Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor® blog at Retaildoc.com

Did you catch today’s news that Toyota, the brand many American’s have run to from GM and Ford because they were “better built” than the Big 3, has halted production and withdrawn eight models?  Not just came up with a recall to fix but HALTED PRODUCTION of 60% of their products due to an accelerator glitch they don’t seem able to get a handle on.   The full story can be read at the WSJ but with such a mea culpa, have they raised our consciousness to such a level that we now question all those years of quality reports?  I know I do.

[Updated 2/2: The New York Times reports, "At almost every step that led to its current predicament, Toyota underestimated the severity of the sudden-acceleration problem affecting its most popular cars. It went from discounting early reports of problems to overconfidently announcing diagnoses and insufficient fixes. You can read it all here.]

But they’re not the only ones.  Have you checked out the new Dominoes pizza ads that basically say their pizza crust sucked for the past 50 years and they had to do something to acknowledge customers’ honest comments? They’ve even created their own website reinforcing again how they had to change. You can watch Patrick Doyle’s message here.

But wait, it’s not just the Domino’s Pizza company CMO and President saying they’re sorry. How about Jr. and Ramon (the District Manager?)’s video apology to a Twitterer’s tweets about a bad experience. Just amazing to watch a DM in Chicago apologize about Dominoes 223 Lincoln.  Domino’s may have still been smarting from their disgusting employees in Conover last year and how their response was anything but mea culpa. If you missed that post, its here.

What’s fascninating is they are major companies taking the lead in saying, “Yep, we got problems.”  Maybe its due to the influence of social media they want to get ahead of things, I’m not sure but the acknowledgements are almost reveling in their rottenness.

With Valentine’s Day coming up, imagine saying to your sweetheart, I can’t see you anymore because I’ve been unfaithful, not sure when I can stop so stay tuned.” Or, “I know I’ve been unfaithful, here’s the room we stayed at, the bedsheets and notes I wrote – I get it, I’m bad but give me another chance because hey, I’ve got a video.”

Is this where watchdog reporters have led us?  Think back to Lee Iacocca’s commercials for Chrysler in the 80’s – he never said, “We sucked and hope you’ll give us a chance.”  His message was “We’re doing amazing things.”  Of course, the difference is he had high safety ratings, when you have cars that accelerate uncontrolably, you kinda ‘cede that.

Now consumers who have purchased Toyotas and those who will undoubtedly buy them in the future will scrutinize the brand like never before.

Lesson to businesses large and small, if you want to become a larger brand, you better pay attention to the most basic brand promises:

• eating our product won’t taste bad or
• our products won’t kill you.

It really is the little things that allow you to say those things. Take your eyes off the ball and you’ll be whipping yourself like the judge in Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd – hopefully not on the global stage like Toyota and Dominoes. Which could tarnish the reputations of others in their categories and, Toyota’s case, a whole country.

PS – This isn’t like the Tylenol scare which killed 7 people because of a saboteur tampering with the bottles in stores.  Toyota has almost 100 deaths due to sudden acceleration – they knew about this as far back as 2006. This won’t blow over.

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