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Toyota’s Safety Muddle Signals Need for a New Era of Trust Communications — Not the Crisis Communications of the Past

February 8th, 2010 by admin

On Jan. 27, The Wall Street Journal reported that Toyota Motors’ President Akio Toyoda is worried about how the growing safety recall of more than 8 million vehicles will affect the company’s reputation for quality. Just yesterday, the Bloomberg Business Week’s Insider Newsletter editor Katherine Davis reported that he’s ducking the press as he swishes cockails with the global elite in Davos. “You can’t buy this kind of publicity - nor would you want to.”

Being in the publicity business, I have been drawn to Toyota recall reports like a bug to a bulb on a summer’s night. After all, we in the PR business are always probing “crisis communications” and explicating how they were carried out and what we could have done better. Truth is, crisis communications, crisis management and similar terms are proven to be some of the most popular Web searches for PR. Toyota is on its way to being one of the “big ones” when it comes to crisis commuincations, right up there with Tylenol for J&J and Bhopal for Union Carbide.

What’s surprising to me is how a corporate icon for quality, embracing notions of consumer safety, fell so low. I saw a similar display in the late 1970’s as our client McDonnell Douglas avoided confronting media questioning what was going on with DC-10 aircraft falling out of the sky. We’d been working on behalf of the company after the issues with cargo doors were resolved, when DC-10s around the world were grounded following the crash of American Airlines Flight 191, killing 273 people. Unwilling to discuss details after the bloody negative publicity earlier in the decade, I recall pleading with our account director who was at headquarters as I held The Wall Street Journal’s aviation writer on the other phone threatening to “go” to print with a page one-article based on comments he had gathered from outside the company. It was a dramatic example of, “If you don’t speak for the company they [critics] will.”

That was my PR indoctination into the rules of engagement for crisis communications — a set of principles devoted to guiding institutions away from garnering even worse public opinion and, sometimes, even helping them deflect the blame. Some of this deflection may be underway as information from Toyota points to the flaws being in materials from CTS of Elkhart, Ind. which are used in the brake systems.  Deflection doesn’t really work. In  the end, the best crisis communicators help companies navigate through stormy waters, without sinking the whole ship. I think there is another, more basic role that communications can help with.

Total quality?

What happened at Toyota?  Having gone through years of B2B communications for many manufacturers, Toyota’s “total quality” focus had become legendary and highly respected.  How many hours have I sp

ent with clients from around the world talking about Kaizen (continuous improvement), Kaiban, Genchi Genbutsu (go and see for yourself)?  All of these are more or less part of the larger Toyota Production System (TPS) which led to the company being a hallmark for quality writ big. I recall some years ago receiving a call from a senior VP at then AlliedSignal, telling me one of his businesses had received an award fro

m Toyota for quality and being asked to stiumlate coverage in the Wall Street Journal. The fact is the Journal, as a matter of policy didn’t cover awards, but this was the exception — an all-American brand being annointed by the global leader in quality!

Dig into the Toyota legend and you’ll discover a systematic and passionate commitment to improvement of the product and the production process. But what is going on that such a premier global leader in one of the most competitive economic segments could find itself as today’s successor to the likes of GM (and the Corvair) and others of the mighty American motor industry featured in Ralph Nadar’s “Unsafe at any Speed” blockbuster of 1965?

Too big to care

How does such a great company like Toyota, with an intense focus on quality, find itself skewered in public opinion on the issue of safety?  After all, safety would seem to be a strategic byproduct of safety. Indeed, the issue is not over unsafe designs of the 60s, like chrome dashboards that cause injuries in seat-beltless vehicles. These are brake components that allegedly don’t work all of the time.

The root is far more profound than the CEO cowering in Davos versus confronting the media (though he should have been more up front). The root is an internal view, a culture that has reacted slowly to reports of safety failings, as reported in the New York Times. They have gone a little “safety deaf,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said.

We in the PR field can help companies set the record straight, as the latest television commercials from Toyota attempt. We in advertising and marketing communications can attempt to shift the attention of consumers from the economic havoc of the past two years to the potential of the future under the guidance of smarter and wiser investor advisors. We can help try to focus attention on one or another perspective in a health-care debate that seems to have more revolutions than Macy’s front door in the peak holiday shopping season. But we cannot affect the fundamental business problem.

