Follow Up Letter Rewrite for Toyota

1018 Words5 Pages
Assignment 4: Follow Up Letter from Toyota Follow Up Letter from Toyota Communication Situation I am writing a follow up letter that I believe Toyota CEO Jim Lentz should have written after he realized that his initial letter was ineffective and possibly damaging to Toyota’s reputation. Introduction In this paper, I will provide the details behind how and why I designed my follow up letter from Jim Lentz. I will outline my presentation goal, the audience analysis, crisis communication style and tone, and implications for stakeholders. In conclusion, I will share the strengths of this approach and possible risks associated with this approach and how my DiSC profile affected my approach. Presentation Goal It was important for me to present Toyota as taking responsibility and communicating their empathy more effectively than the previous communication. According to Weiner, a controversial tenet of crisis management is the act of taking responsibility (pg. 4) which was a critical component of my follow up letter. The negative reaction to the first letter made it necessary to put an apology in the beginning of my follow up. Another goal in my follow up letter was to ensure customers and the public knew we had a crisis team formed to focus on the matter. It would have been better for Toyota to have a trained team prior to the issue occurring (Weiner, pg. 5), however, I felt this step helped the audience know that Toyota was taking this seriously. Lastly, my goal was to outline the steps we were taking to both resolve the issue and make it easy for customers to get their existing vehicles fixed. We would work closer with dealers to assist with getting them the vehicles and scheduling appointments. Audience Analysis My primary audience is existing Toyota customers, whom are directly impacted by the issue and recall. I needed to show empathy about the

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