When Toyota hit the icy patch in their narrative this January, they did not do what most organizations their size would do, they didn’t do what the Tiger Woods brand did when the Escalade hit the fire hydrant: huddle, confer, strategize, ponder, debate, script, re-write, close ranks, assume a defensive posture, call in damage control experts, and use all of it as an excuse for Not Doing Anything.
No, they improvised. And by that, I don’t mean they flew by the seat of their pants, or made it up as they went along. From the CEO on down, they jumped into the conversation with the audience and performed aggressively to build a narrative that countered the media hysteria around the recall and the ambulance-chasing members of the legal profession who fanned its flames.
This is what improvisation is. A conversation designed to connect the performers with their community. Not a monologue, a strategy, a script or a campaign. A dialogue. Observations and comments. Listening and responding. Action and reaction.
AdWeek this week highlights one component of Toyota’s conversation with the audience: a Digg Dialogg with Toyota’s head of U.S. Sales, Jim Lentz. One of the more telling beats in the article is how skeptical J.D. Power & Associates, the traditional arbiter of performance and quality in the automotive industry is about this tactic. They don’t see ‘movement’ in their polls, they say. The jury is still out, they say. What the J.D. Power people fail to grasp is that the conversation itself is the movement. The fact that it happened, along with untold other interactions between the brand and audience, constitute a flow of events that defy any one snapshot’s (i.e. poll’s) ability to capture its effectiveness. Trying to measure one data point in a narrative with a million data points is foolish. J. D. Powers is trying to apply old school metrics to a new school process. It’s like taking a poll about how people feel about Rings and using it to gauge the audience’s perception of Lord of the Rings.
No doubt there’s a major problem with Toyota’s process, the company has admitted as much. Its quantity got ahead of its quality. It began thinking of its audience as consumers instead of customers. It’s a big, big, issue, with immense implications for the brand. What’s impressive is that they didn’t let the immensity overwhelm them. They didn’t look for an epic solution to the epic problem. Rather, they began a journey of epic proportions., and they are conducting it one conversation, one scene, at a time. They are contrite, but they are not backpedaling, or wasting time deliberating. That would cause the narrative to lose its momentum. They didn’t script a narrative and then try to force it on the audience. They improvised, with the conviction that their journey will eventually re-connect them with their community, and win back its confidence and its applause for their performance.
