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… its boss is customer focused?Because the way of doing business has changed and cars are no more sold as “objects to have and show” but as “transportation media” and “investment”.I always appreciated the way Japanese people manage their business.Maybe it’s mainly because they implemented knowledge management (which is “my general approach to business”) but it’s also related to how they manage communication.And that was the case of Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s president, in the news conference at the Japan National Press Club in Tokyo yesterday.He spoke about Toyota’s crisis and suggested one way to exit it: “We have to make better cars.” That goal should be reached by focusing on “What is important to every customer, that is my management philosophy.“Isn’t that scarce?Besides the comments arisen from those declarations, my suspect is that (saying it with the uttermost modesty) he didn’t get the point.Taking into consideration how currently cars are promoted, I would say that most of the message is on value, cheapness and trust. Not many of the commercials we see on TV are based on “the car you’ve always dreamed” or, even better, “the car you’ll always love to be in”.Part of the reason of that lays on the fact that those traditional values of cars are no more perceived as “must” by the public.But there’s another reason.We have to accept that the car market has come to a mature point.That means:

• before the adoption of a different fuel (due to ecology and …), any innovation will be in accessories only: that means no great reason to change a car before it’s broken;
• the public is more focused on functions and costs than on status (and that’s true even without the current crisis).

So cars are considered only for their function and in terms of efficiency (how much I pay to move from one place to another?).I guess that’s the reason why car manufacturers and dealers are promoting sales more with incentives than with other benefits.That’s the reason why (IMHO) Toyoda should re-think cars not as objects but as services, and eventually think of “shared cars”, “one-use cars” and so on.I’m not saying that sells will be replaced by rentals, I’m merely say that it’s time to re-build a car market, going back to the old times when cars were not “mass market” but were transportation media.Now they are “4-wheel investment”, which is bad for anybody in this market.

It’s right we have to use social networks (which are almost all free-to-use) for communicating to customers or prospects, but we must prepare to reach them through many and different channels, as our message could be different and those networks could fail.We have to remember what happened on Aug. 6th: a hacking attack on the microblogging site left users around the world unable to access Twitter for much of the day. As well explained in “Twitter’s Blackout: Bad for Business“, that affected Starbucks, IBM, and other companies who rely on Twitter to reach customers.How could such important corporation rely on a free service?How could they not have a back-up communication system?All that reminded me a good practice I’ve been using since the beginning of my social network presence: duplicate my contact list on all the most important networks.That’s a huge work, I know, but it’s so useful.The first reason is to avoid communication black-out. If Twitter is down, I use Facebook, if that is down too I use … and if all are down I use email (which I collected from contacts’ profiles).But there’s a major reason why one should duplicate contacts.As I have a different policy on each different profile on each different network, I presume (and I have always confirmation of that) the same occurs for everybody.So I have to choose which network based on the subject and / or tone of my message, in order to make it more “readable” by my target contact.And there’s a final reason: frequency.We all know that frequency of communication has a great impact on efficiency in communicating.Either I repeat my message on the same network more times (but I may be judged as spa..er) or I post slightly different messages on different networks, in different times, so to be sure my target contact will be reached at least by one during the communication period.And I may be much more effective than sending a personalized e-mail.