Targeting youthful dollars has been a sound strategy for dozens of industries, with the marketing creation of the American teenager in the 1950s giving birth to a kaleidoscope of entertainment, fashion, food and lifestyle brands catering exclusively to the country’s newest consumers.
In the automotive world, things have always been a little different. New cars are expensive, often well beyond the budgets of even the hardest working high schooler or college student, which means advertising campaigns that skewed towards entry-level buyers traditionally took into account a wider demographic. It was easier, and more profitable, to make older folks feel young by feeding them a line or two about the rejuvenating effects of a vehicle than it was to build something exclusively for the sub-25 set.
In the early 2000s, Toyota turned this conventional wisdom on its ear by…
