Posts Tagged ‘unintended acceleration’

Unintended acceleration and driver error.

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Below is a letter to the editor from today’s Wall Street Journal that I think provides an important perspective on unintended acceleration.

Allegations of  UA and the media furor around it virtually destroyed Audi in the United States.  Audi was vindicated eventually, with UA and the unfortunate accidents associated with it attributed to driver error.

Toyota is now “in the barrel”  with the politicians and media all intimating that there is some sinister plot at work.  There’s a lot at stake.  If there have been genuine misdeeds then let’s prove it beyond a question of a doubt and hold Toyota responsible. If indeed, driver error was the issue, I hope that the media and our politicians will be as quick to acknowledge the fact as they have been to hoist Toyota on its petard.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below and here’s the letter:

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Toyota’s brand: People don’t love their refrigerator either.

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Toyota is in deep stuff given the allegations of unintended acceleration, several huge recalls that will cost BILLIONs of dollars, continuing investigation by NHTSA, civil penalties, reduced sales, weakening brand image scores and deflated residual values.

There has already been plenty written about the impact of this on Toyota’s brand reputation.  It certainly is going to set them back, some pundits say it’s a “speed bump” for Toyota, others say the situation will effectively “kill” the Toyota brand.  I suspect that the “truth” will be somewhere in the middle, the Toyota brand has been damaged, it will take a good deal of time and effort to recover, but it will recover.

Rather than debating the current health of the Toyota brand, I’ve been thinking about the discipline of branding in the automotive category and what its practitioners can learn from Toyota’s experience. Certainly the need to manage the media and to do so in a transparent way is critical.  Time is of the essence, the internet can take your reputation and spin it out of control in a heartbeat.  Beyond the crisis management learnings, I think that we are seeing the danger of having a brand that is based solely on rational underpinnings. (more…)