Toyota is the category leader among Hispanics, #1 for 10 straight years. However, customer retention is becoming increasingly more challenging in this competitive category. The objective of the campaign was to pay tribute to one of their most loyal customer bases - Hispanics. Toyota wanted to do this in a way that wasn't boastful but rather, genuine and fresh.

Research revealed a strong bond between Hispanics and their Toyotas —they personify their cars, as if they’re part of the family. We gave them the chance to do what they were already doing: naming their Toyotas, but now through a customized badge.

According to research, Hispanics are tremendous supporters of Toyota – and this campaign only deepened that bond, because now, they won’t just call their Toyotas by the nicknames they chose for them, they’ll also see it every time they walk up to it. The badges quickly became social objects as a result of many proud owners sharing them as never seen before in the social space. Each and every one of them also ignited organic conversations around the brand.

Consequently, “More than Cars” (Más que un Auto) became the highest user generated content campaign in the history of the brand to date.

Brand sales growth among Hispanics continues to build. Toyota remains the clear category leader, with a 5 percentage-point gap over its closest competitor. And it is now the #1 brand among Hispanics for the 11th consecutive year.

“Más que un Auto” was the perfect fit for an auto brand, especially since it has built so much credibility with its customers. You name things you love and we knew going in that there was a lot of heart for Toyotas. The program had a soft launch on National Name Your Car Day, October 2nd, 2014 and ran for 6 months on different media channels such as, online, cinema, addressable TV, direct marketing, and events.

Due to customer demand, the campaign continued to be adapted to align to customer requests and we had to increase the initial inventory of badges by 300%. Informing customers that we had ‘ran out’ led to hand written letters being sent to Toyota’s customer service center with stories of why their cars deserved a ‘badge.’ Adaptability was key to success.

The clearest evidence of our success was the sheer number of requests we received: 100,000 in the span of 6 months. Due to overwhelming demand, we had to increase the inventory of badges from the initial 25,000 to 100,000. During the launch of the program, sentiment for the brand reached 100% positive.

On social media, we reached an impressive mark of 20.8 Million earned impressions. This total eclipsed the amount of paid impressions by five times. Furthermore, the campaign achieved a total of 5MM engagements.

To date, this campaign produced the highest user generated content in the history of the brand in the U.S.Toyota also maintains the #1 rank among Hispanics for its 11th year.