Toyota has spent decades, not to mention billions of dollars, spreading the message that their vehicles are superior – in safety, style and value. The recent PR debacle facing the automaker goes to show the vulnerability of a brand. Years of maintaining a solid reputation can be shattered in less than 24 hours.

Consumer confidence in Toyota is definitely at a pivotal point. First, the floor mats. Next the sticky accelerators – linked to 19 deaths. Then, with the promise of a “fix” on the horizon, Toyota announced last week that there is a problem with the Prius’s brake system. Where does it end?

Some think that the Toyota brand is done – that they should throw in the towel and start anew. After the contamination issue in 1982, Johnson & Johnson had to repair the Tylenol brand, but no need to scrap it all together. Neither did Firestone or Exxon after their respective catastrophes. Toyota’s major problem, aside from the obvious engineering flaw, in my opinion is the mixed messages being disseminated, further fueling consumer anxiety. Drive. . .Don’t drive. . .It’s electrical. . .It’s mechanical. . .We know. . . We don’t know. . . Get your message straight! This lack of clarity is just further aggravating an already fragile situation.

To a certain extent, loyal patrons are forgiving and would be willing to trust Toyota again. But when is enough, finally enough? As a Camry driver myself, I am waiting (and waiting. . .and waiting) to see if the company can pull a U-turn and boost my confidence or if the crisis will continue to go down hill.

If you were in the driver’s seat of Toyota’s messaging during this fiasco, would you have done anything differently?

Photo credit: Robert Vinet

Being in the Online Brand Development business, we read everything we can get our hands on about changes in the industry – and we regularly discuss everything from best practices for web design … to the incorporation of social media tools … to writing for search engine optimization. The interactive side of our agency has created a real opportunity for collaboration throughout the office – bringing the writers, account executives, designers, programmers (quite literally everyone) together to do it right. It makes for a more exciting process and provides a platform for intensely creative solutions to marketing challenges.

But real success in this ever-evolving medium can’t occur with “new tools” alone. True, you have to be ahead of the curve – but if you only look forward, you may fail to benefit from very valuable “lessons learned.” Yes, the new tools need a few old rules. The first, and most fundamental: The principles of good customer service that have been at play since the first sale was made remain at the heart of everything businesses should be doing to market themselves – online or anywhere else.

Some very successful companies know this all too well. The corporate culture behind Zappos.com and their commitment to good customer service has been widely reported and has catapulted the company from $1.6 million in revenue in 2000, $8.6 million in 2001. Last Wednesday, the company sold to Amazon.com for $850 million. In a recent BusinessWeek article titled “The Web Knows What You Want,” the writer explores how analytics companies are dissecting behavioral data to create technology that will predict what online shoppers want. The article likened this new technology to an in-store salesperson observing a customer’s body language and tone of voice so that they can better anticipate purchasing recommendations. (Interesting … new tools replicating “old rules.”) That analogy drove the very simple point home.

As the “what’s new” continues to evolve, we must remain focused on what really matters. And it begins with one of the oldest marketing tenets around: Know your customer.

More on how Costa DeVault’s take on “new tools and old rules” at the Orlando IABC meeting in November. Stay tuned to the IABC web site for more details.

Photo credit: striatic