Posted by Dale Buss on January 4, 2011 03:00 PM
No individual anywhere likely will be happier to see the auto industry report year-end 2010 sales results today than Bob Carter, GM of the Toyota brand in the United States. Month after month, he’s had to address the brand’s sputtering finish in the American market after decades as its star.
Toyota today reported its Dec. 2010 US sales as slightly down from a year ago, and overall 2010 sales as flat. Carter and his fellow Toyota executives tried to get ahead of that glum news by talking with auto analysts and the vehicle-industry press about their much rosier forecast for 2011.
The brand stewards say they're staging a comeback, naturally, in 2011. Carter backed up his predictions with the fact that the company plans to launch 11 new or updated Toyota, Lexus and Scion models this year, the first of which will be unveiled at the Detroit auto show next week. That will be a new member of a new Prius “family” of vehicles — the bright spot in its just released year-end figures, with December sales up 38% over a year earlier.
This new-product stream could be hugely significant for Toyota because a paucity of vehicle launches last year added to the woes the company experienced in this market because of its spate of safety recalls. Uncharacteristically, Toyota had to try to maintain market share last year with a series of broad incentive programs – and even that didn’t go very well, as Toyota actually lost share of a recovering US market.
Carter not only predicted that Toyota would come back in 2011 but also that the brand would benefit from longer-term demographic shifts in the US, such as the further burgeoning of Generation Y. The loyalties of Millennials remain up for grabs, even as Toyota attempts to get more socially connected (witness its current Ideas for Good crowdsourced innovation exercise).
As Toyota's PR team projects that it will remain "the top retail brand" in the auto industry for the third executive year (and Camry the best-selling US car for the ninth straight year), Carter and his colleagues will be toasting tomorrow — the day after the sales tallies are in for 2010 — as their New Year’s Day and symbolic fresh start.
They won't relax too long, however — Toyota's execs are hitting CES in Las Vegas to promote Entune, its Pandora-enabled multimedia entertainment system that aims to rival Ford's Sync. Here's a sneak peek:
No comments:
Post a Comment