New Media Prof Blog

Toyota PR

Posted on 17. Feb, 2010 by admin in For Students, New Media

We’ve all been watching the missteps in PR that Toyota has made. Is it a cultural divide between East and West?  Is it a lack of mea culpa at the top?  Every student of PR knows from the famous Tylenol case  in 1982 that action must be swift and it must come from the top without wavering and the most important action is safety first, revenue second. Hard to do, no doubt. But the moment the Chairman of Johnson & Johnson learned of the cyanide poisonings involving extra strength tylenol, he pulled all tylenol products off the shelves and halted production. The company’s market value dropped by at least a billion dollars. And they went one step further, after the episode was over, they led the charge to create the tamper-proof caps that we all wrestle with today. We know that Toyota President, Akio Toyoda has said he was ‘deeply sorry’ but now says he isn’t coming to testify before Congress in the U.S.  And we know that dealers have worked feverishly to meet recall demands with a fix for the sticky gas pedals. But one issue befell another with faulty brakes on the Prius, a possible recall of steering in Corollas and the snowball gets bigger as it goes downhill. What is interesting is how Japan views the debacle. Interesting article on that in the Christian Science Monitor. How many times do we see that lagging in reaction to a crisis just doesn’t work. Now Toyota has a long-term perception problem – how long – we’ll see.

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Tags: automakers, crisis communications, public relations, recall, sticky pedals, toyota