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.