Nielsen Awards Toyota As 2012 Green Marketer Of The Year

by Edmund Jenks | December 2, 2012 at 12:50 pm

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It’s official. Toyota conducted a poll asking a simple question: what should the plural form of Prius be? After 1.8 million people cast their votes, a clear winner was chosen. So what exactly do you call more than one Prius (choices ranged from Priuses to Prium)? The answer is “Prii”(pronounced Pree-Eye).

Nielsen Awards Toyota As 2012 Automotive Green Marketer Of The Year

According to a recent Nielsen analysis of consumer awareness, TV advertising response, and social media buzz, Toyota Motor Corporation is the greenest auto marketer of 2012.

The automaker brought home the third annual Nielsen Automotive Green Marketer of the Year Award, which was presented this week (November 29, 2012) at the Los Angeles International Auto Show Press Days.

Toyota won by leveraging their effective Prius family ad campaigns as well as their social media events to vault to the top. More than half (53%) of respondents were aware of Toyota’s green marketing initiatives. In addition, Toyota’s campaigns helped cultivate their strong green enthusiast base which drove the most positive online sentiment among the nominees, surpassing the Auto Average by 64%.

Awareness graph. Image Credit: The Nielsen Company

The Nielsen Automotive Green Marketer of the Year Award recognizes the automotive manufacturing brand that made the greatest strides in gaining consumer awareness and positively shifting consumer perceptions for the automotive industry’s environmentally friendly marketing initiatives. Other finalists for the award included Ford, Honda, Chevrolet and Nissan.

Methodology

In order to determine the finalists and winner, Nielsen leveraged three research studies to incorporate awareness levels and perceptions across media types. The studies included:

A custom survey of nearly 2,600 consumers’ cross-media awareness and perceptions of environmental messages by automotive brand
Response data from 6 million viewers of national television advertising collected by Nielsen’s ad effectiveness measurements service, focusing on green automotive ads
Measuring social media “buzz” sentiment within green-related discussion threads, based on over 115,000 social media messages

Auto manufacturers that ran any national TV ads with green themes between October 2011 and September 2012 were eligible for consideration.