Filed under: Government/Legal, Marketing/Advertising, Recalls, Safety, Toyota
Don’t look now, but we’re firmly entrenched in the final week of 2010. Which means, besides figuring out a way to return a few gifts, it’s time to take a look back at the year that was. Here’s one to get us started: What companies made the biggest blunders of 2010?
In retrospect, number one seems almost comically easy. Clearly, British Petroleum and its merry band of PR professionals and executives deserve their very well-earned place at the top of the list of blundering companies of 2010. No arguments there. But it’s number two on the list, which just so happens to be Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, that we remember most vividly.
Recalls and safety probes are a natural part of building automobiles, but as Tim Calkins, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University told MSNBC, “If you look at what they did it was clear that they didn’t really understand the magnitude of the issue and the potential PR risk.” Truer words have never been spoken. Click on past the break for the rest of 2010’s biggest corporate blunderers.
[Source: Fineman PR | Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty]
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Toyota, BP top list of biggest blunders in 2010 originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 28 Dec 2010 13:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Continue reading “Toyota, BP top list of biggest blunders in 2010”
According to The Detroit Free Press, Toyota has agreed to settle the case in which four people died in a runaway Lexus to the tune of $10 million. The crash, which occurred in August 2009, killed an off-duty police officer, his wife, brother-in-law and daughter and set off a torrent of recalls and investigations into just how long the Japanese automaker had known about unintended acceleration issues. In this case, the accelerator was trapped by the wrong-sized floor mat, but Toyota would later recall vehicles not only with similar issues, but with pedals that could stick as well. 
Goldman Sachs Japan isn’t exactly painting a rosy picture for the future of Toyota. The investment group says the automaker isn’t recovering from the automotive implosion as quickly as its competitors. As a result, the predictions regarding the company’s return to pre-sales-collapse figures have been toned down. Goldman Sachs Japan now says that while it fully expects to see car sales eclipse the previous average growth rate of 2.6 percent per year, jumping to eight and nine percent from 2010 on, Toyota is only expected to see its pace swell by three percent. 
According to Automotive News, new car shoppers are beginning to shy away from Toyota thanks to the company’s less-than spotless quality and safety reputation as of late. A new study by J.D. Power and Associates has revealed that around 19 percent of new car buyers surveyed said that they had steered clear of Toyota because of the company’s sullied reputation. Last year, that number was a mere 3 percent. Even worse for the Japanese manufacturer, around 15 percent of those in the study said that they’d personally had a bad experience with the automaker and another 15 percent said that they were concerned about the future of Toyota. Those numbers mark a 12 and an 11 percent increase over last year’s figures, respectively.
