In the sluggish Japanese car market, Toyota (boasting the largest market share) had a mission to galvanise the domestic car market itself.Under the circumstances, Toyota created the multi-purpose-vehicle (MPV) “Mark X Zio”, the best-selling category in the Japanese car market, targeting men in their 40s and 50s, those who have time and dispose of their money freely.Despite Toyota’s conventional mass-media focused approach, we decided to create an effective web communication design that would intersect the contact points, integrated with an appealing content towards the targeted men.

Together with Kenshi Hirokane, the most popular “Neo-Manga” artist, we developed an “unpredictable” storytelling campaign driven by an “unpredictable” media development that allows a proactive and continuous involvement with those targets.

The “Mark X Zio” website product page, an essential information resource for prospective consumers, was the architectonic centre of this campaign. The site included the key visual and gradually unfolded the entire story with intrigue. As the story developed, different versions of subsidiary stories were delivered in serialised novels in papers, magazine cartoons, radio stories, so that targets could “drive” around the media and return to the campaign site.

The “unpredictable” cross-media campaign, driver of “relevancy”, navigated the targets to drive through the “unpredictable” media traffic and succeeded in recording the highest traffic, which was a 145% increase compared to the past highest record in the history of Toyota website within 2 weeks of launch.Moreover, compared with people who didn’t know this campaign, 226% empathised, 212% intended to visit dealers, and 215% intended to purchase the product.

As a result, Mark X Zio’s sales were double the initial sales target.