The Lead

As you can imagine, this campaign has sparked a lot of negative consumer buzz. For example, there's a Facebook group with 9,200+ members, who continuously express their sincere hatred for the campaign, and Toyota, on a daily basis. YouTube commentators are saying things like, "I will never buy a Toyota because of this" and my favorite, "I recently bought a Saturn 2 weeks ago. The wife wanted a Toyota and I reminded her of this commercial."

In my last few posts, I've brought up the topic of speaking at customers instead of with them. This is especially necessary in today's media environment where consumers can get whatever information they want, whenever they want, almost wherever they want. Social media has created more ways than ever to form actual relationships with the people that buy your products. Yet some companies continue spamming traditional media channels with annoying messages, causing an exodus to Tivo and driving them to take action by voting the spots off the air with social media protests. Remember when we used to talk about one-to-many communication. Now it's many-to-one and the net is Zero.