Rigor 101

Scion finds a way to tap oh-so-cool counterculture

February 13, 2007

BY TAMARA AUDI

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

CULVER CITY, Calif. -- There were no signs on the door, no greeters trumpeting the event's sponsor. There were, however, free, freshly made tacos served from a truck parked outside.

There was a DJ with a too-cool-to-be-here smirk spinning window-rattling music for Los Angeles' young, beautiful and oddly dressed at a sample sale of little-known designers' clothing inside a bare-walled gallery.

There were $5 T-shirts printed with such phrases as "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT" and skateboards decorated with skulls and flames.

This den of antiestablishment irony was -- ironically -- sponsored by one of the biggest corporations on the planet: Toyota Motor Corp. Or, more accurately, by Scion, Toyota's meticulously engineered antiestablishment youth brand, which in four years has managed to sell more than 400,000 vehicles and create a product that is most popular within the 20-to-25 age bracket.

Not that anyone at the fashion sale seemed to know, or care.

"This is for what? Scion? I don't know about that. It was pretty cool. I got a T-shirt," said Ilanit Gluckowsky, 24, succinctly distilling the reaction of most shoppers when their low-key host was revealed to her.

The shoppers might not have known about Scion, but because of these events, Scion is learning valuable information about them -- like the kind of fashion and music they embrace.

And Scion also is creating positive, if subconscious, buzz about its own brand: that it's not the kind of car company that hits you in the head with ads, that it is the kind of car company that supports young fashion designers and jewelry makers, and unknown artists of all kinds.

In its quest to capture a base of the young and hip -- confident that one day they will be old and rich (and possibly in the market for a Lexus, Toyota's luxury brand) -- Scion has created a marketing strategy for an antimarketing crowd.

The brand has quietly and effectively entrenched itself in a youth culture that likes to think it's immune to the aggressive marketing that helped make Toyota so popular with its parents. Scion employees endlessly recite the same two words, like they've been beaten with a thick stack of the market research that bears them: subtlety and authenticity.

"The people we're trying to get don't want to see something shoved in their faces. It's subtle, you know?" said Oriel Zelcer.

Marketing without marketing

Zelcer, who works for a youth marketing group Scion consults, was wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon hand grenade smoking a cigarette. Zelcer was monitoring (without seeming like he was monitoring) a sign-in book where people could leave their names and e-mail addresses to be notified of the next event.

For Scion, the sample sale was a first. The company regularly hosts art shows in the gallery space, and holds concerts -- little-known artists only -- across the country. But fashion is the latest way for the company to tap into the lives of its client base, oh-so-coolly spread the Scion message, and create a Scion image.

The mastermind of the event, Jeri Yoshizu, a slim, dark-haired woman wearing a large gold seahorse necklace, green flats and a black and white striped shirt, watched from a corner. Yoshizu is behind Scion's deep dives into youth culture -- the key to why it is considered one of the most successful youth brand launches in the automotive industry.

Yoshizu -- who is 38, but insisted she's "mentally 28" -- said events like the clothing sale are part of a marketing strategy that goes like this: instead of selling Scion to the young as a counterculture supporter of the creative arts, actually make Scion a counterculture supporter of the creative arts.

"It's brand-building, the positive halo," Yoshizu said back at Scion headquarters in Torrance, just south of L.A. "The primary target is the music promoter or the artist" whose work is shown and hopefully purchased at the Scion Gallery.

"That artist will then talk to maybe other artists about how serious Scion is about getting behind the art community. That really makes a difference, because young people can see who's being legit, and who is just marketing.

"We want to be authentic," Yoshizu said, adding that "at the end of the day, your image is going to be what puts you over."

Creating its own consumers

The American market is so competitive, even top foreign automakers know they must aggressively plot to stay ahead. As Detroit catches up to Toyota and Honda in technology, reliability and pricing, there are fewer ways for automakers to distinguish themselves, fewer demographics to exploit. And none tougher than the youth market.

"Scion basically created a market," said Christopher Li, a researcher for a unit of J.D. Power and Associates, which tracks automotive sales. "I'm not even sure they expected to perform that well."

