Toyota hybrid owners are Norway's most loyal and satisfied car owners, but attracting new customers has been a challenge. One of the reasons for this, are all the myths and fallacies about hybrids. So, rather than relying on car salesmen to persuade potential buyers, maybe the hybrid owners themselves could lend a hand. If so, this would not only be a unique story to tell for Toyota as a brand, but also a nice way for people to experience and learn about Toyota hybrids from someone they trust more than car salesmen: the owners themselves.

“Try My Hybrid” featured real (and unpaid) Toyota hybrid owners who let strangers, neighbours and friends test drive their hybrids.

Selected owners were the faces and voices of the campaign locally and nationally when we kicked off. On the campaign site you could find Hybrid owners close to where you live. And logging in with Facebook, allowed you to find friends - and friends of friends, who's hybrid you could test drive.

So, using an intuitive website integrated with Facebook and a messaging tool, we wanted to both recruit hybrid owners willing to share their enthusiasm, and pair them up with people who are curious.

Every car brand knows the importance of getting potential buyers to test-drive, and they all go about it in more or less the same way.

Crowd sourcing this task without compensating though, is something very few could pull off.

Try my Hybrid is about much more than test-drives. It's an introduction to a brand-customer relationship like no other in the industry, making outsiders curious to what it is with this brand that makes the owners so proud and devoted.

It shows that when a brand dares let go, their customers can be their greatest vehicles of communication.

Letting strangers test-drive your car is asking a lot. Still we doubled our goal of 150 owners. In little Norway, 300 owners covered most of the country. Both geographically, and socially on Facebook (friends and friends of friends).

1/3 of the Norwegian population remember the campaign.

1,300 test-drive sign-ups. 10x the average of test-drive signups on toyota.no in the same period.

One of Norway's biggets radio shows signed up and broadcasted the show live from a Prius.

55+ newspapers ran the story.

This January, Auris outsold the category leader VW Golf for the fist time.