The men who made Toyota
For three protagonists – Bob Johnston, John Conomos and Bob Miller – turning Toyota Australia into a manufacturing and sales force was more than a job, it was their life’s work
Illion-dollar Bob will be turning in his grave.
After decades of hard work and shuttle diplomacy, the lights are going out on his dream, the one he had for Toyota and Australia. Back in the day, Robert Henry Johnston was the only non-japanese to run a major Toyota operation, the ramrod-straight man’s man who convinced Eiji Toyoda to part with a billion early-1990s dollars to make cars here.
The result was our first new automotive manufacturing plant in 25 years – the gleaming Altona HQ for Toyota’s local manufacturing operations – which opened in April 1995.
It was a massive bet and there’s no doubt who made it happen. Bob Johnston was the architect, the chief negotiator, government lobbyist, ministerial confidant and go-between who tipped the notoriously conservative Toyota Motor Corporation, and its founding Toyoda family, into putting cash on the table.
By sheer force of personality and backed by all the right numbers, he convinced Prime Minister Keating it would work. And for quite a while, it did.
Under Johnston’s watch as chief executive, then chairman, Toyota achieved market leadership in Australia for the first time in 1991 and maintained it. The rest as they say, is history.
In the process he recruited and mentored an executive team that were the SAS of the motor industry, a win-at-allcosts culture that seemed to thrive on the sort of division and controversy that would kill most rivals.
There were frequent, sometimes famous, outbursts of frustration with Japanese HQ, and spats between the sales and marketing mercenaries in Sydney and the more measured engineering teams in Melbourne.
But rock-steady at the top there was always Bob Johnston, a strapping bloke with the military bearing of the Navy officer he’d once been. He was a shrewd student of human nature with the easy manner and approachability of a PR man, but the steel-trap mind of the seasoned industrialist he was. With Bob Johnston, the ease was genuine. There was a touch of Bob Hawke about his ability to relate to all comers from factory-floor sweeper to the Prime Minister.
Almost without peer he understood the Japanese and they in turn respected him and trusted his judgement. “A lot of people don’t understand the Japanese and don’t try to,” he told Wheels in 1995. For him, “the war ended in 1945 and I don’t even think about it any more.”
The Altona investment was the crowning glory in a long career, but perhaps his strongest legacy was the talent he spotted and nurtured. A young diesel fitter called John Conomos would go on to vaunted status as a Managing Officer of Toyota Motor Corp – at the time one of only five non-japanese to be awarded the honour.
The nattily tailored, well-coiffed Conomos was the guy with his finger on the retail pulse, a smooth operator who famously called himself “a poor but humble truck salesman” even when the business card said Executive Chairman of Toyota in Australia.
A ruthless, results-driven sales guy, Conomos was charm personified and a dab hand with the media, albeit not averse to leveraging any and every advantage.
There was a famous lunch in Kerry Packer’s private dining room on the fifth floor of his Park St, Sydney HQ where Toyota’s spend with Channel Nine on 60 Minutes and as the AFL broadcast sponsor was cited to wonder why Wheels magazine, at then-sister company Australian Consolidated Press, wasn’t delivering cover treatment for the Camry. The concept of editorial independence only went so far with the SAS.
It led to a lot of banged heads and lost bark over the decades. Fair to say, Toyota’s Australian team didn’t always respond well to unfavourable coverage.
John Conomos’s marketing guru was the unique Bob Miller – he of the ‘ready, fire, aim’ school, inventor of the Camry Chicken, keen student of propaganda techniques, and widely read practical philosopher who despised the status quo. Without doubt he was the most unpredictable and quotable executive to ever flog cars in this country.
His 14 years as marketing chief at Toyota coincided with the gaining and maintaining of market leadership, though he was anything but a toe-the-line company man. Miller was an upsetter of applecarts, a marketing insurgent and a handy bomb-thrower, ever ready with a quotable and often incendiary one-liner, hugely combative, competitive and outspoken. No Holden or Ford executive would ever speak ill of world headquarters. Bob Miller made it a sport.
