Hybrids Battle for Green

Toyota Rolls Out Major Push for Third-Generation Prius
By SUZANNE VRANICA

With sales of hybrid vehicles sinking, a green-advertising battle is erupting between Toyota Motor's new Prius and Honda Motor's new Insight.
Beginning today, Toyota, the world's largest auto maker, is rolling out a major U.S. ad push for its 2010 Prius, the third generation of the world's top-selling hybrid vehicle. The car hits dealerships in the coming weeks.
The Prius television ads -- heavy on the special effects -- feature a utopian landscape made entirely of people; the sun, clouds and ocean are depicted by humans moving in unison. The new slogan: "Harmony between man, nature and machine."
The Prius campaign also will deploy some outdoor-marketing gimmicks, including transforming certain bus shelters in cities such as Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles into cooling stations that use solar panels to power fans. It's a way to demonstrate how solar panels on the Prius's moon roof keep the car cool.

Toyota's new ad for its third-generation Prius shows a planet in harmony, with humanized clouds, fields and flowers bursting into song.
Toyota's ad push will go head to head with a campaign for the Insight. Honda has been blanketing the airwaves with ads since March. Its pitch carries the slogan "A Hybrid for everyone," a nod to the price, which is just shy of $20,000. The Prius is more expensive, with a starting price of $22,000, unchanged from the base price for the 2009 model.
Still, Toyota says it will introduce a cheaper version of the car in the fall that will start at $21,000. It's unclear how much supply Toyota will have of the lower-priced Prius. Toyota ads won't mention the Prius's price.
Some experts believe that price should be a big factor in the campaigns; hybrids typically cost thousands of dollars more than comparable gas-burning models. "They need to emphasize not only the social benefits of hybrids but also the economics," says Rebecca Lindland, director of the automotive group at IHS Global Insight. "One of the big hang-ups with these cars is that they cost more."
Persuading consumers to buy a new car in this economic climate won't be easy. Toyota hasn't been spared in the auto industry's sales collapse. Its $7.8 billion loss for the January-March quarter, reported Friday, is bigger even than General Motors'.
Moreover, the allure of hybrids has waned with the decline in oil prices. Prius sales have fallen about 50% from Jan. 1 to April 30. It's a change from last summer, when consumers were clamoring for fuel-efficient cars as gas prices topped $4 a gallon. And for all their earth-friendly cachet, hybrid cars represent only 2% of the light-vehicle market, according to IHS Global Insight.
Toyota
Artist's rendering of one of the solar-cooling bus shelters Toyota will use to show how solar panels on the moon roof of its Prius hybrid cool the car.
"It's stunning," says Ms. Lindland of IHS. "Despite all the successes of the Prius and the emphasis on global warming, we can't get significant hybrid penetration."
The Prius campaign ranges across television, print and online ads. Toyota says it will spend more on the new campaign than it did for the second generation of Prius, which received $58.3 million in ad support, according to WPP's TNS Media Intelligence. Toyota declines to disclose its exact spending for this latest pitch.
"We recognize that normally hybrid sales fall with gas prices, but with this new product we think we can break that paradigm," says Kim McCullough, Toyota's corporate manager of marketing communications. The newly remodeled Prius will have more mass appeal, she says, because it is slightly bigger, with more horsepower.
The initial Prius advertising largely targeted the early adopter and the tree-hugging crowd, while the second generation of the vehicle was seen as the family's second or commuter car. This campaign is about the "mainstreaming of the product," Ms. McCullough says.
"The big barrier for mass consumers is they worried that the Prius was underpowered and small," says Mike McKay, executive creative director at the Los Angeles offices of Saatchi & Saatchi, the Publicis Groupe agency that created the ad effort.
Addressing the power question in another of its outdoor gimmicks, Toyota will head to some big parks, where it will set up 8- to 12-foot-tall flower sculptures equipped with solar panels that can be used as cellphone- and laptop-recharging stations. In August, the company will have billboards in California made of flowers.
Write to Suzanne Vranica at suzanne.vranica@wsj.com