Toyota: A Firsthand Account

By Nigel Middlemiss, Knowledge Director, Echo Research

Not long ago we (my wife Prisca and I) bought a Toyota Prius, the “3rd Generation” model, which had just come on to the market. But within a month, the “Gen 3” Priuses had been recalled by Toyota because the brake pedal “felt strange” when the anti-skid system (ABS) operated.

I realised with mild surprise that we’d become what in my day job are known as “stakeholders“, enmeshed in a “product crisis”. I decided to note how it developed in case there were any passing insights into brand reputations.

So how did Toyota do?

Well, first of all, this particular stakeholder was slightly resentful that he had to schlepp out to a West London dealership to have a software patch loaded to stop the alleged “strange feeling” of the brakes.

More seriously, pride in the shiny new possession was dented by Toyota’s reputational hit. I almost felt as if we’d rented a charming country cottage and woken next morning to find a motorway at the bottom of the garden. Because of the recall, there were far fewer conversations than I’d have liked about the things that had made the Prius the Green Car of the Year 2009 in the US, or the City Car of the Year 2009 in the UK.

A third, insidious, effect was that, when I looked at web forums about the Prius, once people had seen one tiny bit of the reputation crumble, they piled in en masse to demolish other bits. “Apparently the fuel consumption isn’t as good as a manual diesel”, “Apparently the boot’s too small to be any use because of the huge electric motor”, and so on. A sort of crowd fever set in.

A month or so went by, and the Prius story began to fade in the media. And then, strangely, now that the reputational tsunami had calmed, we started to take a fresh look. A blog about Toyotas I read put it in perspective: in the last 15 years there’ve been seven recalls of Audis, 12 for BMWs, six for Bentleys and 16 for that byword for reliability the VW. Meanwhile, in March In the US, where concerns had been strongest, Toyota reported 20 per cent year-on-year sales growth for Priuses.

We began to notice again some of the virtues we’d bought it for. Here again were the convenience and comfort of the feather-light controls, the drive-by-wire systems that turn the gearshift into an electronic console, the ease of reversing guided by video cameras, the facility to have the vehicle parked for you in the tightest space with a radar-based system that spins the steering wheel (while you take your hands off), another radar controller that keeps you a safe distance from the car ahead, and, not least, very low petrol consumption, especially now unleaded had climbed to 120p a litre. And because of the low exhaust pollution, no road tax and no London congestion charge. Its deeper virtues were surfacing again.

The worst of it, I realised, looking back, had been the negative ‘peer pressure’. It had been – still is, of course, till Toyota’s reputation fully reasserts itself - a case of “You’ve nothing to fear from the loss of reputation but fear itself”. Other people’s take on it had clouded the reality in my mind – not of course, that it had been a risk-free occurrence, but that it was one among many, which most car brands encounter, that it could be rectified, and that it would eventually be history.

So I’m no longer a stakeholder with product issues, and I much prefer it that way.

The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.

Welcome to Apple’s world

By Tom Mattey – Graphics Specialist, Echo Research Ltd.

I have had a chance to play with Apple’s new iPad and I can report that it is stunning to look at and works very gracefully. I have to tip my cap to the Apple software engineers; the operating system is a work of digital art.

The iPad has been pitched by the digital world’s new ‘Messiah’, Apple CEO Steve Jobs as ‘filling the gap between the smart phone and the laptop’. As an avid tech user, I am still struggling to tell if this gap actually exists and if it did, why the netbook class of laptops does not fill that same void?

Ignoring attributes such as aesthetics or ‘cool factor’, when compared to a netbook, the netbook equals or beats the iPad hands down in every department except the quality of the screen. The netbook can run most standard Windows software. I can plug a USB pen into it, swap the battery, change the operating system, I have complete control over what I want to install or do on it.

As you can tell, I am still on the fence with the iPad, but not for the reasons you may think, it’s not to do with their price, their limited capabilities, or the hidden, murky world of 3G contracts you must enter to use a 3G model or even a practical standpoint because I have no use for it, (I have constantly been guilty of buying gadgets because they are desirable when in fact I have no practical use for them).

My reasons are very simply to do with freedom.

