Posts Tagged ‘Toyota’

Close to the heels of Toyota recall, Honda Motor Co is all out to make a similar move to replace the faulty airbag deflator in their cars. The No.2 automaker of Japan is about to recall 4+ million cars.

About 12 incidents have been reported including one fatality.  This is the second time Honda is recalling their cars for the same reason, previously it was in November 2008 and June 2009. The series of recalls from Honda also includes the one for faulty window switch.

The current recall applies to 2001 and 2002 year model; CL vehicles, Civic, Accord, CR-V, Pilot, Odyssey, and 2002 Acura TL. Honda is currently concentrating the recall in the United States

A Honda spokesman said “the defect was caused by insufficient stamping pressure during the production of the inflator”. On the contrary the US unit of Japan’s Takata Corporation; manufacturer of the airbag stated ‘they are not aware of any defect in airbags supplied to Honda’.

Known for their reliability and quality over the years, the recent incidence has jolted the customer’s faith in these Japanese (Honda, Toyota) vehicles.  This has also effected its production and sale in many countries.  Quick to grab the market share the domestic car makers; General Motors, Chrysler and Ford are looking to cash in on the woes of their unbeatable Japanese competitors.

As from the reputation management point of view, we feel if Honda is able to turn the buzz rapidly and positively, the damage will only be marginal. A positive step to regain customer confidence, Honda has already started contacting it’s customers by mail asking them to take their cars to the authorized dealers.

At least a dozen fatalities have occurred when Toyota or Lexus vehicles have surged unexpectedly with drivers finding that they are unable to stop by stomping hard on the brakes. The complaints were rising up and Toyota has quickly come up with the damage control plan, lest it effects its reputation and ultimately the business turnover.

Toyota has proven to be a quick damage rectifier when they announced the news of solving the problem with a new brake override system. The 2005 through 2010 model-year Toyota Avalons and 2007 through 2010 Camrys and Lexus ES350s  are to be recalled by the automaker, who will reconfigure the floor surface beneath the pedal to create more space between the pedal and the floor. The company spokesmen announced, beginning from January, dealers will cut nearly an inch off the lower edge of the gas pedal and adjust the width and not only that replacement pedals will be available from April.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has found that on most recalls, only 72% of affected owners bring their vehicles in for prescribed repairs. That means Toyota dealers can expect to see 2.7 million of the 3.8 million vehicles recalled. That’s more than Toyota’s total U.S. sales in the pre-recession year of 2007.
Those recalls will be a lengthy process and a pretty tough job to re-establish their business reputation with the dealers alone, but with some online reputation management strategies along with the technical rectification will bring in a great deal of damage limitation briskly for Toyota.

I saw a news article on the BBC about the top 100 brands in the world and thought it would be interesting to see how their rankings were reflected on the Internet in terms of Reputation Management.  I got the list off Interbrand which runs a report each year.  All the main brands have a http://en.wikipedia.org page but I decided not to list every Wiki page, you can easily find them yourself. The results are from the searches I did on Google.com

1. Coca Cola – Number one in the report, it looks like they have about 4 websites on the first page but this massive giant still has a negative result number 7 http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-coca-cola.html
2. IBM – One negative from the same site as Coca Cola http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-ibm.html Number 5, International Brotherhood of Magicians number 8, so as long as you don’t annoy one of these magical guys you should be OK
3. Microsoft – They pretty much dominate the first page through all the sites they run from bing to xbox,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft being the main issue
4. GE – So far is doing very well like Microsoft however they also have negatives about them on the Wiki page
5. Nokia – Have done a great job with their reputation online dominating pretty much the first page, again a wiki page with negative content is still available.
6. Macdonalds – falls into the category of having a name with a lots of other people (Scots) and businesses helping drown out negative content.  Of course there is a wiki page but on one of those rare occasions the page is about Kevin B. MacDonald so well done Macdonalds the only company so far not to have anything negative on the first page in google.com
7. Google – Guess what there is not one negative piece of content about Google not even a wiki page, I wonder how they manage that
8. Toyota – At the time I did this research Toyota had a couple of negative news stories, wiki page and this one http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10353116-54.html number 10
9. Intel – Intel have a clear bill of health apart from Wiki page
10. Disney – Have done very well, even the wiki page was number 9 in the results, a few negative news stories but not directed at them, well done!!!

I will look at the following 90 brands over the course of the week and give feedback on any that really stand out.  What is amazing is how much weight Google gives to Wiki pages.  Many of these wiki pages include previous law suits of the companies involved (many years out of date), I have no real understanding why they add such information, or even why they list companies in the first place.  It is the easiest way for someone to get negative content up the search results by adding a page to Wiki.   I thought encyclopedia’s were about how fast a Cheater can run or the Roman Wall, not how a company has had previous law suits against it.