The culture of insititutions that take strategic aim at the perpetuation and growth of these organizations may, along the way, have lost touch with the basic purpose of the business and the customers they were founded to serve.

The foundation of trust

A recent PR forum ask people in the practice to come up with ideas about how to restore trust in our institutions. My take is that the communicators can no longer successfully serve their organizations with reactive crisis management campaigns. We need to move in a more fundamental way. Toyota’s recall problem was only a blip, if that, when the trust question was raised. I said then and still believe that the issue of trust cannot begin with a PR or advertising campaign.  It must begin with the culture within an organization, and with that culture enabling members to speak out and be heard when a quality or safety issue is first observed. Such a culture begins with the customer in mind. How does what the company is doing affect those who buy and use our products?

The new role of communications

Professionals like me are hired to help our companies or clients put their best foot forward. Looking to an increasingly competitive future with growing complexities from the integration of advanced technologies, and the new needs to care for the environment and sustainability, I suggest that communications must place an intensive focus on fundamentals — including the fundamental of giving employees a voice, an opportunity to use their voices, and a cultural freedom to hold the organization accountable to its principles.

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Posted in Advertising, Communications effectiveness, Corporate communications, Crisis Communications, Current Affairs, Marketing Communications, News & Thinking, Public Relations, blogging | No Comments »

They Sang for Us

February 5th, 2010 by John Mallen

PBS Channel 13 www.thirteen.org recently ran a fund raising program with the producer Susan Lacy creator of American Masters, a series on American cultural history. One segment covered Joan Baez and her years of political activism in opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Rev. Martin Luther King appears in a segment saying how he stopped by Oakland, Calif. where Baez was persistently lobbing the inductees urging them to make another choice and refuse to go. She would successfully talk one into leaving, get arrested, go to jail, get released and return to repeat the process.

Looking back some 42 years, I was one who accepted Uncle Sam’s call, moving from stateside training to Vietnam, essentially entering a cultural bubble that insulated me from the revolution percolating throughout the country.

Joan Baez, whose voice I’d discovered several years earlier at Lads Music, the little record shop on Thayer Street on the Brown campus, continued waging the pacifist campaign, joining marches across the United States, visiting North Vietnam and becoming a cultural force who moved opinion.

To this day, I have difficulty admitting that what we engaged in there in Southeast Asia was wrong, that what we had gone to do was wrong and that we should get out. Casting the loss of friends and fellow soldiers off to a misplaced, useless purpose is even today too painful for me to think through on a path of logical progression. There is certainly a great fear of being led to agree with former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara who, long after the U.S. left Vietnam, joined in with Joan Baez and other protestors.

So the documentary plays on through these war years, and it occurs to me for the first time ever that they, Joan Baez and the others, were there for a larger purpose, bigger than what they may have been aware of perhaps. What they marched for, sang about, and reached for was deeply profound; a unity of national soul. Beyond the music of protest was a collective, deep soul cry for a unity that can come only in peace.

As with Joan Baez and the anti-war cast of those years, Bob Dylan, David Harris, and others as with me, the freshness of youth has given way to the mellowness of the 60’s. And as the PBS camera pans the decades, I cannot avoid feeling tugged at some deep level of emotion, stunned to see that “it” was never about pro war or anti war; pro civil rights or pro status quo; but it was about our collective soul.

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…”

John Donne

Meditation 17

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

1624

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Posted in News & Thinking, Public Television, Television | No Comments »

Feedback

February 5th, 2010 by John Mallen

Looking into SuperFreakonomics,” the “explosive follow-up to Freakonomics” we receive this wisdom from the authors: “Good feedback is hard to come by and extremely valuable. Not only did we receive feedback on what we’d already written but also many suggestions for future topics.”

Authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dinner are reflecting in essence on an enterprise that began as a partnership where the economist (Levitt) and writer (Dubner) began packaging stories that illustrated and underscored a law of economic behavior which says people respond to incentives, though not in a predictable way, thus ushering in the “law of unintended consequences.”

Indeed, as they explain, the book was published before these powerful laws were associated with the freaky way people behave.

