When your brand is on the receiving end of household jokes, lampooned on late night talk shows and parodied throughout the internet, you know it's in trouble.
When your brand is on the receiving end of household jokes, lampooned on late night talk shows and parodied throughout the internet, you know it's in trouble.
While hilarious for us, how long will it take Toyota to fix their brand image and restore consumer confidence? Despite their problems, a recent survey indicates that people still trust in Toyota, which is a promising start.
In fact, I don’t think Toyota will take a long-term hit. Unlike Ford’s cover-up of fuel tank defects in their Pinto cars, in which a memo showed that Ford considered settling lawsuits from resulting deaths would be cheaper than repair and recall, Toyota’s troubles seem to be isolated incidents which are being fixed, and there does not seem to be of any deliberate attempt by the automaker to cover up a history of these findings.
Overall, customer perceptions of Toyota are still fairly positive especially when compared to other troubled car companies as of late and will recover within the next year or two. While we are disappointed, people are not disgusted – a fine line between long-term damage and short-term impact to the brand.
In the next article, we'll be discussing the implications of this for Toyota and the Toyota Way, how it still remains applicable to the world and how Toyota can rebound from all of this.
In the meantime, enjoy some a selection of a few jokes to be had at Toyota's expense.
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| Even online comic xkcd lampoons the recent Prius brake failure. |
