in the manufacturing world. A baseball team that wins 150 out of 162 games? Maybe. By late December, Toyota’s global projections for 2007 — the production of 9.34 million cars and trucks — indicated that it would soon pass G.M. as the world’s largest car company.

The article searches for the seeds of Toyota’s “outsized” success and finds it in their basic philosophy:

Toyota is as much a philosophy as a business, a patchwork of traditions, apothegms and precepts that don’t translate easily into the American vernacular. Some have proved incisive (“Build quality into processes”) and some opaque (“Open the window. It’s a big world out there!”). Toyota’s overarching principle, Press told me, is “to enrich society through the building of cars and trucks.”

The author notes that this sounds like typical corporate baloney but goes on to realize that this was in fact deeply ingrained in Toyota’s DNA:

Historically the idea has meant offering car customers reliability and mobility while investing profits in new plants, technologies and employees. It has also captured an obsessive obligation to build better cars, which reflects the Toyota belief in kaizen, or continuous improvement.

The article is well worth reading with lots of insights into how Toyota has come so far while most other car companies are crashing and burning. From a Marketing for Good perspective, Toyota recognizes first and foremost they must satisfy their customers by building better cars. Product enhancements in Toyotas aren’t usually obvious things like the hybrid engine in the Prius. More often the enhancements can be found under the sheet metal, incremental improvements that make Toyotas the most reliable vehicles on the road. This isn’t marketing magic. In fact, one could argue that Toyota’s advertising has been relatively pedestrian over the years. What isn’t pedestrian is the product itself.  It literally walks all over the competition.