Willie van Greune reckons he aged about five years during the seven odd weeks he spent in Madagascar, spying out the lie of the land for his employers. “The worst thing was the communication problem”, says the veteran of a couple of hundred past launches. “That and the transport. There are no cars for hire, so I had to use public transport to get anywhere, and the Malagasy have a system whereby you climb into the boat or bus or whatever and wait till all the seats are occupied before you set off. You can’t plan anything”.
Things were further complicated by the fact that most of the Malagasy place names are heavily vowel laden and, to an English speaker, unpronounceable, so asking a cab driver to take you to Tsiroanomandidy or Ambohijanahary can have some unexpected consequences. Still, Willie counts his lucky stars that the Malagasy folk were considerate enough not to name any towns after their first real monarch, King Andrianampoinimerinadriantsimitovianimandriampanjaka, who formed the powerful Merina kingdom in 1794.
Willie’s days were interesting. One of his tasks was to photograph the toilets at every potential stopover point for the launch, and when Toyota’s Lee-Anne Eades inspected the pics and decided that the situpons didn’t come up to scratch, she ordered brand new toilet seats to be flown in from South Africa.
Madagascar’s come under attack more than a few times — English frigates regularly bombarded the hordes of pirates who holed up there in the 17th and 18th centuries, the French attacked and occupied the main ports in 1883 before taking over the entire country in 1890, and the British lost hundreds of troops while ousting the Vichy French in 1942. Then the Japanese had a go, sending in a submarine and two human torpedoes to sink Allied shipping in Diego Saurez bay in 1943. But none of these attacks were worth tuppence compared with Toyota’s assault of July 2004.
The first wave consisted of 16 Legend35 Hilux double-cab 4X4s — eight 2700i models and eight KZ-TE turbodiesels. Their importation was complicated by the fact that they were righthand-drive vehicles coming into a lefthand-drive country, and that they’d be leaving after a few short weeks, which meant they’d need export documentation as well. Because there is no unleaded petrol available in Madagascar — the people there have never even heard of lead poisoning — and the diesel fuel is of questionable quality, the Toyota team also had to bring in their own gas. And, of course, because the bakkies had to be shipped with empty fuel tanks they couldn’t even get off to a flying start when they arrived. Permits had to be arranged for the vehicles, the fuel, the television crew’s cameras, the medical supplies Toyota insisted be on hand … The Malagasy people aren’t burdened by an acute sense of passing time so anxious emails and faxes remained largely unanswered.
All in all just under 200 guests travelled to Madagascar in four consecutive waves for the launch, which took three weeks in all. Visas had to be arranged for all of them, and an airliner chartered to transport them to Nosy Be island in the far north. In addition to Toyota’s PR team and management there were also four technical staff on the island, a team of 4X4 instructors, a professional photographer, and three medical support crew members with loads of equipment to handle anything from a bee sting to a heart attack. And, of course, there had to be a fixed wing aircraft with crew on standby to medevac any casualties back to South Africa.
There isn’t a supermarket on every corner in Madagascar, and some things we take for granted are well nigh unobtainable there. So Toyota took their own tablecloths, toilet-cleaners, soaps, towels and air-fresheners along. Spare tooth-brushes, razors and other toiletries also had to be on hand in case any of the guests forgot theirs, or — heaven forbid — had their luggage go missing en route.
Route schedules had to be checked and rechecked, daily programmes worked out and printed for the guests and name tags prepared for all. Willie spent days beforehand negotiating with local taxi drivers, car cleaners, vehicle security guards, crane drivers and stevedores to ensure that everything worked like clockwork. Timber had to be bought in to repair rickety bridges that were likely to fall apart under the burden of such unprecedented traffic. The communication problem had some interesting consequences. “We arranged with the chief of a fishing village on the main island to leave the bakkies in his care overnight, explaining to him and his councillors how good the whole shindig would be for tourism in Madagascar. To sweeten the pot we told them that there would be a television crew coming with us. The message became so twisted in translation that the excited villagers heard we were going to install generators and give them all televisions sets! It took us hours to talk our way out of that one.” The villagers didn’t get television sets, but they gained a well to bring them clean water, and schoolbooks and pencils from Toyota.
Then there was a minor panic when the customs officials withheld the container bringing in the sparkling new toilet seats because the short-wave radios in the same consignment raised memories of the South African mercenary attack on the Seychelles all those years ago. But common sense and hard work overcame that one — elbow grease, sandpaper and paint soon got the offending seats up to scratch.
The fleet of local taxis used to ferry guests between the resort and the harbour looked somewhat the worse for wear, so Toyota brought in lots of car polish to tidy them up and massive “Toyota” transfers to stick on their windscreen. In the interests of consistency, the chartered airliner was treated to a Toyota logo as well.
In the end very little went wrong. The boats ferrying the guests between islands broke down a couple of times, and the buses getting them back to the airport both needed roadside repairs at frequent intervals. But all in all the exercise was a model of efficiency.
Toyota’s cagey about revealing just how much the whole launch cost them, but say that they do as much as possible in-house, rather than hire expensive consultants and event-organisers to do the work for them. And because they sell so many new vehicles each month their annual launch and promotional expenditure per unit is probably the lowest in the industry.