Can Toyota Get Its Mojo Back?

When Gretta Rose Bart went shopping for her first new car, she intended to follow her family's tradition of buying Toyotas. The 29-year-old learned to drive in her mother's Toyota Camry, which she says was "safe and practical." Instead, Bart drove away in a sleek white Volkswagen Jetta for $16,000. Why? "Toyota is a responsible, heavy car," says the San Diego kayak instructor. "But VW is carefree, light and fast."

Once the wheels of Young America, Toyota is having a midlife crisis. Baby boomers began a love affair with Toyota three decades ago as they rebelled against the big, stodgy cars Detroit sold to their parents. The boomers' devotion made Toyota the most successful foreign model on the road, with the Camry cruising along as America's top-selling car for the last three years. But as its boomer buyers age, Toyota is beginning to feel trapped by the relationship. With the average age of Camry buyers approaching 50, the carmaker is desperately seeking Gen-Xers. Otherwise, Toyota executives fear their brand faces the same fate as geriatric Detroit models, like Cadillac and Oldsmobile, whose sales hit the skids as their Eisenhower-era buyers began dying off. "We've done such a good job growing up with the baby boomers that we took our eye off the youth market," admits Don Esmond, vice president of the Toyota division.

Toyota is on an Austin Powers-style quest to get its mojo back. It is aiming three funky new cars--the Echo compact, a restyled Celica coupe and the MR2 Spyder roadster--at the Net generation. It's pitching them with ads on the Web and MTV that declare a "revolution" is underway at the once hip automaker. Even ads for the staid Camry have an irreverent tone. Toyota retired Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People" boomer anthem and replaced it with a self-deprecating version of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy." (New lyric: "I'm too sexy for the drive-thru.") The elders at Toyota also established a youth-marketing staff made up entirely of people in the prized 24-to-35 age group. All of this is intended to lower the average age of Toyota buyers by a decade, to 35.

Toyota isn't the only brand fretting that its boomer dependence could drive it to an early grave. Levi and Nike are also struggling to attract a younger audience and shake off an outdated image. It's a hard sell for boomer brands to persuade today's kids to drive the cars and walk in the same shoes that Mom and Dad did. Among automakers, only VW consistently scores with younger buyers, thanks to offbeat advertising, slick styling and the Beetle's triumphant reinvention. Toyota's $30 million marketing effort to recapture its lost youth underscores how boomers' once supreme influence over the American marketplace is on the wane. Madison Avenue is now training its sights on the boomers' babies, who equal their parents' generation's size and are set to surpass them in cultural influence and spending power, marketing experts say. "The days of boomers setting pop-culture trends are over," says Gerald Celente, editor of The Trends Journal. "Boomers are over the hill."

Intercepting the next generation on its way up is the job of Toyota's youth-marketing squad, dubbed the Genesis team. Tucked into a low-slung building across the parking lot from Toyota's U.S. headquarters in Torrance, Calif., the eight-member team works in an airy, modern space with computerized work stations on rollers. The team, pulled up from the low rungs of Toyota's sales-and-marketing ladder, decorated its office like a teenager's bedroom, with hip-hop posters and floppy red pillow chairs. They say they understand the youth market because they live it. "We're not hanging out in clubs to do investigative work--it's just what we do," says Jeri Yoshizu, 30, who created a funky new Web site, isthistoyota.com. Eventually, this youthful outlook is supposed to influence how Toyota designs its cars, as well as sells them. So far, the Genesis team can only claim that they designed the Echo's hubcaps and equipped it with six stereo speakers instead of four. But they contend the new models have what it takes--radical styling and rock-bottom prices. At $10,000, the Echo undercuts the Ford Focus compact by $2,000. The redesigned Celica starts at $17,350, nearly $4,500 less than the old model. At $25,000, the racy MR2 Spyder, coming this spring, probably costs too much for most kids, but is far cheaper than other roadsters.

Still, Toyota's mainstream models have such a middle-of-the-road image that execs are worried the brand is becoming a geezer-mobile. So they're giving Toyota's marketing a makeover. The new Web site includes a humorous video of a young woman making an obscene one-finger gesture from her car. An ad in Teen magazine last year advised new drivers not to perform personal hygiene at the wheel. The "Driver's Ed" ad showed a driver burrowing his pinkie into his right nostril and warned: "Attention nose pickers: Just because you are alone in your car--news flash--you are not invisible."