The outcome led to great ideas e-mailed in from readers. The book’s success also led to a strategic by-product – the authors as (paid) speakers on the lecture circuit and, in that context, to more reader recommendations of content for number two

These suggestions from readers brought about an enrichment of the content in book number two, which the authors claim to be better than book number one.

They claim to benefit from the economic phenomenon of cumulative advantage – “that is the prominence of our first book produced a series of advantages in writing our second book that a different author may not have enjoyed.”

So the lesson is about the value that arises from listening is bigger than the value of using the feedback to tune your operation so every year you get better and better – like Toyota does. In addition, you can get strategic by-products like the authors’ speaking gigs – the readers came to them – and useful ideas for a new-generation product or service.

The key point – it really pays to listen!

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Timing is Everything

February 5th, 2010 by John Mallen

A colleague of mine is fond of saying “timing is everything.” Thus, when we are ready reach out and touch people who are prospective customers, some times are better than others.

Here’s some useful info on dates to plan around for both business-to-business and consumer campaigns from Prospects To Go:
Prospects To Go’s holiday calendar shows government holidays as well as religious and secular holidays that are recognized by enough people in the United States to be noteworthy to marketers. Our calendar has broken ground by also highlighting common vacation and travel days – periods that B-toB- marketers want to avoid and consumer marketers tend to hammer.
2010
There were a couple challenges to putting together next year’s calendar:
• There’s no consensus on dates for Spring Break, we discovered, when checking several school-district and university calendars. We still designated the time between March 29th, the night Passover starts at Sunset, and April 5th, the day after Easter, as a busy personal travel period.
• We wondered for the first time if there’s enough scar tissue on the collective memory of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that marketers can now freely deliver their messages on that day without offending anyone. We decided not. Also, since 2002, 9/11 has become a quasi-holiday called Patriot Day, with the American flag flown at half-staff at the White House, all federal buildings and many private homes.
History of the calendar
We developed this calendar in 2005 when we recognized that some clients of our list brokerage and media-buying agency were forced to advertise at poor times because they hadn’t anticipated holidays in advance. Some celebrations – like Martin Luther King Day in January and Veterans Day in November – are one-day events that you can easily work around. But we’ve seen B-to-B clients lose as much as a percentage point in response (compared to other campaigns we’ve done for them at other times) when they launched campaigns during the major vacation and travel periods around Thanksgiving and Independence Day.
Of course you need to customize this even further to meet your own business cycle. Event marketers working on city tours can refine this calendar by being sensitive to important ethnic holidays in cities with a preponderance of minorities who will be observing them.

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Recollections involving the rise of integrity, remembering Peter Sewell, and saluting a new generation of PR leaders

November 14th, 2009 by John Mallen

Fresh from the Autumn meeting of  the Public Relations Global Network (PRGN), now 40 agencies on multiple continents, it’s inspiring to experience the energy being devoted to communications that can help energize business and financial success of clients these agencies serve.

Several top-line themes emerge for me, our firm being a member and one of the host agencies here in New York City along with Adam Friedman Associates and Cooperkatz&Company.

1. Central to commercial communications today are the themes of trust, integrity, honesty and sustainability.  While always important, they have become top-line priorites as a result of the economic melt down, governments’ response, and the roaring disaffection and cynicism of consumers and citizens.

2. The responsibility for formulating trustworthiness, cultural integrity and commitments to honesty in our institutions is falling to a new generation of executive leader and communications consultant — those in their mid 40’s (the tail of the Baby Boom Generation) and the 40+ group in the Generation X tribe ( from the mid 40’s to early ’80’s).  Looking at our PRGN members, our corporate guests and speakers from Dragon Search Marketing, Coldwell Banker, Guardian insurance, Polar USA, Davis & Gilbert law firm — there is a wave of intelligent and responsible leaders coming to the bride and taking over the tiller of our institutions.

3. And point No. 3 here involves my reflection on the last meeting the PRGN held in 2005 in New York. We recalled the then president Peter Sewell, a good friend of the earier generation, who has passed away and whose firm has morped from his son Adam Sewell to a new identity (Beyond PR) and most recently new owners, then the  ”pioneering” (for PRGN) survey we conducted about the emerging importance of new media, and our own first media tour — a kind of “coming out” for the group founded in 1999.

