Protect Philippine brand reputation

Protecting reputation is not just a good thing but a must to remain in business. There is the personal reputation of the businessman, the corporate reputation of the company and the national reputation of the country where the product is manufactured or produced.

We all know about the Tylenol poisoning episode many years ago that Johnson and Johnson handled magnificently by immediately withdrawing the product from retail shelves. J and J could have hemmed and hawed to escape liability for something that is obviously out of their control. But J and J decided to protect the brand’s reputation by recalling every unit of the product in the market. Now, Tylenol is as trusted as ever.

On the other hand, there is the reputation problem of Toyota today. You must have heard how a California Highway Patrol officer and his family died in a fiery car crash while on board a Lexus car just the other month. The CHP officer was a highly experienced driver so his driving ability was not an issue. He was a 19-year CHP officer whose job entails vehicle safety inspections.

Two minutes or so before the crash, the brother-in-law sitting at the back seat of the Lexus phoned 911 to report that its accelerator was stuck, sending it hurtling down the freeway at about 120 mph. The vehicle slammed into the rear end of a Ford Explorer and then plowed over a curb and through a fence before hitting an embankment and going airborne. It rolled several times before stopping and bursting into flames in the nearby San Diego River basin. All four people in the car died.

In a prepared statement, Toyota acknowledged that unspecified “recent events” had prompted company officials to “take a closer look at the potential for an accelerator pedal to get stuck in the full open position due to an unsecured or incompatible driver’s floor mat.” Toyota blamed the Lexus going out of control on the carpet getting stuck to the accelerator pedal.

But motoring bloggers were not convinced. They think there must have been a bigger problem, possibly with the programming of the car’s computer that prevented an experienced driver to regain control of the car that just kept on going full speed.

And even if it is just the floor mat and accelerator design that’s at fault, Toyota’s reputation still suffers a hit. With a fatal design failure in something so simple and mundane, how can you trust them to do the right thing in the more complex high tech aspects of the car? This brings us back to the programming of the car’s computer. All of us who work with computers everyday know how things could go wrong… and car computers basically have the same microchips.

With today’s drivers losing more and more control of the car to the car’s computer, what happened to the CHP officer is a horrifying thought. No wonder bloggers are insisting that Lexus needs to address sudden acceleration issues, a situation when car randomly accelerates and brakes don’t work. Stepping on the car brakes should always override the gas pedal. But why didn’t that happen in this case?

Toyota ordered a recall of 3.8 million of their recent car models but only to replace the accelerator. Speaking as a motorist myself who owns a Toyota SUV, that simplistic explanation and recall won’t do it. I would hesitate to replace my old reliable Toyota with any of their new high tech models because of this. Toyota’s brand is damaged for me.  

Not too long ago, China-made products suffered a serious reputation problem. There were toxic chemicals in toys, melamine in milk and pet food and substandard car tires that caused fatal car accidents. Were it not for the sheer momentum going for the world’s largest exporter, the reputation of China-made products for low quality and even dangerous products would have been a serious economic blow. It will take a while for China to regain a reputation for dependable quality products. Cheap is no longer enough.

I mention these reputation management case studies as a prelude to an appeal to our own authorities to protect the reputation of Brand Philippines in the world market. We don’t have that many exportable products so that reputation management becomes even more important.

I had an interesting lunch with the well known and multi awarded artist Juvenal Sanso Thursday last week and he related to me a horror story that could seriously affect the image of our export products or Brand Philippines. Sanso said that it all started when a friend of his told him he was going to Costa Rica for bananas to export to the Middle East.

Ever ready to sell the Philippines, Sanso convinced his friend to come here and get his bananas from here instead. And so they went to Mindanao and talked to some of the bigger plantations but their production are already committed to foreign buyers. So they took the laborious route of talking to a number of smaller plantations for the bananas.

In the beginning, Sanso said, things were alright. But soon after the first few shipments, the quality of the bananas started going down. Bad bananas started showing up in cartons of the produce mixed with the good ones. Soon there were more bad bananas until one shipment turned out to be all bad bananas. Sanso and his friend lost a bundle of money for their effort to promote the Philippine brand but what dismayed Sanso more was the destruction of our country’s reputation as a reliable source of an export product.

It also didn’t help, Sanso said, that their Manila-based bank (a top 5 bank) was so bureaucratic and totally unhelpful. It took a lot of time for their bank to clear vital documents and that also affected the quality of their bananas, a perishable product.

Government should be more vigilant in making sure that only high quality products get out of our ports with the Made or Produced in the Philippines label. It is government’s job to make sure that sub standard bananas, for example, never reach the export market because it will destroy our reputation… it will destroy our brand.

This is of particular importance in bananas because there is a high world demand for it. When I joined a trade mission to Dubai last year, I heard buyers tell Agriculture Secretary Art Yap that they are ready to buy all the bananas we can produce. Because of this high demand, greed has come into the picture. But long-term viability is sacrificed by short-term greed when substandard bananas from the Philippines are sent out into the world market. 

Sanso and his friend learned their lesson the hard and expensive way. They trusted too much. But Sanso is also sure that Brand Philippines suffered because of greed on the part of their local contractors and the failure of government to monitor an important export commodity. Export quality control is a must, not an option.

In the world of business, reputation is everything for long-term success. Once trust and confidence in your product suffers a dent, the bad news spreads quickly and will affect future sales. If we are serious about our agricultural exports, the authorities must always make sure the few greedy ones in the private sector are prevented from destroying the reputation of the Philippine brand. There is no other way to attain continued success for Brand Philippines.

Pinoy curse

A reader sent me this modern day Pinoy curse… a mixed bag of seemingly good and not so good in an ironic kind of way.

May you have the height of GMA, the IQ of Erap, the loyalty of FVR, the humility of Angelo Reyes and Mikey Arroyo’s generous wedding guests.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. This and some past columns can also be viewed at www.boochanco.com