No one can fail to have heard about the massive global recall of Toyota cars over the past few weeks with millions of ‘defective’ vehicles called back especially over Europe, North America and China…

Gone in a flash it seems is the car giant’s long standing reputation for being one of the most reliable vehicles around and fiscally the impact is even scarier with share values plummeting overnight.

But, once the dust settles the lingering question may be what price can be put on the damage to their brand image?  How long will it take for the hearts and minds of consumers to forgive this and what lessons will Toyota have learned about communication.

Certainly if you’re to believe the media one of the biggest criticisms of them has been the time lag between press leakage of the scale of the issue and official Toyota statements, another will be how long it has taken them to directly contact customers. As we write we’ve heard they are rapidly preparing a series of marketing communications activity, but is it too little too late?

Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t springs to mind, but from what we’ve seen it appears that Toyota have indeed been slow to get out there and reassure customers, perhaps wrongly believing silence is golden.  No doubt their team of crisis managers have been locked in conference rooms with them since the story broke strategising, but in this age of light-speed communication, where the internet can circulate a story faster than you can hit the brakes on your car (no pun intended) would they have been better off being alot more transparent. We think so. What about you?