By Jason Snyder
As the dust and debris from the Toyota recall tornado continue to swirl, we’re continuing to slice and dice everything the car maker did wrong from a crisis management, public relations and communications standpoint.
The company is now in make-up mode, trying to convince consumers it’s righting the ship. It’s obvious, though, that when current customers, like Bob Manke of St. Paul, Minn., say, “Will I buy another one? No,” Toyota has a lot of work to do.
A centerpiece of Toyota’s PR campaign is its mea culpa commercial. As part of its crisis strategy, Toyota has been running an ad on television that harkens viewers back to a better time when quality and safety mattered. I must say, I very much like the background music. But beyond that, I’m not hearing much.
According to the commercial, “For over 50 years, providing you with safe, reliable, high quality vehicles has been our priority.” To many, that statement rings hollow and lacks authenticity and credibility. And therein lies the issue with advertising, particularly in trying to win back customers.
Eight years ago, long before the tectonic shift now affecting marketing, Al and Laura Ries wrote the book, “The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR.” Though the authors argue that advertising has a place in maintaining brands, “Advertising lacks credibility. The crucial ingredient in brand building is credibility, an ingredient that only PR can supply.” Toyota is trying to rebuild its brand through an inauthentic medium. Advertising is the right medium for many things but not for this.
But don’t just take my word for it. According to Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, “As the overall marketing landscape is in the midst of a massive shift, so is the iconic medium of television. The standard methods of delivery and measurement need to adapt to what marketers today need: more specificity, greater effectiveness, and more detailed measurement. ROI is one of the most crucial aspects of marketing today, and the process behind TV must be held to the same scrutiny as marketers.
We couldn’t have endorsed PR any better ourselves. Liodices’s comments sound to me like a vote for social media, a natural component of any public relations plan given PR pros’ mastery of content and the measurement ability of these new channels.
So then how should Toyota – or any organization that finds itself in crisis – reach current and prospective customers if not through advertising? The company should have had a plan in place to address this type of issue. It’s hard to imagine it didn’t, but given the great differences between the Japanese and American corporate cultures, particularly in terms of transparency, it’s perhaps not as surprising. It’s also not surprising then that executing the plan is another problem.
There is no simple answer to Toyota’s problem, because a reputation that took 50 years to build was destroyed in a matter of days. We’ve worked with many organizations in crisis, and while each is unique, there is one common thread to our approach. We build and execute a plan that seeks to credibly establish our clients as honest and trustworthy, and purchasing an ad that gives them carte blanche to say whatever they wish is not an option.
No matter how creative it is, or how many awards an ad campaign may win, in the end, advertising is always a variation on the statement, “I am great/honest/sorry/trustworthy because I say I am.” Because it relies on third-party validation, either from the independent news media or another participant in the public debate (think consumers in social media), public relations is always a variation on the statement, “I’m great/honest/sorry/trustworthy because others say I am, not because I say it about myself.” Especially in a crisis situation such as the one now facing Toyota, this independent judgment of the marketplace is an essential first step.
Regardless of your industry or customer base, imagine your company in Toyota’s position. (And telling yourself, “We’d never find ourselves in a situation like that,” isn’t an acceptable scenario.) How would you react? Would you, as Toyota and many others have done, first try to bury it? Wrong answer, because you’ll likely get buried in the court of public opinion. Or, would you get out in front of the issue, as Toyota should have done? Or does the answer lie somewhere in the middle?
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Jason Snyder is vice president of WordWrite Communications.
