Toyota: Crisis management goes prime time

I have recently been umm-ing and arr-ing about whether to buy my first car. Knowing absolutely nothing about cars, as I walking down the street with a friend the other day we played a ‘what about that one?’ game. My answer to most of the cars he pointed at was ‘yeah maybe’... until he pointed at a Toyota and I automatically found myself appalled at the idea, saying ‘ooh no way!’
‘Why?’ my friend replied. And then I realised I wasn’t entirely sure why, I just knew Toyota was bad.

This just reaffirmed for me how powerful the media are and how powerful PR can potentially be. I had subconsciously consumed media messages about Toyota over the recent months and had made the decision that I will never buy Toyota, almost without realising.

A fascinating documentary aired on BBC 2 a few days ago, Toyota: Total Recall (recommended viewing for all those interested in brands and crisis management) explained the reasons why I have subconsciously made this decision.

I will be forever haunted by the audio of a family’s last moments as they explain to emergency services, terrified, how they are speeding out of control and are unable to stop. Just about the worst crisis a brand can face is death, and there were many more examples of tragedies associated with Toyota’s cars and ‘Sudden Unintended Acceleration’(SIA).

Toyota, the biggest and most successful car manufacturing brand in the world, had skilfully built up a brand associated with ethics, quality and safety. The principles of the ‘Toyota Way’ inspired a plethora of businesses and organisations, even the NHS, but this crisis undermined all of this.

From the outside, Toyota seemed to be acting correctly in one particular situation, recalling products which had the same potentially fatal flaw. It then came out of the woodwork that Toyota had decided to facilitate a much narrower equipment recall, saving the company in excess of $100,000,000. What’s worse, is that this was documented on a Toyota internal memo as a ‘win’ for the company. This was described by the judge at Congress as ‘one of the most embarrassing documents I have ever seen.’ He went on... ‘Toyota had an outstanding reputation and safety record, but this discredits everyone.’

For me, the key to handling a crisis is to appear human, restore faith and above all be transparent. The first thing the North American head of Toyota said was that he ‘did not recall’ the meeting. Toyota spokespeople blamed the product faults on the rapid expansion of the company, which seems to say that profit and growth took precedence over the safety of its vehicles. These are some examples of the hugely negative messages I now associate with the Toyota brand.

On the other hand, despite some definite mishandling (including the cover up of documents which is also touched upon in the documentary) Akio Toyoda did portray what seemed to be genuine emotion and sorrow that any tragedy had occurred, and for me, did manage to put a human face on a company that employs over 300,000 people in the world. But overall this does not change the fact that my faith in Toyota has been permanently damaged, and I expect I am not alone in this. It will be interesting to monitor how this will no doubt have a knock on effect to Toyota in the future.