Saving Toyota\'s Reputation Toyota\'s Initial

Saving Toyota's Reputation

Toyota's initial response to their customers was not effective. Without reading or drawing from other Toyota correspondence, devise an original one-page follow up response intended to repair Toyota's reputation with their customers and the public. Note: This is a new follow-up letter to mitigate the problems associated with the first letter. It is not a rewriting of the first letter.

Dear Toyota Customers

Protecting you, your loved ones and your investment in Toyota automobiles is why we as a company exist. When we fail on any of these three dimensions, we fail as a company. Our recent accelerator pedal recall, on top of previous recalls, are inexcusable.

Everyone at Toyota realizes that without your trust, we will seek to be relevant as a business. Because we believe this so strongly, I am initiating the following programs immediately:

Complete replacement of all Toyota vehicles damaged due to the accelerator pedal quality problems. Customers whose vehicles were damaged or destroyed will get the model of their choice free of charge.

A new website that shows all VIN numbers in a searchable database of every make and model of Toyota vehicle that we know may have the accelerator pedal problem. This is designed for you if you are unsure if your Toyota automobile is covered or not.

I am announcing the formation of the "Toyota For Life" Foundation. We are immediately donating $1M to a new scholarship fund in memory of those who lost their lives due to the accelerator pedal accidents. This scholarship fund will pay the entire college educations of promising engineering students who are studying safety and mechanical engineering. We are also funding a chair in the mechanical engineering school of Carnegie-Mellon dedicated entirely to automotive safety in the hope new research will also help avert this ever happening again. Included in this program are scholarships for all surviving children of parents killed in accidents that arose due to the accelerator pedal problem.

A New Era of Accountability. We have the most advanced supply chain in the world, the Toyota Production System yet this error in the accelerator pedal occurred. We are completely revamping supplier quality management and will publish inbound quality levels by product for our dealers, the press and customers.

Finally you can e-mail me directly with your concerns at -- and I will have a response to you within 72 hours.

Thank You, President Toyota Motor Corporation

Part 2: Write a paper (excluding references) explaining how the concepts and principles from this courses reading and lectures, along with other cited sources impacted your choice of content and format of the letter you created in Part 1. Your paper should focus on crisis communication along with stakeholder analysis and business writing techniques.

Throughout this course the key concepts of crisis communications, ethical and stakeholder analysis have shown how critical it is for Toyota to move beyond just compensating their customers and look to recover their trust. At the center of excellent business ethics in crisis situations is the need for being entirely transparent with every customer, not just those affected by the event (Dolphin, 295). Excellent ethics also show a very clear orientation towards service recovery, or providing more than the customer expects as part of the compensation process (Gross, 919). Toyota has caused some customers to lose loved ones, others to lose their vehicles, after investing tens of thousands of dollar in them. The letter reflects a strong orientation more towards a service recovery mindset and mentality.

Second, the ethical issues surrounding such an egregious error in supply chain quality management must be squarely addressed. Toyota is known for having an exceptional command of their supply chain, logistics and ironically enough, quality management organizations. That is why this type of recall and others like it are so atypical and out of character for them. Clearly the reputation of excellence in these areas of their business model is not accurately reflected in performance, as the recalls illustrate. From a crisis communications perspective, Toyota must admit it failed in one of the areas they are known for having pioneered in manufacturing, which is supply chain management and quality management. To do this, Toyota must first admits they are entirely at fault, this shows they are taking accountability very seriously for the massive quality management breakdown that led to the accelerator pedals not working properly. This is a foundational element of successful crisis communications is to take complete accountability for errors and seek to avert them in the future by relying on new, higher levels of transparency with customers and stakeholders as a result (Dolphin, 295, 296).

Third, Toyota had failed to show empathy for the families who lost loved ones due to this massive breakdown in their quality management system. Widely discussed and debated in the media at the time of the recalls and today, Toyota's failures in quality management and engineering led to people dying, and yet in their first letter they do nothing to acknowledge that. In the second letter, in keeping with the concepts of service recovery as an essential part of an ethical foundation of trust with customers (Gross, 919) and showing strong empathy for their memory, a $1M scholarship is immediately created. The Toyota For Life Foundation is specifically designed to honor the memories of the customers and their lived ones killed due to the company's negligence. To further show empathy, all surviving children of parents killed as a result of the accelerator pedal problem also get scholarships to their colleges or universities of their choice. This shows that Toyota understands how pivotal a role parents play in children's educational development. By showing this level of commitment to the victims of the accidents caused by the accelerator pedal, Toyota takes the focus away from the unempathetic, cold first letter and shows they entirely understand the depth of loss incurred is beyond any monetary figure. Taking the step of providing free educations for the children either orphaned or who have lost a parent puts Toyota into a more leadership-based role vs. A reactive one (Garcia, 43).