Business Advice from PR: An Example from Toyota
- Posted by Ephraim Cohen on February 25th, 2007 filed in Public Relations, Reputation Management
This week’s BusinessWeek article on Toyota has a strong example of the role public relations should play at the senior level - providing business consulting advice in the context of reputation impact.
The article tells how the head of Toyota, Shoichiro Toyoda, had his new head of PR, James Olson, find out how the company should avoid angering US consumers and politicians as it made inroads in the market during the 1980s. The article briefing goes into discussoin how Olson reported Toyota’s reputation as an interloper due, at least in part (the article implies), to the fact that Toyota produced very little in the US itself. What did Toyota do next? Not release bunch of news and speeches, but actually invest in building factories and creating jobs in the US. These days some argue that Toyota’s cars are more American from a manufacturing perspective than cars made by the Big 3.
Now how many times have public relations executives given this type of business operations = reputation impact advice? My guess would be not often enough.
Sphere: Related Content
February 26th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
[...] Meaningful reputation changes come with meaningful business change. PR teams usally just try and communicate around changes already made. Some more business smarts and a little speaking up might give public relations executives a role in determining business moves such as product packaging, customer service scripts, product offerings, CEO compensation and other public actions that drive reputation. See the recent Toyota post as a good example. [...]