This is the issue I have with Apple. I like a lot of its products, the iPhone is an exceptional device, but I don’t like the fact that once I’ve bought it, I am also buying into Apple’s world and to leave I must use another device. I don’t like that I can only use an Apple cable and iTunes to copy material onto my phone, I don’t like that I can’t ever use a different OS or app not approved and sanitised by Apple. Apple is also now dictating what the future of the internet will be and hinting at a censorship model for material it deems unsavoury. These are basic freedoms and choices that pioneered the internet and indeed Apple in its early days. For my computer use which occupies a large part of my time at work and at home, I am not prepared to sacrifice these freedoms.

I am however eagerly waiting to see what the launch of the iPad will mean for Apple’s reputation. One of the iPad’s big selling points is its book and newspaper reader ability. Apple is hoping to sell it to the modern western professional to read his or her newspaper on while commuting.

Apple has identified the increasingly talked about demise of the newspaper and is offering these sinking ships a life raft by trying to establish a device capable of delivering digital newspapers to the masses. Some rumours talk about Apple looking to sign exclusive deals with newspapers to deliver via the iPad and now speculation is growing as what Apple’s objective would be if it did this. Does Steve Jobs see himself as the next Rupert Murdoch?

Apple has seduced the mainstream market. The mainstream view of Apple is generally favourable as it has introduced a whole new demographic to the virtual world of the internet with a range of easy to use, stylish gadgets. However there is an undercurrent of increasing alienation and anger from professional digital users who see a company built on a reputation of open source, trust and transparency become corrupted by its recent success and using increasingly unsavoury tactics to its competitors such as Adobe. A lot of people see the perceived motivation of the company swing from open sourced innovation to profit driven greed. For those that saw Apple as a David fighting against the Goliath of Microsoft, it’s sad to see it win the battle only to fall prey to the same trappings as Microsoft did.

In his defence, Steve Jobs does not shy from these allegations; he is very clear about his mission and mandate and is happy to defend it to anyone (link to http://gawker.com/5539717/).

So will the iPad be a success? I suspect it will sell very well at first but quickly fall away or be replaced by Apple’s next offering but I hope the world is not seduced by these shiny toys if it means sacrificing something much more valuable.

The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.

The Future of News

By Nigel Middlemiss, Knowledge Director, Echo Research

The future of news is up for debate. Nobody really knows what will happen to newspapers as online storms ahead

Some say “the economics of free” – giveaways like the Metro, free websites like the Guardian - is causing carnage among UK journalists, with 2,000 lost through dwindling circulation and title closures in the last year. There are fears that journalism will become a hyphenated profession; because there is not enough money in newspapers alone, journalist-lawyers and journalist-lecturers etc will be the only ones to make ends meet.

Others say the evidence tends the opposite way: people will always pay for great content. A million subscribers pay for the Wall Street Journal online, and four million for The Economist. Paid-for TV like Sky is growing while free-to-air TV is in decline. Some newspapers are only failing because, in the US certainly, they were lazy big town monopolies.

What is sure is that the channels or carriers of news are on the move; 26 new e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle are coming to market this year and they will overtake, some predictions say, iPads and laptops as convenient readers, and replace the physical bulk, transportation demands and chemical damage of newspapers.

Clearly there’s no going back on Web 2.0 and its news successes. There are now heavily trafficked sites that take the best of freelance contributions from around the globe to create a newswire service. Patch.com in the US is a typical platform for people to tell stories citizen-to-citizen, unfettered and free, and so is wikileaks.com which aggregates leaks that “the Establishment” don’t want you to know about. Blogs influence geo-politics as they issue pleas to the world from inside repressive regimes like Iran. There are Egyptian bloggers who collect allegations of torture and challenge their Government with it, for example.

Perhaps the most convincing take on who will win the blog vs. news media debate is: nobody will. Certainly social media give us more access to unmediated news. But nobody ever knows where the journey will end; almost everyone gets it wrong. Some said when the car was invented that the train would end, when traffic started to gridlock that flying cars would be invented to overcome congestion.

But news values will survive transmission changes, as they have in transit through ink and paper to film, to TV, to computers. The medium is not really key; the message is. What matters is what’s happening in the world; that is what people want to be sure has been reliably aggregated and is being powerfully presented through sharp writing, great pictures, clever graphics, wide coverage. You have to trust the output: and for that you need an editor, a fact-checker, an accountable individual, which means trained journalists. The demand side not the supply side will determine news. Publishing, in whatever form, will remain.

As to the “economics of free”, Rupert Murdoch has now declared war on aggregators like Google. This month he started putting News International coverage behind a ‘paywall’. Will his general interest papers be able to mimic the model of financial journalism like the FT, Economist, WSJ? Watch this space.

The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.