When an Icon Crashes, Is an Apology Enough?

[By Nora Jacobs, Hennes Communications]

The first car I ever owned was a ’57 Volkswagen that I bought for $100. Its most memorable features were a cloth sunroof and turn signals that flipped out of the side pillars like miniature wings.  It was almost as fanciful as the Morris Minor I learned to drive on, which featured powder blue leather upholstery and matching carpet. I’ve driven many other cars over the years, but I’ve always thought back to that ‘57 and promised myself that I’d buy another Bug when my commuting days were behind me.

So it is therefore with great sadness that I watch as the icon of the counterculture and the wellspring from which “smart” advertising flowed in the Sixties writhes in the depths of a self-inflicted reputational crisis of international proportions. Most ironic is the fact that the crisis revolves around attempts to deceive emission-detecting equipment – a complete assault on the values of environmental consciousness that can be traced back to the award-winning “Think Small” campaign created by Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1959.

This week, Volkswagen posted quarterly losses of $1.9 billion and issued a full-year profit warning as company executives continued to work to rebuild market confidence following the EPA announcement just six weeks ago that Volkswagen engineers had devised ways in its diesel models to circumvent emission-testing equipment– thereby allowing unknowing drivers to pump nitrogen oxide into the environment at 40 times permitted levels.  Observers wonder how much impact the crisis will have on companion brands Audi and Porsche.

Much has been written about the way Volkswagen leadership responded to the revelation – the apologies, the resignations and the attempts to blame a few bad actors deep inside the company’s engineering operations. Volkswagen is now following the full-confession playbook, but the task ahead is much larger and more daunting.  There clearly was a culture within Volkswagen that encouraged deception and shortcutting.  How widespread that culture was is yet to be known.  But with nearly 600,000 employees worldwide, it will not be a quick transformation to become a respected brand once again.  In this piece from the Harvard Business Review, the authors suggest that Volkswagen adapt the concept of “radical honesty.”  It may not have the Madison Avenue memorability of “think small,” but it is certainly is an approach worth considering.