Toyota Shares Manufacturing Process With Consumers

A new Toyota campaign gives a rare look behind-the-scenes of its manufacturing plants in the form of GIFs, which consumers can then share on several social channels.

On Toyota’s website Gifony – a portmanteau of GIF and symphony that rhymes with Tiffany – 45 GIFs illustrate different steps in the process of making a Corolla. From the giant robotic arms stacking pieces of an automobile’s body to the carwash-like painting system that gives the car its red color, each GIF includes sounds recorded from Toyota plants in Mississippi and Kentucky.

“You can almost think of this as a backstage pass into the production process,” says Marjorie Schussel, corporate marketing director at Toyota. “It’s so unbelievably amazing when you’re inside a plant, to watch how a car goes from a coil of steel to an actual vehicle.”

Schussel thought it would be fun to connect the manufacturing process to music. Consumers can go on Gifony and select eight GIFs, mashing them into a music video that can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and SoundCloud.

The cross-channel campaign also allowed people to create and share videos in a sound booth at the New York International Auto Show this week. Additionally, the automaker commissioned SoNevable, a DJ with 363,000 YouTube followers, to mix a song on his launchpad.

“We really wanted to tell the manufacturing story in a much more creative way and really engage the audience,” she says, adding that her favorite GIF is the factory workers arriving and doing their morning stretches. “Music speaks to all of us, and people like to create things and share them.”