1)  Toyota has a huge reservoir of consumer good will. The company regularly tops rankings – including ours – not only of automakers, but of the largest multi-nationals.   At Vanno, Toyota was the overall top overall company for a good fraction of 2009.  The recent acceleration and brake issues have obviously taken a toll – particularly relative to customer satisfaction, as the graphic shows – but the company is still in the overall top 10. The fact is that company reputations take time to build, and they are hard to destroy overnight or with one event.

2) Toyota’s reputation is strong across the board. Historically, Toyota ranks highly not only relative to customer satisfaction, but also community involvement, the environment and social responsibility.  Their weakest aspect of reputation – employee satisfaction – still is in the top 30 among the 250 companies we track.

3) Consumers respond well when companies say they are sorry and fix things quickly.   One of the most remarkable recent studies in consumer behavior involved doctors and patients, and the power of saying “I’m sorry”.   When doctors admitted errors and offered to quickly correct and/or compensate patients, the number of lawsuits filed by patients dropped considerably.    Similarly, when companies respond quickly and forcefully to negative events – like Kellogg did when some of its brands of peanut-butter crackers were found to be contaminated with salmonella – the negative impact on company reputation is short-lived.    If Toyota corrects the problems quickly and makes the appropriate public apologies, there is every reason to believe that consumers will respond favorably in the long term.

4) People buy cars via comparison shopping, and Toyota still compares very well to all other manufacturers. it is important to remember that sudden acceleration has been around for a long time, and has been primarily associated with  Chrysler and Ford before Toyota. More broadly viewed, consumers have relatively long memories and Toyota reliability has become the stuff of consumer lore.    As long as their products are priced competitively, and – as noted above – consumers believe a good-faith effort was made to correct the issues, it’s unlikely this one event will destroy a long and hard-earned reputation.

5) Most cases of sudden acceleration will turn out to be driver-related. When all is said and done, this is primarily an operator error issue.  There will likely be very few injuries or accidents that unambiguously involve actual mechanical/electrical failure.     The statistical reality is that many more people will die from reading, texting or tweeting about Toyota while driving around this week than ever will from any acceleration system flaws.

The big potential problem for Toyota is that every case of a driver unwittingly stepping on the gas at an inopportune time will now turn into a lawsuit.   It’s a well known phenomenon -  give something a name and widespread publicity – and associate it with deep-pocketed companies  – and complaints (and lawsuits) will come out of the woodwork.     Recall, for example, the long, convoluted and ongoing battle over vaccines and  autism.   When the (now thoroughly debunked) vaccine connection was made public, entirely new claims of autism started showing up everywhere, straining the very definition of the disease.   And, of course, lawsuits proliferated against every company in the vaccine food-chain.

For more on how Toyota treats its customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, visit Vanno.