preview

Toyota Crisis Management

Best Essays

Toyota Crisis: Management Ignorance?

Abstract
Since the late 2009, the famous vehicle manufacture Toyota has suffered a severe crisis due to unintended quality problems in its cars which had triggered Toyota’s largest officially recalls of its cars around the world. This crisis threatens the company’s previous reputation of good quality cars, as well as the brand image built up over time. This study aims to elaborate on the Toyota crisis in order to understand why Toyota faces this crisis and how they deal with the crisis; and investigate consumers’ perceptions of Toyota brand as the outcome of the crisis, with a focus on Swedish market. A qualitative research along with a number of face-to-face interviews with Toyota Swedish dealer …show more content…

This pioneering lean manufacturing technique includes continuous process improvement, flexible production with just-in-time principle, and removing waste without removing value (Angel, 2008). So far, America has become Toyota’s largest market, where Toyota is rank as one of the top-selling brands (Toyota USA website).
CONCLUSION
Since the late 2009, the famous vehicle manufacture Toyota has suffered a severe crisis due to unintended quality problems in its cars. This had triggered Toyota’s largest officially recalls of nearly 9 million vehicles all over the world. This crisis has threatened the company’s previous reputation of building good quality and reliable cars, as well as damaging its brand image built up over time. The managerial decisions taken by Toyota to deal with the crisis is considered as a key issue to retrieve the former reputation, and to recover the trust and image held by the customers. This study aims to elaborate on the Toyota crisis in order to understand why Toyota faces this crisis and how Toyota deals with the crisis, and investigate Swedish consumers’ perceptions of Toyota brand as the outcome of the crisis. The findings indicated that:
(1) Although there were external powers such as mass media that forced Toyota working even harder on the crisis, it was Toyota itself that asks for most of its own misfortunes when they lost quality focus in the rapid global expansion and failed to effectively

Get Access