As it 2005, it has been a rainy in New York as it moves across the threshold from fall to winter, as we in PRGN move to a new season and a strong position of leadership in a field that has become increasingly crucial in this world.  These are my recollections.

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Posted in Communications, Corporate communications, News & Thinking, Openness & Transparency, PR, PRGN, Public Relations, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Obama Overexposure for Health Care Reform? Naa! It’s All About Frequency

September 21st, 2009 by John Mallen

11-21-09 NYTIn marketing frequency holds a lofty position as a key factor for effectiveness. Frequency is  the number of times a consumer needs to see your ad before they recall an buy.

I mention this because on September 20th virtually every pundit I’ve heard has hinted that President Obama may suffer from overexposure. 

Following a number of news conferences since January, multiple appearances on television interview programs, the President appeared on five different public affairs shows yesterday, and tonight he appears on David Letterman.

Of course all of this aligns with his goal of selling comprehensive health insurance reform.

The question of overexposure has to do with a struggle of the Mainstream Media to understand their own roles in an era of sea change in media and communications.  No longer is MSM the interpreter of developments for us - - at least in this case.

President Obama is using the MSM as an advertising media, speaking directly to the citizenry.  Not once, not twice … But clearly as he delivers consistent messages that are successively relayed on these networks and by other media who cover the President’s every major action.

So how many times do you have to repeat the message to get people to buy? At least three, but maybe seven, 17  if you are on line and, well, maybe up to 20 times.  These stats are well explained by Aussie blogger Bryan Ong in “A Marketing Blog by Marketing Journal” in a great 2006 post and another in 2007

My take?  What’s in play is an PR campaign driving frequency for the President’s main points.  He doesn’t need to buy air time.  But the message is direct from the country’s CEO to his electorate  ( who in turn can place extraordinary pressure on the directors, that is to say Congress)

What’s the message for those of us in the ” real world” of tight budgets, scarce resources and limited time?  The answer is more than the enduring value of frequency itself.  Even more  significant in the President’s campaign is an underlying two-step strategy. Get the out in your voice, accurately.  Then let it go viral.

To take the message public, perhaps you and I cannot command time on Sunday public affairs programs.   But you and I can publish on the Web in our own voice and with accuracy.  And we can take it viral.  I’ll post more on the Web opportunities in a future blog.

 Image from The New York Times, Sept. 21, 2009

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Are Tactics Wagging your Marketing?

September 17th, 2009 by John Mallen

I like how this article in yesterday’s Fast Company draws attention to the importance of the corporate brand ( where the corporate brand is needed) and reminds us that strategy not glitzy tactics should be guiding the marketing.  Tactics are great, but need to be marshalled toward an end.

” … With the growth of the Internet and social technology tools, personal branding activity and opportunities have exploded. On the other hand, in some ways, the arc of Web 1.0 to 2.0+ (not to mention this current economy) has seduced many marketers into being focused on tactics at the expense of strategy including branding. Hot media tactics often substitute for the “strategy.”

Thanks to Kevin Randall, Director of Brand Strategy & Research at  Movéo Integrated Branding for these words.  The remainder of the article is also a great primer on the  important elements of a brand.

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Posted in Branding, Marketing, Marketing Communications, News & Thinking, Social Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

When Customers are a Village

September 14th, 2009 by John Mallen

Christopher St., Greenwich Village by Beulah BettersworthI have just read a blog essay called “Finding Your Village of Customers” by Sonia Simone, senior editor at Copyblogger .  This is must reading for the micro-businesses among us.

Such firms, like my own, may have a global band of customers who not only know those who serve them, but delight in the relationship. She is spot on. In this space you really do listen to your customers, really understand them and respond to their needs — before you’re asked!  The village is your market, the regulars who love your offerings as well as the status of being a “regular,” like the Beacon Hill bar in TV’s “Cheers.”

Simone’s post is short, so I won’t go on except to summarize the key needs (besides listening, understanding and taking action). Every village needs:

“A leader. (That’s you.)

“A purpose. (That’s your market position or winning difference.) . . .

“And a place to come together.

