• Los Angeles Times, AOL Auto's , Thursday, February 11, 2010 10:40 AM

After consulting with crisis communications experts, David Lazarus writes that successfully responding to a corporate crisis doesn't seem to be all that complicated. Tell customers everything you know as soon as you know it and never, ever give the appearance that you're spinning the story or covering up bad news. Easier prescribed than done, evidently, judging by Toyota's initial denials and obfuscations.

Lazarus revisits some of the classic successful responses to crises in the past -- a refresher course worth the scan -- including Tylenol and the Odwalla juice company's 1995 recall of all products containing apple juice at a cost of $6.5 million in the wake of an E. coli bacteria scare. When crisis hits, it "isn't the time to be cheap, that's for sure," says Ben Allen, CEO of Kroll, the risk-consulting firm.

Julie Roehm certainly endorsed that notion last week when one of her suggestions to Toyota in her "Slash Marketing" blog was the admittedly "expensive" idea of "offering to exchange all recalled vehicles for other Toyota products not affected, of similar or same value, at no cost, no questions asked."

In a post titled "Toyota's Version Of The Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx" in his Harvard Business Reviewblog, Justin Fox suggests that criticism of the formerly hallowed company's business practices may be overwrought: "We all probably overdid the Toyota praise a few years ago," he writes, "and there's a pretty good change we're now overdoing the hand-wringing."

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