Scion, Toyota’s youth-oriented brand within a brand, does marketing differently, to say the least. The car maker has opted for the road less traveled in most of its online promotion, favoring independent film and music festivals, presence in virtual worlds, and hip-hop-flavored video as ways to promote its vehicles.

In all these campaigns, the car maker has taken pains to match the message to what it sees as the brand’s key attributes. Scion owners describe themselves as independent and out of the mainstream and value personalization as much as performance. The brand’s cars reportedly have one of the highest aftermarket customization rates in the industry. Scion owners like to feel they’re unique.

So Scion was interested enough to listen last year when marketing agency Strawberry Frog came to them with a proposal to create a new “language” that would help build social communities among its owners and fans.

“At that point we didn’t know whether they meant linguistic syntax or some kind of special code or decoder ring,” says Bruce Wallace, client and technical project manager for the Scion division. “I’m not sure they knew either at that point, but a few ideas got tossed around.”

Specifically, they got tossed to design expert and street artist Tristan Eaton, who went with Scion to talk to owner groups and enthusiasts around the country about what it meant to be a Scion owner and how that might be represented.

The result, launched in early April, was a community-building interactive Web site called www.ScionSpeak.com that gives owners a gallery of crests or badges as esoteric as they claim to be. Visitors can download some ready-made designs or fashion their own out of more than one hundred individual art elements.

The variety of the designs Eaton has provided for the site is staggering. You say you want a tough-looking rat in a gas mask hovering over a shield containing a razor blade and a hamburger, backed up by thunderbolts and a shapely set of female gams? Scion’s got the art parts waiting for you.

Visitors can add color to their coats of arms, via a spray-paint icon of course, can choose a suitable hip-hop name for their design (e.g., “Count Shorty the Crunk”) and can then download it to their desktop. Scion doesn’t give any guidance about how it will be used from there, but hopes the crests will turn up as cool personal icons on social networks and perhaps even get transferred by auto detailers to the cars themselves.

“We make the raw asset available as a downloadable .jpeg, and you can really do with it as you see fit,” Wallace says. “If you want to use it as a Web background you can, or you can turn it into an iron-on and put it on a T shirt for yourself or for your club. We’re interested to see how the community itself deciders to propagate the graphics.”

And that’s pretty much all there is to this elegantly simple Web site—except for three videos. One is an official trailer that highlights the multiple designs; it’s also available on YouTube and other video aggregator sites. Another films Eaton talking about the process of comprehending the lure of the Scion and turning it into a visual language.

The third short video documents the consumer conversations and focus groups that went into creating ScionSpeak.com and shows how passionate owners can be about customizing their rides. (“You come for the cars and stay for the people,” one says. “It’s like a cult—without the Kool-Aid.”)

Interestingly, the ScionSpeaks.com site doesn’t offer any explicit online mechanisms for creating a community: no voting on other people’s designs, no forward-to-a-friend capability, no officially sanctioned way to share your creations with others. Nor is there any link to the official Scion Web site. It almost seems as if those sharing tools would be too regimented for most Scion owners—too much like company-sponsored branding.

But informal chatter about the site is cropping up in other places on the Internet. “We’re seeing pockets of discussion in other channels such as enthusiast Web sites, comments and online postings,” Wallace says.

Beyond keeping tabs on that off-site conversational bleed, Wallace says the company hasn’t laid down a specific yardstick by which it will measure the success of the coat of arms campaign.

“I think we’ll know we’re on to something if we see a lot of people taking our designs and adding their own personal touches, inserting new colors or elements and using them in ways we didn’t think of,” he says. “Personalizing is a high value for our owners, and that will spell success.”