Toyota Ideas for Good

Posted by ChaseEllman at 3:11 PM


Many of you may have seen the Toyota commercial where a mother talks about how she is more confident with her son's safety playing football due to Toyota technology regarding head injuries. If you haven't, you can watch it here. This commercial is part of a new Toyota campaign called "Ideas For Good". There are 3 steps to becoming part of Ideas For Good. A contributor first picks from five different Toyota technologies. They then think of a creative way to improve our lives using that technology, unrelated to cars. The last step involves the users sharing their big ideas online to make the world a better place. I thought this sounded similar to something we might learn in class and it turns out the challenge is a collaboration between InnoCentive and Toyota. There is one winner for each of the five technologies, and they get to pick from a new 2011 Prius, Venza, or Highlander Hybrid. It's amazing to me that one of the world's most successful car companies is asking the general public to contribute in order to change the way we think about car technology. What do you think? Is Toyota Ideas for Good a step forward for the car industry?

 

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3 comments:

  1. WisconsInnovation said... December 15, 2010 at 11:36 PM

    This is a great example of the power of sharing initiatives like InnoCentive and how firms can use this power creatively. I think Toyota is using this initiative to make up some ground they lost during their recent (and much publicized) product crisis. Overall, it seems like a good strategy.  

  2. Jeff said... December 29, 2010 at 10:55 AM

    I think this is a great example of the shift in marketing in general. The use of "real" people vs. celeb endorsements and the co-creation of campaigns between corporations and customers whether it be through social media or contests or countless other options. And there is nothing more powerful than having a true brand ambassador (or someone that cares enough to take time out of their day) to share their thoughts about a particular product, service or company.

    I think what makes this campaign different from the rest is that they are going beyond the actual product (the cars) and diving into the technologies Toyota uses and the benefits to our lives... outside of the car... in order to build that relationship every marketer seeks.  

  3. Anonymous said... January 9, 2011 at 2:03 AM

    This is five steps backwards.

    It's making people THINK they're intelligent when they're still idiots. Take blogs, people post stuff they get replies from people who have "like mindset" and they think they're smart instead of realizing that people are simply agreeing with them. You get more and more people together saying the same thing until someone takes notice, tries to correct the viewpoint, and fails because even though said person /is/ right, the "consensus of the many" is against reality.

    One only needs to watch the "ideas" that appear on the commercials (the recent one being "Toyota invented solar panels! We should put solar panels on TENTS!") with a closed mind to realize that the ideas churned out by the masses are going to be horrid.


    It's one thing to share ideas between intelligent people, but the rabble has no understanding of the basic operation of the "Toyota Technology"... and even though it is obvious Toyota is trying to portray themselves as having some "advanced features" and being a "company for the people" all they are doing is convincing the rabble that what they have been preaching (That we don't need "corporations" to make things, cause the rabble can do it just as well [a.k.a open source kiddy scripters (some are decent programmers, most are kiddy scripters)])



    All I can say is that no good ideas will come from this, yet millions of people will get the convoluted idea that they actually can engineer a new device loosely based off of "toyota technology".  

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