The Toyota Recall Crisis: Media Impact on Toyota's Corporate Brand Reputation

The time trend of public opinion about carmaker Toyota dropped precipitously in early 2010 following a series of quality issues and recalls. The mathematical model of ideodynamics could predict the fall and subsequent rise in Toyota's reputation from coverage of Toyota in blogs, in Internet forums, in print news, and in news websites from 1 January, 2009 through 31 March, 2011. Internet forums represented crowd sourcing in social media. The model performance was high for all these types of media with R2 values in the range of 0.7–0.8. Information favorable to Toyota was about twice as persuasive as information unfavorable to the company. Blogs had negative coverage of Toyota in the fall of 2009 before other media types but had limited effects on opinion. Impressions of Toyota only showed a notable drop after recall information hit the majority of the other media. The good predictions showed that all the media studied moved in reasonable synchrony, so all could represent the information shaping public opinion even though the messages did not include advertising or broadcast content.