Yes, that’s a NASCAR racer pictured above, and yes, you’re still on the TEDBlog.  If you think there’s something incongruous about mentioning NASCAR and TED  in the same sentence, I’d like to ask you to imagine NASCAR as an interesting place where a corporate strategy focusing on technology, entertainment, and design goes to create stories to grow a brand.

Later in February, history will be made when a Toyota Camry hums around the steep banks of Daytona International Speedway.  This will be the first time that a Japanese car maker has competed at the highest level of competition in NASCAR.  Of course, the Camry racing in NASCAR isn’t the Toyota you and I can buy — it’s a pure race car with a motor that you can’t get feeding power to the rear wheels.  So it’s more of a Toyota "Camry", but it looks the part, and it gives current and soon-to-be Toyota fans something to hoot and holler about in an irrational kind of way.  Because there’s nothing more irrational than the form of entertainment called motorsport.  Which is why it’s such a great way to shift a brand to focus on emotion on top of a base of extreme technical competence.

Racing in NASCAR is part of of a larger trend of emotional design sweeping the entire Toyota-Lexus-Scion range.  To be sure, Toyotas have always been designed, and designed well, but in their quest for zero defects, more viscerally exciting design elements never made it to production.  Back in the 90’s a famous designer told me that he feared for every other automaker if and when Toyota figured out how to market to the irrational part of the human brain.  Well, that time has come.  All of a sudden the Camry is a really interesting car from an aesthetic point of view, what with its just-crawled-out-of-a-dark-and-mysterious-swamp front face.  And how about that FJ Cruiser, the first Toyota in decades to post its windshield at a near vertical angle?  As an exercise in pure visceral styling evocative of the original FJ Land Cruiser, it out-jeeps Jeep and Hummer.  So far this emphasis on emotion seems to be working to drive sales, so with all the petroleum going into FJ’s and NASCAR Camrys, Toyota is going to have to move a lot of hybrid-electric Prius units in order to maintain its karmic balance…

Up until I started writing this, I never once thought of TED’s themes of technology, entertainment, and design in the same train of thought as NASCAR.  But there you go — with NASCAR, as Toyota seems to know, all three get combined into one incredibly attractive package, which goes a long way to explaining why NASCAR is such a huge phenomenon.  And why understanding it is important to anyone working across these domains.