At Toyota , strippers and human heads add an intimate touch.

With human heads and hands personifying the features & amenities, this new advertising campaign by Toyota portrays the idea that its products and services are customized for you, making you feel as though someone is attending to you at all times. It's creative and funny. But when the campaign--dubbed "human touch"--comes out at the same time as news of the company's internal "personal touch" policies, the definition of intimacy with the automaker becomes a little bit sketchier.

Personal touch is a decades-old internal labor policy in which strippers are invited to company meetings to help managers and staffers let loose and bond. Word of the widespread use of this policy got out this week when nine Toyota Motor Philippines employees were reprimanded for exploiting it. According to one:

Strip shows are part and parcel of wining and dining during personal touch meetings. Workers have a lottery to see who gets to sleep with the stripper and some employees have actually done the deed.

So then the question is, would you rather be a customer receiving Toyota's human touch, or an employee receiving its personal touch?

Comments

[gme]

The prospect of either is fairly unappealing, but given the choice between a stripper and driving around with a guy in a suit hugging me and a bunch of his cohorts watching...(though I imagine there's a niche market for the latter option).I'm amazed they OKed the advertising campaign. Unsexy, and it undermines your confidence--you can't help worrying about a company that would project the message that their airbag technology is at a level analogous to having a middle-aged man with a balloon squatting in your footwell :)