Non-Flushable CGM!

What specific issues trigger CGM?  Trust me, it's not always the obvious.  In the three days before Thanksgiving I had a whirlwind of meetings in Los Angeles, including several with one of my clients in my regular job at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Toyota.  Being a hybrid fanatic -- remember, I'm the Honda Civic Hybrid driver with the Mo Miles license plate (see my beloved very first blog, HybridBuzz.com) -- I had an opportunity to test drive the new Toyota Camry Hybrid, which was quite a ride and gave me an excellent basis upon which to assess emerging hybrid models.  Quite an impressive car, for a host of reasons (including mileage...yes, I actually said that), but quite honestly I'm not interested at this moment in over-gushing with Toyota hybrid love.  No, I'd rather write about something else I stumbled upon during my trip.  Bruce Ertmann, my key contact and Toyota's manager of "Consumer Generated Media" (please whip out your notebooks and take notes on that official title ) gave me a wonderful and thought-provoking tour of the entire Toyota US Headquarters campus, which included some "next-generation" buildings and facilities.  Of particular note, I had a chance to experience, drumroll please, a "waterless urinal." (See photo in this blog entry.) Yes, one of the newer buildings includes a mens room that has urinals that don't flush...and yet still function and stay clean. Apparently, each urinal saves 40,000 gallons of water a year, which obviously adds up. 

Having grown up in a former desert now known as Los Angeles, and taken annual family trips to the Sierra Nevada mountains by way of the Owens Valley (where the water was basically robbed to keep the grass green in L.A....recall the movie Chinatown and Marc Reisner's book Cadillac Desert), this touched both a rational (conservation is good) and emotional (you are helping my hometown) nerves.  And I've been talking about it ever since, including on this blog...obviously.  I've also found myself curiously connecting mental (perhaps unconscious) dots between saving water via biological pitstops and conserving fuel via hybrid cars.  It all hangs together.  My point is this: we all have different "talk levers."  Great brand experiences often compel us to talk, and bad brand experiences (e.g. customer service) consistenty induce our most viral venom.  Sometimes the wee smallest activities such as putting chocolates on a hotel bed pillow, or having an iPod hookup slot available a rental car, can trigger what I like to call "situational virality."  Did Toyota work the new environmentally-sensitized urinals into the media budget, figuring guys like me would talk it up a storm?  I seriously doubt it, but the entire initiative does harmonize with other messaging they are putting out to the marketplace, and consistency always helps drive credibility. Oh, and they get a little blog buzz in the process!

Comments

[Bruce]

No, the waterless urinals did not make it into our media budget, but they are symbolic of the genuine enterprise-wide environmental initiative that we have been pursuing at Toyota for many years. The scope transcends our environmantally-friendly vehicles and includes everything from energy-efficeint green assmebly plants across the globe to those curious urinals you highlighted within your post.

BTW, that building that houses those urinals is our newest award winning addition to our U.S. headquarters complex in Southern California . . . In addition to generating enough energy to power 350 homes during a typical summer day in the LA area, the environmentally-conscious contractor managed to recycle 95% of the construction materials used in building that complex.

[Meikah]

Very interesting information! I"m glad that many companies these days are not only concerned with bottomline but also invest in social responsibility. To me doing business and at the same time help conserve water or even energy is a noble thing. Well, Toyota is Toyota and the book The Toyota Way is already a well of valuable lessons. :)

[GrahamHill]

Bruce

I look after CRM for Toyota Financial Services in Germany.

I would be interested in discussing your experiences with CGM in Toyota US further. Perhaps you could mail me your details through my TFS mail graham(dot)hill(at)toyota(dash)fs(dot)com.

As we like to say at Toyota in Germany. Nichts ist unmoerglich = Nothing is impossible!

Graham Hill