Grr...Blowing Off Some Steam

Me at the Chicago Auto Show in '07.

Some of you know I work for two Toyota-Scion dealerships managing their Scion departments. For those of you who are not familiar with Scion, here's a little background. Scion is Toyota's youth line. It's designed as an entry vehicle for young Generation Y individuals who Toyota corporation hopes will someday graduate to their parent line of vehicles.


Mid March we were presented with two Scion challenges by our regional office:


1. Come up with a cool grassroots marketing event promoting Scion in the community.
2. Design an accessory mailer promoting accessory sales for customers who already own a Scion.

I caught wind of the winner a little too early--before they had a chance to announce the results. A person at another dealer won BOTH of the challenges! I thought to myself "Okay that hurts, but he must have just brought his A game and blew us all away...". So not the case.

The next day I called my rep to confirm the results were true, and they were. He said the guy won both but he had some "help" and he was just using his "resources". My inquisitive mind asked what exactly does that mean? Long story short He didn't even design the mailer (challenge #2) himself, he had their dealership's marketing guy design it for him! I told my rep I thought since it was a competition, our resources were our minds and the challenge was to inspire the Scion Champions (that's what Toyota Motor Corp. calls our position) at each store to think creatively in promoting the Scion brand. It's the principal matter this guy wins the challenge and doesn't do the work!

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Toyota and the automotive industry. The company is a great company and they are usually very good to us and have the utmost respect for the corporate employees. Toyotas and Scions are the best cars out there and have great reliability. Scions are so unique and fun yet have the quality of Toyota with a more affordable price tag. It's a job I enjoy but it's discouraging when something so injust happens. I don't think I've been this hot about an issue in over a year. Okay I vented...now I can go back to liking my job again. :-)