Toyota borrowed their script from Tiger Woods, and it worked

On October 23rd last year, I wrote a piece on this site called “The great ADP lie and other brand illusions” where I talked about companies that outright lie to their customers and get away with it.

As the head of Toyota talked with Congress yesterday, he said that the things that caused the issues that have led to the recall of over eight million vehicles were basically the result of their push to unseat GM as the world’s leading car maker (which they did).  Their principle of relentless pursuit of the highest quality product, the core of their brand promise,  took a back seat, if you will, to their growth goal.  It was the first time in their 52 year history that they had a recall compared with over 100 recalls just last year among the major US auto makers, by the way.  This shouldn’t be such a big deal.

I don’t have any proof of this, but I think that explanation is hogwash, and I think they know it’s hogwash, but I think they felt they this was the best spin to put on this story to minimize brand damage.  Part of their problem is that they aren’t 100% sure the fixes they have come up with will solve the problems that have led to the recalls.

Why aren’t they sure? Well, depending on who you listen to, these problems aren’t really problems – they are partly operator error and partly a misunderstanding of the product.  It’s unsurprising that the US press is all over this – it’s a huge boost for the US automakers to paint Toyota in a bad light, and that’s just the way it is.  And if a problem isn’t really a problem, then you can’t be 100% confident of your fix, right?  But you can’t really come out and blame your customer, so you are stuck.

If you listen to another crowd and there really are issues, then it still wasn’t the result of the entire company relaxing their quality standards in pursuit of GM, it was one or two, or a handful of people that did a poor job of engineering, and testing the parts in question.  Individuals with names, not the entire corporate entity, as Toyota seems to be trying to make us think.  It almost has the same ring as the Tiger Woods apology last week – when he said, look, I am not perfect, I made mistakes, and I am taking actions to fix them.

In a very different way, Toyota had that same perfect image that Tiger had.

People bought, and liked, the narrative when Tiger delivered it, so why not reuse it to paint Toyota in a better light.  It leaves the door open for (more) Toyota errors, but it has the promise that they are working to prevent them in the future – it would be silly for Toyota to say it’s never going to happen again.

The point is that when companies deliver a message to their customers, facts may or may not play into the message – and assigning blame will rarely happen because that implies the problem will never happen again.  It’s not a matter of lying to the customer, it’s saying things that will minimize the damage, but also maintain (or try to regain) their trust that you will do what you can to avoid it in the future.

-Ric