Given Toyota’s model line-up was no walk-up start to be number one, Conomos and Miller forced the issue
with an all-out assault. Dealers were incentivised with prizes that included luxury motor cruisers – the entire boat, not just a ticket with P&O. Media launches were no-expense-spared affairs and the advertising budgets a triumph of courage over finance department pursed lips.
They were the Odd Couple but they were joined at the hip to deliver Toyota leadership a long time before natural market forces and product cycles were ever going to do it. Oh What A Feeling! Indeed, that tag line seemed to be everywhere. It originated in the USA but Miller and his team made it their own, setting a record for advertising longevity – close to 30 years.
But all good things come to an end. The combination of Conomos, the urbane, and Miller, the bull in the China shop, didn’t survive the 1990s.
Miller’s loss was painfully felt when he departed some months after a controversial appearance at the Tokyo Motor Show. Coming off a long overnight flight from Sydney, he offered an audible critique as the chairman of General Motors, Jack Smith, and the boss of Toyota, Dr Eiji Toyoda announced a technical co-operation agreement, surrounded by their company presidents.
John Conomos and his long-time public relations consultant John Smailes went into crisis mode, doing one-onone damage-control chats with senior media. But the quotes were there in black and white, and ran big in Melbourne’s Herald Sun and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.
The story transcended the motoring pages and became an international incident. Face was lost.
Bob Miller went on to play a part in the cash-for-comment saga on radio and won a swag of marketing awards, an Order of Australia in the honours list and these days is an adjunct lecturer at Sydney’s Macquarie University, when not running his marketing consultancy. Nearly 20 years out of the job, journos still ring him for quotes on Toyota; testament to the job he did with the company and also on his own brand.
John Conomos retired at 65 with the custom-made title ‘Emeritus Executive Chairman’. Such was his passion for the business, insiders said it required dynamite to transition him from desk to golf course.
Back in Japan the board never really understood why their Australian operation was split between Sydney and Melbourne. Conomos and Miller successfully argued that as California is to Detroit, then Sydney is to Melbourne. Not only is it the major market with nearly 40 percent of national sales but a setter of trends for the rest of the country.
Thus sales and marketing needed to be more freewheeling and closer to the pulse than attached to a factory in dreary outer Melbourne. Bob Miller used to characterise the difference as this: the warriors fought the wars in Sydney while the farmers grew stuff in Melbourne. Needless to say the farmers never saw it that way.
For the front-of-house media appearances it was always the local executives – Conomos, Miller, the encyclopaedic product planner and marketer Peter Evans, engineers Max Gillard and Ray Brown. But there was always a Japanese shadow team reporting back to HQ with a Japanese chairman firmly entrenched in Melbourne.
It was no surprise that with the closure of Altona came the announcement that Sydney operations, with the exception of the profit-leading parts division, will head south to be consolidated with the rest of Toyota’s team.
Close to 150 years of experience will be left behind in Sydney but Toyota will no doubt play the long game. A drop in market share is inevitable – not just with the loss of volume from the factory but the loss of institutional memory.
Toyota has been force-feeding the Camry in Australia for years as customers switched away from traditional sedans into SUVS. At the time Altona was built, the logic said it should make the Corolla and Camry, two of Toyota’s biggest global sellers, to better position the plant for exports.
In hindsight, given the engineering expertise on the ground here and the hundreds of thousands of kays Toyota has invested in Australia as a proving ground, perhaps an alternative product strategy could have been a better bet. If Altona was a major plant for building the number-oneselling Hilux, it might still be going.
But with the components industry reeling after the closures of Ford and Holden, the logistics for a single, stand-alone manufacturer no longer make sense in Toyota’s global manufacturing matrix.
Billion-dollar Bob passed away in May 1995 – just a month after Altona opened – typically while in the US working to promote exports in his role as chairman of Austrade. He ignored the illness that had already cost him an eye and died with his boots on promoting Australia.
Prime Minister Keating expressed it best: “I wish to offer the thanks of the Australian people for a life which helped make Australia a more modern and productive place.” As to the future, Keating’s words beg the obvious question.