Every year at the Christmas and New Years holiday period I get hit with remembering back to the year 1979. Most of you see the seemingly endless series of TOYOTATHON commercials on the tube I see the word STUPID. It is bad enough to know how stupid we were at the time, but trust me being reminded year each is not pleasant. In the paragraphs below you will see the rest of the story about the event called Toyotathon.
All this occurred very innocently in the little town in eastern North Carolina of Clinton. However let's set the table first and go back to 1975. I began my personal working life as an advertising salesperson for the Jacksonville Daily News in Jacksonville NC under the direction of two experienced and knowledgeable supervisors. Now Jacksonville NC is a military town being the home of Camp Lejeune and is full of young Marines with money burning a hole in their pocket. Young Marines have two big desires women and a nice car to drive on days off. The Daily News the primary media in the market covered the second desire well with lots of automotive advertising since the car dealers wanted these young Marines to come spend their automotive money with them. If memory serves me there were at the time some over 20 new car dealers in the area and a large assorted group of used car dealers wanting at their share of this burning a hole in the pocket money. Note that in those days new car dealers usually had one line, Toyota, Fiat, Datsun (you have to be old enough to remember that one) and on and on. The competition between dealers was intense and the two people, the manager and myself, in the car advertising dept. at the newspaper were kept quite busy selling and handling advertising for these dealers. In fact the Jacksonville newspaper ran more automotive advertising than the Raleigh newspaper at the time. The two supervisors helped teach me the finer points of handling car dealers and part of that was learning how the business operated and automotive talk used at dealers. I was young but a quick study and began to handle as many as 10 or so of the smaller dealers, leaving the big boys to the supervisor. When the boss was out I handled his load as well. The four years of this non stop deep in the weeds learning helped make me pretty good at working with new car dealers and I frankly enjoyed the work and being on the inside action so to speak. I liked new car dealer work so much for years afterward it was not unusual for me to be found at a dealer on Saturdays my day off just to enjoy the atmosphere, and learn some more. There came a point I could go into a auto showroom, check the atmosphere, and know if the auto dealer was successful.
Now all this acquired automotive education was taken to a new job when I moved to Clinton NC in July 1978 to begin working at The Sampson Independent. More money and better opportunities awaited me. My account list there had about three new car dealers and I quickly immersed myself in their business and began to help them sell more vehicles. Since I knew the auto talk and liked it my sales bloomed. My supervisor noticed my skills with auto dealers and decided to assign me one of her accounts Clinton Toyota. Clinton Toyota was a fairly new dealership that was trying to sell Toyotas in a market that did not see Toyotas other than a bucket of loose bolts. But nevertheless I was assigned and the owners of the dealership there actually called my supervisor and asked her why she had assigned someone else to the account. They had liked having the manager call on them and expressed concern of her no longer handling their business. The manager assured them to just give me a try and she believed they would be happy. Now the manager being a step ahead of the Toyota dealership owners had already figured this out and knew if anyone could help them sell Toyotas I was the one. It also would help her make her sales goal in her newspaper advertising dept. as well.
So the relationship began in early 1979 with the two owners and their new dealership. The final piece to this soon to happen event now comes into play and that is one world renowned Jim Moran. JIm was an automotive marketing legend already when he was asked by Toyota to take over their sales and distribution in Southeast US markets. Jim had already retired, but automotive was in his blood and I supposed he figured it would be fun too. So Jim went about trying to add new dealers to the network and existing Toyota dealers to push sales of Toyotas. Frankly most dealers were just fine with 25 or so new cars monthly making a nice profit on each and selling to people who just wanted a cheap fuel efficient car. Jim was having a difficult time making headway with getting dealers to push sales notably in the bigger metro areas like Raleigh. Jim looked at Raleigh and saw a large and rapidly growing young population that would be ideal for Toyota sales. However the Raleigh dealer was not interested in pushing Toyota sales hard enough in Jim's opinion . Jim could not understand this since he thought they had an ace in the pocket which was the recent Arab oil embargo which had pushed up gas at the pump prices and should make small fuel efficient vehicles a easy sale.
Jim also had another ace in his pocket in the form of the Clinton Toyota dealership owners who wanted to push Toyota sales and were willing to work hard in the attempt. Jim decided to use this dealership in Clinton to get some of his other dealers moving by asking Clinton Toyota to begin advertising in other markets where Toyota dealers already existed hoping this would get them moving on sales. Marketing money was made available to do so. As noted I was now the Clinton Toyota advertising rep and knew just how to make use of the marketing money. In the winter of 1979 one of the owners Jeff who was the marketing person and I began working closely as a team to market new Toyotas across Eastern North Carolina. We were moderately successful at doing so and sales picked up to around 50 or so vehicles per month. Jim Moran took notice and asked Jeff and Tommy to make a BIG push in April and May to sell Toyotas. Jeff came up with the idea of a big sale stretching from April 15 thorough Memorial Day in May. He envisioned selling 500 vehicles during the period. Jeff was a dreamer. Most everyone else though he had lost his mind thinking the dealership could sell 500 in that period. Jeff and I got together one day in late March in his office to put together a marketing plan. It was here we decided to called the big sale the Clinton 500 and name it officially a Toyotathon. I still do not remember who came up with the phrase first but it was either Jeff or myself, but what I do know it was here at this moment that it was coined. Anyway the sale began and for around six weeks we ran an ads on radio, tv, and newspapers each week in various media markets. By the end of Memorial Day weekend we had sold somewhere around 450 vehicles.
Frankly I believe even Jeff was shocked we sold that many, after all 75 to 100 would have been a good run. I know everyone else had smiles on their faces. Jim Moran took note of this sale and obviously was pleased. I also expect he pointed to the success in front of some of his larger metro dealers saying see you can do this and more if you just try. Whatever was said or done what I do know is Jim thought so much of our Toyotathon he did a late 1979 Holiday sales blitz using the name. Sales went big time during that campaign as well and the name stuck. Jeff and I were like proud parents having someone use our creation. Never thinking or considering that if we had been smart we would have copyrighted the name and sold it to Southeast Toyota. No telling how much money we would have made over the now 34 year existence of Toyotathon. That is why when I see the word I think STUPID.
Now through the years when I see Jeff we laugh about it now knowing what we should have done. Oh, the story you will see about Toyotathon officially is that some ad agency came up with the name, but all they did was use the name. But I know where it really came from and unfortunately Jim Moran is no longer with us to affirm this recollection. Jim took it and thanked us and passed it on to the agency for the official Toyotathon which is nationwide now.
Now you know the rest of the story.
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