Picking fights with those who buy ink by the barrel

Oh, Toyota. It’s been a rough couple of weeks and there have been so many missed opportunities to lessen the impact of this bona fide corporate crisis. Worse than a missed opportunity, though, is to actively add to your woes.

We get it – nobody likes nasty news coverage that goes on for days after steps have been taken to solve a problem. It’s frustrating, and it’s often just sensational after the recall/fix/plan is in place and working. But rule number… eleven (I’ve really got to start actually numbering these rules!) of crisis management is not to attack the attacker.

So don’t complain about ABC’s news coverage and threaten to pull ads from their affiliates as ‘punishment’.

A few reasons why that’s a bad idea:

1) It’s not really punishment for the ABC Corporation. Even in a recession they can find new ads to fill these spots. They are not dependent on any one company for advertising (though admittedly these southeast dealers are biggies – 20% of Toyota’s US sales).
2) It blurs the line between the business and news functions of a TV network and its affiliates. It shows you don’t understand the way their organization works, which makes you look silly. In theory, your business decision is doing nothing but making life harder for the sales people at a local station. This is misdirected anger and it shouldn’t affect the news one bit.
3) You end up with ugly media stories like the one linked above.

A better strategy would have been:

- Push back on ABC’s news (locally and coordinated/nationally) with aggressive lines about your actions, invite them to shoot the fix in action, interview happy customers, etc. Fight back with your side of the recall story: Toyota is an automaker that made herculean efforts to get the fix underway quickly.
- Change the tone of your advertisements to a “Toyota cares” theme. Maybe personal stories about how Toyota’s inspection found problems, fixed them for free, gave a car owner advice on how to maintain a particular part, etc. Any sort of a ‘personal touch’ story showing Toyota to be anything but a massively incompetent or callous.
- Perhaps run a Superbowl ad to ’shoot straight’ with the American people, update them on your handling of the crisis, and tell them about all the great new things they have to offer now that an isolated problem has been fixed? This time: no prepared notes, no reading from a script.

Any of all of these would be better than bullying affiliates over network coverage tone.