Most people are bad drivers with bad driving habits. I’m not, of course, and you certainly aren’t. But pretty much everyone else is. That’s what researchers report when people’s opinions of their driving skills are compared to their actual performance. It’s related to what cognitive psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect: the tendency of people (particularly the least competent) to vastly overestimate their skills and abilities. Continue reading ‘Is sudden acceleration just bad driving?’
Social Responsibility includes avoidance of controversial business, fair trade, good corporate governance, human rights and animal rights. You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.
The Environment includes anti-pollution, recycling, clean & renewable energy, conservation, preservation, and sustainability. You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.
Some sanity is finally creeping to into the media free-for-all surrounding the Toyota accelerator and brake recalls. Curiously, the piling-on seems to be continuing in the business pundit world, with one after another declaring the death of the Toyota brand. Those with a better understanding of how consumers buy cars seem to be less apocalyptic. Edmunds.com, for example, analyzed National Traffic Safety Administration data over the last ten years and found that Toyota had had 9.1% of all the complaints in the database, but 13.5% of the U.S. market. That was good for 17 out of 20 (here a lower rank is better), bettered only by Mercedes, Porsche and Smart. Compare Toyota to the worst brand on the list – Land Rover – which received 0.6% of the total complaints in the database, while its sales amounted to only 0.1% of all new cars sold in the United States. Of course, anyone who drives by a Land Rover dealership on a Saturday morning already knows that.
As we pointed out in a recent post entitled Five Reasons why Toyota will be OK, people buy cars via comparison shopping. Our most recent ranking of automobile companies (shown at the top of this post) still has Toyota on top. Toyota’s overall reputation – including customer and employee satisfaction, community involvement, the environment and social responsibility – has dropped a bit recently, but has consistently tracked ahead of competitors like Honda, Ford and GM, as shown in the graph below.
That’s not to say the recalls involving floor mats, accelerator systems and hybrid brakes – coupled with and a slow and clumsy initial public response by Toyota senior management – haven’t taken a toll. In the graph below, it’s clear that Toyota’s reputation for customer satisfaction – as reflected in online stories and commentary – has dropped significantly in recent weeks. But notice that Honda has also seen a drop – most likely associated with their own recalls. Ford is seen as having recovered somewhat in recent months after a bout of mis-association with the other American automakers involved in government bailouts. And their reputation for customer satisfaction did NOT follow Toyota and Honda down in recent weeks.
For more on how the most talked-about companies online – including Toyota – treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, please visit Vanno.
Community Involvement includes charitable giving, support for the arts and education, volunteering and country or region of origin. You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.
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.
You can learn more about how the most talked-about companies on the Web treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.
It’s been reported that during an informal chat with Apple employees, Steve Jobs described Google’s don’t-be-evil mantra as “bullshit” or ” a load of crap”. While the tech press seems predictably focused on the distinction between the two characterizations, we asked ourselves whether Jobs in fact had a point.
A quick look at Google’s reputation scores on Vanno shows that social responsibility – which by our measure includes avoidance of controversial business, human rights and good governance among other factors – is in fact a weak point in the otherwise stellar reputation of the search and advertising giant. Issues surrounding privacy (Streetview, health records), copyright (digital book projects), censorship (China until recently) and questionable business practices (behavioral advertising) have all been the subject of extensive online discussion.
By the way, for all Google’s flaws when it comes to social responsibility, Apple is the wrong company to throw the first stone. They score lower than Google on this count.
Some of Apple’s social responsibility issues are similar to those that Google faces, such as censorship (Dalai Lama and the iPhone) and questionable business practices (DRM). Other concerns have included manufacturing practices (silicon sweatshops) and corporate governance (refusal to report on sustainability efforts, lack of disclosure surrounding the health of CEO Steve Jobs and options back-dating).
You can learn more about how Google and Apple treat their customers, employees communities, the environment and society in general at Vanno.
Vanno is live again. We’re still the same Company Reputation Index that we always were, but the way we go about building our rankings has changed significantly. We think the changes have resulted in a more powerful set of business tools for our subscribers. So if you’re interested in how companies treat their customers, employees, communities, the environment and society in general, sign up for a free trial.
For those of you who were familiar with our free site, here’s what happened between then and now. The free site relied on “crowdsourcing” to generate the raw material – stories, votes and comments – for our analysis. While we count many serious and thoughtful people among the thousands of users of our free site, we discovered two things that led us to question the viability of a crowdsourced model for company reputations. Continue reading ‘Welcome back to Vanno!’
Identity Commerce LLC is re-launching Vanno as a subscription-only service. The new site is scheduled to open on February 1, 2010. The existing free site is no longer accessible. All user personal information from the free site has been permanently deleted in accordance with our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
We thank you for your continued interest in Vanno. We invite you to visit the new site after February 1, 2010 and sign up for a free trial subscription. We believe you will find it more compelling and professionally valuable than ever before. If you have any questions, please contact us at question@vanno.com.
We apologize for the delay in launching the new site, but we’ve been a bit distracted by the addition of a new member to the Vanno family. Shaila David Clark was born on January 17, 2010. She immediately moved to the top of our rankings.
Sincerely,
Nick, Landon and the Vanno Team
