Those Awful Advertising Slogans - No. 17 - Toyota

 Toyota, the largest manufacturer of motor vehicles in the world, is also, not surprisingly, a major sponsor of the Olympic and Paralympic Games that have been held this summer in Tokyo. I have no issues with Toyota supporting the games and in particular putting their hefty marketing muscle behind the assistance of athletes needing help.

What I do resent is the slogan that this massive business has adopted to showcase their efforts. It only came to my attention recently, when a large poster appeared in beautiful Ruislip, but apparently it has been running since 2018. Here is one of the many examples of the use of the slogan.

 I am certainly not the first who has looked at these three words and pondered, deeply, about why it is that marketing people are so offensive. A cursory glance on Google showed that a frequent search on Toyota and Impossible is "What does Start Your Impossible mean?" and the answer, according to Google, is

"Start your impossible" is a catchphrase that Toyota made up and it means to "start making your impossible dreams possible.

Good. I am not alone. I really cherish that phrase "made up". They just knocked it out in their shed, as it were.

Let us not waste too much space dissecting the mentality of people who try to turn adjectives into nouns. They know what they're doing.  Presumably it goes down well with the kids, or something, Why they couldn't use "Start your impossible dream" I don't know. It's a helluva lot better as a slogan, and it rules out the alternatives that we at Ramblings naturally came up with when considering how the slogan should have been crafted:

• Start your impossible ambition to expunge admen from decent society
• Start your impossible attempt to make vehicle manufacturers take direct responsibility for poisoning us with diesel emissions
• Start your impossible campaign to make it impossible* to drive a car with the windows open whilst playing music loudly.
  

I suppose the guys in Tokyo really think they are doing cutting-edge, innovative marketing. But they are not. Like all car companies, they are inherently conservative and terrified of doing anything really new. The three-word strap-line is so firmly established in the ad world that it seems nothing can shift it and, if what they really want to say is several words longer, then they just cut out the extra words and leave it up to us to guess.

*Sorry about the repeat of "impossible". I couldn't think of an alternative and it's getting late