Scion first released its distinctly low-slung vehicles -- one boxy, one egg-shaped -- slowly and quietly in California. Scion started to sell well there, its underground image only helped by limited availability. According to an independent analysis, 35% of Scion customers -- a large slice by industry norms -- are younger than 30.

A large part of Scion's appeal is the array of options encouraging young customers to personalize their vehicles like a Starbucks order. The Scion xA, for example, offers different colored shifter knobs, gas and brake pedals (red, blue or silver), interior ambient lighting that illuminates the foot wells and cup holders (amber, blue, green, red), a choice of different wheels and eight types of performance kits -- from a sport muffler for a throaty rumble ($399) to lowering springs ($189).

Image is everything

At Scion's offices, a small building on the back of Toyota's massive campus in Torrance, there are constant discussions about image: the success of the Apple iPod versus the Sony MP3; the VHS tape winning out over Beta.

"In the end, what was the difference? The technologies were the same. It was image," said Sheila Swanson, 37, special events manager for Scion.

To burnish Scion's image, Swanson and Yoshizu, Scion's sales promotions manager, carefully choose venues and performers. For a nationwide Scion tour, where vehicles are available for test-drives, locations are scouted by Hollywood movie scouts in search of edgier crowds.

In Philadelphia, Scion went to South Street, a strip of restaurants and boutiques punctuated by the occasional sex toy shop and tattoo parlor. In Michigan, Scion appeared at Incognito in Royal Oak, known for eclectic shoes and clothes.

What Scion marketers are looking for is not any teenager or twentysomething. They are looking for the trendsetter or, in marketing speak, the early adopter who takes to a new product or style first and influences others to do the same. This was your friend who first used Bluetooth when nobody knew what that meant, or wore skinny jeans before they were on celebrities, but stopped by the time they were sold in Costco.

Mark Templin, Scion vice president, will tell you, for example, that his 17-year-old son, Matt, a junior in high school, "is not the person we're marketing at Scion. He's a jock. He plays football. He's into pickup trucks. He's not the creative set we're after. He's not a trendsetter. He's a trend follower. That's not who we target at Scion."

His 14-year-old daughter, Megan, on the other hand, is a potential target. She's artistic, and doesn't follow fashion trends, but makes her own.

It's a delicate balance, and Scion's style mavens are ever watchful for a tipping point.

"I rely on two groups of people," said Yoshizu, the event promoter. "The first group, if they know about it, it's cool. The second, if they know about it, it's over."

Which can lead to acrobatic dissembling as Scion executives strive mightily not to sound like, you know, executives.

Templin, 46, vice president of marketing at Lexus before coming to Scion, cheerfully notes that there are 142 million people younger than 35 in the United States, even as he insists, straight-faced, that "we're not necessarily trying to sell a million cars a year. That's not what we're about.

"It seems like everybody is trying to trick people into buying their products. ...We want to support the creative community -- music, art, fashion and film."

But only unknown artists, Templin added. If it's someone he's heard of, that person probably doesn't belong at a Scion event.

Making the transition

Yoshizu, who has built a Rolodex of target demographic artists, filmmakers and musicians, quickly realizes when she has made a misstep.

There was the rock disaster of 2005, when Scion promoted three bands that Yoshizu believed had not yet hit the mainstream. But when she got to the first show, "everybody was old!" As in, over 35. "I could tell right away. There was a lot of fleece and Dockers."

Months later, she sponsored a hip-hop show in L.A. that drew a crowd of teenagers. "They were in shape and wore tight T-shirts. There were tons of girls. It was packed. Jackpot."

A reminder that once the art shows are over, and tacos are eaten and the DJs have gone home, Scion is ultimately, as Templin eventually said, "about bringing people to Toyota who wouldn't have been here before."

The transition from Toyota's luxury brand to its youth brand was easy, he said, because "Scion is much more like Lexus than people think. It's about doing the right thing for the customer. It's just a different group of people."

There is no denying the brilliance of taking the guy from the luxury brand and assigning him to sell to his former customers' kids, immediately transforming them into once-and-future Toyota customers. It is a move so authentically corporate, so subversively creative, that only the most disaffected teenager could truly appreciate it.

Contact TAMARA AUDI at 313-222-6582 or audi@freepress.com.

Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.