Chevron Hopes Newest Toy Cars Pump Up Sales
Attention, holiday shoppers: The malls are packed, the grocery stores are crammed, but the gasoline stations are pretty much wide open.
Lucky thing, that, because Chevron Corp. has geared up for the season by rolling out three new models in its surprisingly successful line of toy cars--the same ones that star in the San Francisco-based oil company’s quietly funny advertising campaign that uses animated clay figures.
Like the 11 other models in the car line, the three latest--Kelly Kompact, Tina Turbo and Cary Carrier--are available only at Chevron service stations or on the World Wide Web at https://www.chevroncars.com. Yes, the cars are popular enough to demand their own piece of the Internet, separate from Chevron’s corporate Web site.
The cars have become animated spokes-models for Chevron and have turned into an unusual moneymaker for the nation’s third-largest oil company. With crude oil threatening to dip below $10 a barrel, that’s got to be good news for shareholders.
“Yeah, they turn a profit,” Glenn Weckerlin, manager of Chevron product lines, said of the toy cars. “But they’re high quality and a good value for consumers.”
Chevron introduced the toys in May 1996 to capitalize on an advertising campaign featuring the cars that had been running for a year by then. The campaign was created by Young & Rubicam/San Francisco and animated by Aardman Animations, a British company known for the Wallace and Gromit characters.
“The whole basis was: How do you talk to folks about gasoline? Who better to talk about gasoline than the thing that consumes it, the car?” Weckerlin said.
Each model has a distinctive personality in the advertisements, and the toys duplicate the look in plastic with wheels that roll and eyes that move.
The first cars, which Chevron unveiled with some trepidation, Weckerlin said, sold out. By the end of this year, the company will have sold more than 7 million at a suggested retail price of $5.99 each (although the much larger Cary Carrier sells for $22.99). The cars even get fan mail.
“People love these cars,” said Jim Sayegh, owner of a Chevron station in Glassell Park, noting that the toys are as popular with adults as they are with children. “They’re friendly-type cars. They put people in a happy mood.”
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Oil Firms’ Cuts for ‘99: Most U.S.-based exploration and production companies are resigned to cheap oil and have reduced how much they plan to spend next year on looking for it, and how many workers they will employ to do it, according to an annual survey by the Arthur Andersen consulting firm.
This represents a reversal of last year’s survey, when crude oil was fetching more than $20 a barrel and most companies were increasing capital spending and hiring workers.
“Extremely low oil prices are driving companies to take extreme action, including significant cutbacks in spending and people, as well as unprecedented merger and acquisition activity,” said Victor A. Burk, Arthur Andersen’s managing director of energy industry services.
West Texas Intermediate crude oil, the U.S. benchmark, has been hovering around $11 a barrel in futures trading, nearly 50% lower than a year ago.
In response to the rock-bottom prices, more than 70% of survey participants said they will reduce or maintain spending for domestic and overseas exploration next year.
More than three-fourths of respondents expect industry exploration and production employment to decrease. But they are more positive about the prospects at their own companies, with only 24% expecting employment declines and nearly half predicting no change.
More than 80% of the 83 companies surveyed said they expect increased mergers, acquisitions or asset sales in 1999.
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Nancy Rivera Brooks can be reached via e-mail at nancy.rivera.brooks@latimes.com or by fax at (213) 237-7837.
