Inside the Campaign: Team One’s “The Lexus of Love Letters” for Lexus

In the series Inside the Campaign, the 4A’s features creative work from its member agencies. Here, Team One shows its recent work for Lexus.

Campaign: “The Lexus of Love Letters”

Agency: Team One

Client: Lexus

Program Background: On March 8, 2018, “Letters” — a 3-D installation by perceptual art pioneer Michael Murphy — was revealed as part of a new marketing campaign celebrating the Lexus guest experience. The 16-foot art piece, which hangs from six ceiling panels and a steel frame, features more than 2,000 suspended pieces of origami, each constructed from individual thank you letters from guests to their Lexus dealerships. From one vantage point, the origami art pieces create the shape of the all-new 2018 LS sedan, while from another vantage point it takes the shape of the Lexus logo.

“Lexus crafts experiences for its guests with the same level of care it crafts its vehicles,” said Cooper Ericksen, Lexus vice president of marketing. “Using actual letters sent to our dealerships shows how each interaction, large or small, makes the overall Lexus experience exceptional. These experiences are the very DNA of what makes Lexus, Lexus.”

With the brand’s launch in 1989, Lexus reinvented the luxury car market — introducing new levels of service, customer satisfaction, and quality never before offered by any of the leading brands of the time. That commitment, captured in the Lexus Covenant, is the inspiration for the “Letters” campaign. It is a pledge to value the customer as an important individual, to do things right the first time, and to always exceed expectations. “The Lexus Covenant is what drives dealers and associates to treat customers as they would treat guests in their own home and to go to any lengths to serve them better,” added Ericksen.

To showcase the installation, Lexus has created a 60-second video featuring guests reading their handwritten letters to dealerships as a Lexus craftsman carefully folds and hangs each one. One reads, “It is with a very grateful heart that I write you about your amazing employees,” while another adds, “Eric volunteered to come to my rescue that evening as soon as Lexus closed” and “Brad met me personally in the service bay.” A mother concludes with “This may seem like a little thing, but to a mom, these things really matter. My three-year-old even noticed, and said, ‘He wanted to be sure we were really safe, didn’t he?’”

The video is being shared on Hulu and Pandora, as well as displayed through other strategic online and social integrations.

Murphy refers to his pieces as perceptual art because the main emphasis of the work is on the viewers’ perception. “I took my ability to make things and combined it with my passion to create experiences for people and put them together,” said Murphy. The project took hundreds of hours to complete, with the folding and hanging of each origami piece taking nearly 200 hours. “This is a very tight, precise craft,” added Murphy. “If it is more than one millimeter off it is considered an error.”

The “Letters” art installation – which measures 8-feet wide by 16-feet long, and is suspended 13 feet from the ground – was designed by the artist to be fully transportable, making it available for viewing at select corporate and dealer events across the country. For more information, visit lexus.com/guest- experience.

There are over two hundred Lexus dealerships across the country. Each one dedicated to applying the same level of care to our guests that we put into our vehicles. Because of this philosophy, Lexus dealers receive countless letters of appreciation. Lexus took 2,000 of those letters and crafted them into an origami installation. These are just some of the stories behind those letters, as told by the people who wrote them.

See their full stories at lexus.com/guest-experience. When guest experiences are crafted by Lexus, you Experience Amazing.