“You might create a membership site for your best-loved customers. Or organize special conferences, user groups, and gatherings. You might build something as simple as a private online forum where your village can share their experiences — good and bad.

“But give your village a place to get together. To know you better, and know one another better. A place where everybody knows their name.”

And that’s one powerful way to use communications to amplify success. The “place” is likely one you develop on the Social Web.

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Three Goodbys Three Gifts

August 29th, 2009 by John Mallen

This past week and a half has been an unusual for many reasons — challenges of business, some personal items, but most of all because of the deaths of three people: Anne Chase my cousin George’s widow; Ted Kennedy a towering icon of civic inspiration and personal redemption for me, and finally Bud Thompson, fellow practitioner in communication, his being advertising and design here in the Mid-Hudson Valley. 

Anne’s passing a week ago Friday and Senator Kennedy’s on Tuesday were not unexpected, each having persevered through terminal illness. Anne and Ted set a stage for personal reflection. Then came news Friday that Bud was killed while bicycling not all that far from where I write – colliding with a deer. His death is a keen reminder that we truly have at any time only the present. We don’t know when we walk through the door in the morning whether we will be back that evening. 

But there is light here. Lots of it. Each of the three cast in their own way rays that warm, illuminate and even strike awe as does a glorious sunset.

The Gift of Confidence

Anne was the glorious sunset, a quiet person who with George migrated from New England to the the Los Angeles area in the early 1960s, where they made a life raising two wonderful girls, themselves parents today. There was a certain spirit in those years. Some struck for Alaska; others for the South and many of course to California. Ann remains with her George quiet explorers, early “settlers” in Ventura County’s Simi Valley. Lives that in having been lived teach us. “Yes, you can! Even if you do not know what lies ahead, you can.” The gift of confidence. 

The Gift of Hope

Senator Kennedy has been a presence for many of us for a half centruy or so. No intent here to repeat all that has been said so well by so many. But his affect on me is summed in a single powerful notion that has been fallow for me in recent years: hope. In a country where massive crises of trust and integrity,confidence, capability, and responsibility have been drawn to the breaking point, I for one am comforted to hear again that voice of promise and potential and progress on things that matter to our society. That voice has long been the timbre of Ted Kennedy. Though he is now gone, his voice remains. I am reinvigorated with hope. 

The Gift of Warmth

And then Bud. I’d of course met bud professionally and known him to say hello to when we’d meet, usually on Wall Street in Kingston where we both have offices. Since his death, I’ve learned that he was a remarkably talented person with a legacy of good works and community service. But, I hadn’t known that. What I did know was how the simple experience of greeting Bud would light the moment with a positive energy that would linger, often for the day. Even as I write and picture a Bud Clarke greeting, I smile. The gift of warmth.

With Gratitude

Three passings of three great people whose lives in different ways affected many, including my own.

One a quiet explorer who inspires confidence, another the lion of the Senate and enormous accomplishments who voice has rekindled hope, and the third a warm colleague who in a simple moment of greeting could light up one’s day. To each, my gratitude. 

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Describe Yourself!

August 26th, 2009 by John Mallen

I have just been led to a compelling piece “How the Leading Social Sites Describe Themselves” by Steve Rubel. Steve’s piece is worth reading, but his view applies to far more than the social Web, and touches on a favorite peeve of mine.

Rubel’s blog follows his return to the City from the Bay Area where a high penetration of Digerati (I love that term) is accompanied by a parochial focus of these tech-savvy folk, as evinced by how popular social Web sites introduce themselves. It really would be difficult for someone who is not a member of the cognoscenti to make an intelligent choice from among Twitter, digg, Friendfeed and others.

I find the same condition far too often in too many places. Take trade shows, where in my experience the more high-tech the exhibitor the more undifferentiated their presentations. Glitzy to be sure. Clarity of what they are, not much. The same carries over to brochures, videos, Web sites and other marketing materials. You really need to dig to understand just what they’re about.

I’m with Steve Rubel. Describe yourself! It’s job No.1 for any customer facing activity.

Need help? Just call us or any of our 39 colleague firms in the Public Relations Global Network.

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Posted in Communications effectiveness, Marketing Communications, New Communications, PR, PRGN, Public Relations, Social Marketing, Uncategorized, differentiation | 1 Comment »

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