Toyota's public humiliation perpetuated by relentless mocking from Letterman

Toyota's public humiliation perpetuated by relentless mocking from Letterman
By Brett Michael Dykes
Copyright by Yahoo! News
April 8, 2010
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_ts1533

Toyota will be long remembered for the epic 2010 recalls stemming from apparent design flaws in the accelerator pedals of many of the auto giant’s most popular models. The company’s senior management could also be fodder for future management textbooks explaining how not to handle damage control in the wake of a corporate scandal.

And, in all likelihood, David Letterman will at least be a footnote in those same entries. That’s because the host of the CBS “Late Show” has been featuring a series of skits about Toyota’s stop-start-restart efforts to restore public confidence in its products.

The setup is always the same: Letterman, seated behind his desk, introduces Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda, explaining that he called the show personally, requesting to come on to issue a statement. Of course, it’s not real — but it’s a pitch-perfect spoof of Toyoda’s own uncomfortable effort to court the public and put the ordeal of the massive 2.3-million vehicle recall behind him. The actor portraying the embattled car honcho is a Japanese-American named Ken Kensei; he enters the "Late Show" soundstage with a mock-solemn deep Asian bow, and launches into what appears to be a sincere apology. His impersonation is so faithful to the original that he occasionally wins applause from the studio audience for his opening stabs at contrition.

But the façade of corporate charm soon crumbles, as Kensei breaks into an unhinged tirade. In one sketch, for instance, he lays into American drivers as “fatties” who “drive like frightened kitties.” In another, he singles out Letterman himself for abuse, yelling that the wisecracking Hoosier has “killed Big Jaw” — a none-too-subtle reference to Letterman’s feud with “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno:

The skits are oddly compelling — even though they’re delivered in Japanese, and Kensei reads his lines from Japanese-language cue cards (which, according to "Late Show" staffers, often causes headaches for the show's not-fluent-in-Japanese cue-card person whenever last minute rewrites are made).

Letterman himself pitched the idea for the Toyota segments during the real-life Akio Toyoda’s public apology tour in the wake of the recalls earlier this year. Justin and Eric Stangel, the pair of brothers who head the "Late Show" writing team, remember that their boss approached them with the idea of an initially composed and deferential Toyoda character starting in with a heartfelt statement of apology and then suddenly “losing his mind.”

"Dave just came in one day and told us that he wanted to do this," Justin Stangel told Yahoo! News. "So my brother and I took a crack at the script, and we sent it over to Dave. Then he basically rewrote it, and it was brilliant."

The anguish of the "Late Show" version of Toyoda certainly has its corollary in the real world. As the AP has reported, the executive’s namesake company is facing a still steeper road to public forgiveness thanks to internal company documents showing that a senior official was urging top management to release all the compromising information that gave rise to the scandal over the past three years.

"We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet," wrote Irv Miller, the company’s then-vice president for environmental and public affairs in an internal email obtained by the AP. "The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean."

But such appeals ran headlong into a corporate culture at Toyota that approaches public inquiries into its business with a lockdown strategy.

"Toyota has a history of not being responsive, to worry first about their image," Ray Wert, editor of the auto blog Jalopnik.com, told Yahoo! News. "So their first response was, 'There is no problem.' They may have not misled anyone, but they definitely tried to hide the problem. It bit them so hard that Akio had to come out and apologize all over the place."

Indeed, the company's initial "information retention" efforts led Toyota’s leaders from one end of the PR spectrum — tightly controlled nondisclosure — to the other: gushing public displays of remorse. Toyoda, the grandson of the company’s founder, even confessed that the automaker was "grasping for salvation." But the more he sought to strike the right remorseful note in public, the more critics kept noting the ways he kept falling short, or coming off as insincere. And since, as Wert notes, “the art of the apology in Japan is very precise,” Toyoda even was taken to task for executing a too-shallow bow to signify his sorrow.

That sort of scrutiny is probably enough to drive anyone into a tirade.

The main question ahead for Toyota is when it will have righted itself to the point that it’s not the butt of a running joke on late-night network TV. Unfortunately for Toyoda and his allies, the view of corporate damage-control experts is mainly that time will tell.

“Once the crisis vortex gets going, your capacity to stop it these days is limited," crisis-management specialist Eric Dezenhall told Yahoo! News. "You do not control the modern media. Even if you handle it correctly, you can't control it." That equation has only been complicated by the rise of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, Dezenhall notes, which makes it all but impossible for corporate damage controllers to execute a top-down message strategy.

And the "Late Show" doesn't show any signs of letting up, so long as the Akio skits continue caroming around YouTube. The show's writers tell us they will target "whatever's in the news." Though Justin Stangel does want the world to know that he and his brother "both drive Toyotas. So if something happens to either of us, draw your own conclusions."

Yahoo! News repeatedly contacted Toyota personnel for comment, but they replied that they were “unable to provide a comment.” And for the record, this correspondent uses public transportation.