Watching the latest Toyota Tundra commercial, and realize what it really means to mind watching Mike Tyson fight when he was young ... is a creeping sense of dread and inevitability of the result.
Ultimately, no matter what U.S. manufacturers have been building trucks for decades and is still great.
As the "Great American Truck 'has long been on the market as a male icon, almost all previous advertising campaigns have a tendency to out-macho guy next. It has a rich tradition of commercial trucks in the world has gruffest, manliest voice talk about the product is an exciting way, but Toyota has dangerously upped the ante with this latest Tundra voice-over actor ... this guy makes Sam Elliott sound like a giggling schoolgirl.
As soon as American ad guys realized that people knew that Toyota was building many of their cars and trucks here in the States, they went at a time "American History" old ground. You know ... "We were building these when they flew over Pearl" and so on. But these little sideshows are really just a distraction from the real game: At some point, it will return the product - the price, quality, operating costs, the depreciation rate ... You know that money.
In the Toyota factories around the world, a worker must stop the assembly line if you think that there is a problem, or if it believes that the way to improve the process. U.S. trade unions are very effective in promoting a number of things, but creative thinking and individual does not belong 'em Not to say that does not happen, it could not happen, but it is hard to imagine one of our guys to stop the conveyor belt. Well, you know, without a hit in the face of a baseball bat.
U.S. automakers most directly in the line of fire of tundra is obviously Ford and Chevrolet. It can actually be a good thing, because if people take the time to put all their options with rates, they can find (to their surprise) that there is very little - if anything - to choose between the marks.
But what happens if you find that we are not able to fight them in the arena of quality? That our powers of persuasion are blunted by superior voice-over actors? How long before we start to consider the unthinkable ... the awakening of his former enemies Mothra induced sleep may well be our last, best hope? And what message would that send our children when they ask - and demand - if there was no other way we could compete for this business? "Daddy, why do we wake the monster"?
Oh ... humanity
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