Toyota's challenge

The Week, a favorite magazine of mine, has posted on its website a collection of five strategies that might save the Toyota brand. It is a great look at business and public relations strategy in the short- and long-term. Ideas include:

  1. Take responsibility, hide nothing
  2. Fix everything, fast
  3. Reach out
  4. Move the whole industry forward
  5. Create a celebrity

This entire crisis for Toyota is a live-action case study and I'm sure that for years to come students in MBA and business communication classes at UST and elsewhere will examine how well the company handled the situation. People still cite the example of Johnson & Johnson's trouble with Tylenol as an example of great crisis response. So far I think that Toyota has been a little slow to respond, but overall has done a very good job working toward each of these ideas, particularly 1, 2 and 3. We'll have to see they can successfully "more forward" from here.