It’s terrible news for Toyota, but have some of its PR efforts exacerbated the crisis?

There is no questioning that it is a tough time for car giant Toyota, as it has had to recall 8.5 million vehicles worldwide during the past four months because of mechanical problems.

Such bad news is bound to dominate the business headlines – PRmoment commissioned research to compare how much Toyota has been in the news in the last month compared to other leading car manufacturers, BMW, Honda and Renault. Not surprisingly, Toyota has been hogging the headlines, for all the wrong reasons.

Research supplied by Echo Sonar 

What lessons can be learnt from the way that the Toyota’s PR team have handled this crisis? There has certainly been a great deal of criticism in the press about the information Toyota has been giving out. For example, at independent.co.uk it reported on 16 Feb: “Toyota's under-fire president will reveal more tomorrow about the company's massive global recall following severe criticism for being largely invisible during the crisis.”

Jonathan Hemus, director Insignia Communications believes that the Toyota crisis demonstrates a failure of leadership, not a failure of PR, and that the culture at Toyota is largely to blame. He explains: “This is most likely due to a blinkered fixation with quality, and a culture which discouraged junior members of staff from raising concerns.“ Hemus believes that Toyota's PR people could have helped to avoid this by challenging the status quo. He says, “the role of devil's advocate is a valuable service which PR people can provide, based on their ability to look at situations from the outside in. Ex-journalists are often particularly adept at doing this!”

 Research supplied by Echo Sonar 

Hemus also thinks that PROs could have helped the organisation to be better prepared, by ensuring Toyota had a team of proficient, well-trained media spokespeople ready to hit the airwaves. He adds: “The performance of these spokespeople can be critical in shaping stakeholder opinion, and my view is that Toyota's executives – UK and international – have been generally poor in the way in which they have handled media interviews. In some cases their performances have left the company in a worse position after the interview, than before it. This is careless to say the very least! It should be the task of the communicators to ensure that their colleagues have the skills they need to succeed, to identify the media stars – and to tell less gifted media operators that their role needs to be elsewhere within the crisis team.”

However, Hemus believes that during the last three weeks Toyota's PR people have done many things right in terms of feeding the media, blogging and sending out the correct messages on social networks such as Twitter. But this is not enough to undo the damage: “Even great communication cannot overcome a major failure of management resulting in a massive reputational challenge and a lack of trust in a previously revered brand. In the coming months it is to be hoped that the PR people can help to effect culture change and in particular open up lines of internal communication to head off future incidents, before they become the terrible crisis we have witnessed over the last month.”

Another reason why Toyota’s corporate culture has contributed to its communications failure, is because it is a victim of its own commercial success. Tom Leatherbarrrow, head of business to business at Willoughby PR says: “There is a wider issue which no amount of media training, Q&As, holding statements and Twitter monitoring will deal with. Extraordinary success over the last 20 years has bred aggression, hubris and a culture where bad news from suppliers or employees would not reach, or was ignored, by senior management. This inevitably seeped into its external communication with customers.”

Leatherbarrrow agrees with Hemus that Toyota needs to change if future disasters are to be avoided, saying, "Toyota is a strong enough brand to survive this initial crisis, but unless it deals with all its cultural and stakeholder communication issues, then it is destined to repeat its mistakes."