Over the years I’ve counseled my clients to have crisis communication plans, up-to-date and ready at all times, just in case. Central to those plans is a process for identifying the problem, and telling the truth about it—the whole truth, and quickly. But what do you do when the truth will not set you free but will instead send you into a free-fall of catastrophic proportions?
The truth about Toyota is not good. Seems the problems they have are systemic. Seems they’ve been cutting corners all over the place. Seems, according to Fortune magazine, they have “a culture that prizes speed and efficiency over reliability and safety.”
There’s just no amount of PR that can change those fundamentals. Not until the core problems are thoroughly examined and totally corrected. When the problems are ingrained in the culture, like Toyota’s, that could take some time. Usually, in a crisis situation, you can find a reason things went wrong and fix it. There have been some online comparisons of Toyota to the classic crisis situation of Tylenol in the early ‘80s. But Toyota wishes they could have it so good.
Tylenol was a victim—they were sabotaged with poison. Toyota sabotaged themselves by abandoning what their brand had represented for years—quality. Tylenol had an expensive but relatively easy fix—recall the product and design those irritating but safe tamper-proof caps. (I’m sure this didn’t seem easy to Tylenol at the time, but they came out with the new bottles pretty quickly.) How long will it take to change Toyota’s entire way of doing things?
And here’s one more reason Toyota’s situation is very different from Tylenol’s. The Tylenol crisis didn’t happen in the age of the Internet. There were no legions of bloggers whipping up a froth of vitriol. There were no web sites popping up all over with URLs like ToyotaSucks.com. There was no Jon Stewart doing a six-minute segment entitled “The Toyotathon of Death” that’s played repeatedly on YouTube.
As a veteran PR person, I would like to say that PR can do its job to get Toyota out of this mess. And certainly PR can help. But slapping on a band-aid when you really need major surgery will only make the patient sicker in the long run. Yes, Toyota is Tweeting. Yes, the company is offering whiz-bang incentives to get customers’ confidence back. Yes, the company is doing some public groveling.
But no amount of PR will change the fact that Toyota can’t be trusted right now. The company played fast and loose (pun intended) with our safety for the sake of profit. And all the Tweets in the world won’t restore its reputation until it makes some fundamental changes. And even then, the climb back will be tough. Maybe impossible.
The headline in a recent morning’s paper makes me doubt Toyota’s future: Fixed Toyotas Still Accelerating. That’s not a crisis. That’s a catastrophe.
Tags: crisis communications, reputation, trust