Conclusion

Toyota Motor Corporation’s Website, Gazoo.com, is named after the two Japanese language characters for “visual” (Strom 2000). The Toyota Website is so named to celebrate its ability to bring the showroom to the consumer. The site, like many others, is designed to visually represent the company – its brand, products, dealer showrooms, and customer service. In an article about the company, Akio Toyada, the force behind the site, is shown writing the characters with the phonetic translations below – ga zoo. He isn’t delivering a PowerPoint presentation, nor is any sophisticated visual equipment present. Curiously, he is using a felt-tip marker to write on a rather nondescript looking whiteboard; he relies on the ancient tradition of writing characters to communicate his message about the latest in information technology – the World Wide Web. Gazoo.com signifies the centrality of vision in today’s market, as well as the problems of translating corporate strategy into computer screens.