MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

A 302% increase in projected profit in a challenging economy is driven by simple changes to PPC ads (with zero net new marketing spend). A brand-battering string of safety recalls is announced by an auto company built on quality. What can we learn from these dream and nightmare scenarios?

Toyota’s image problems have already been written about from every imaginable PR and branding angle. So I’ll avoid the obvious lessons and focus on that thin line between the success we started this piece with and the failure that has sent Toyota scrambling. Namely, what went wrong in example 2, what went right in example 1, and what does it mean to today’s CMO?

The world’s-largest automaker is well known for its practice of kaizen, a.k.a. continuous improvement, a.k.a. “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” Any worker is empowered to stop the assembly line because he spots a flaw. Yet, as Matthew DeBord writes in The New York Times, this system may have allowed Toyota’s executives to become overconfident in the system itself and its front-line practitioners. Read more…