How should a leading brand be managed through difficult times?
I’m a big believer in honesty as a driver of brand trust. From financial institutions to political brands, honesty has never been a more valuable currency than right here and now. Even when brands are at their lowest ebb, in very public cases of product recall, a touch of swiftly-applied honesty can actually strengthen their standing and boost their profile.
As total brand calamities go, Toyota’s recent global meltdown over product reliability ranks high. And what’s truly fascinating about the episode, is how the brand has exploited a mix of new and traditional channels to quickly rescue, and enhance its damaged reputation.
Prior to its problems with sticking accelerator pedals and brake failure on some of its flagship models, Toyota had enjoyed a near peerless reputation for build quality and reliability. Its models were the darlings of taxi drivers worldwide who could coax 150,000 miles and more out of your average nut-brown Corolla.
So it was all the more galling for the brand to have to admit to systemic quality control failure and defend itself against charges of incompetence, corporate denial and spin as not one but three separate recalls began. The car in front, to twist its old UK slogan, was indeed a Toyota. But only because it had broken down.
Product recalls can be successfully managed with careful and honest handling. The far more onerous task is to turn this nightmare event into a brand positive. The scale of the challenge facing Toyota in late 2009, however, was truly staggering. In all, 9 million cars had been recalled by February 2010. The US Chief Executive was hauled before a Congressional committee. And the lawsuits were flying.
The crisis threatened to derail decades of R&D investment at a stroke. The recall of the Prius, in particular, was a huge blow. As Japan’s best-selling car and the state-of-the-art in green motoring, anything that questioned its safety would unravel Toyota’s strategy to dominate the booming market in fuel-efficient hybrid cars.
In February, the fightback began – but only after a deafening silence. Toyota President Akio Toyoda himself publicly apologised “from the bottom of my heart”. He travelled to the US to meet dealers and customers to hear their stories first hand. And, having been felled, the mighty brand began to listen.
In the UK, Toyota contacted the entire ownership base of the affected models, working with licensing authorities tracking down owners of even second and third hand cars. It ran full page press ads detailing its efforts – and thanking customers and government agencies for their patience and cooperation.
The company continued the confident rollout of new models. And, when others might have retreated to the bunker of news management, it began an aggressive social media and reputation campaign online.
Social media was relatively new to Toyota, whose early efforts had been comparatively tokenistic. Now, the channel opened a dedicated ‘social media response room’ to handle customer comments and queries, created new platforms on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Digg, shot its own video content and reposted the comments of brand loyalists. All in addition to a dedicated recall website that sat along traditional channels like call centres.
Toyota knows it can’t ‘control’ online dialogues any more than it can control a conversation between two blokes in a pub. But it can at least engage openly, and create an environment where honest response is possible. And, as I never tire of saying, honesty and brand trust go hand in hand.
Where next for Toyota? The lessons of quality control have been hard-learned, and the brand is once again focusing on the basics. Its marketing efforts are increasingly exploiting a new found fluency in social media, with blogs designed to stimulate word-of-mouth referrals. And, by using new channels, it has reached new audiences who wouldn’t normally be attracted by the corporate charms of bland automotive websites.
Toyota is at last becoming what I like to call a ‘connected brand’. But it took one almighty shock to get there. Maybe it’s something BP could learn from…
Neil Svensen
Chief Executive, Rufus Leonard