Toshiba today announced that they’ll no longer develop HD DVD technologies, clearing the way for Blue-ray discs and leaving over 600,000 Americans with expensive and soon-to-be-obsolete HD DVD players and accessories.

While I applaud Toshiba for learning the lessons of history (back in the 1980’s, it took Sony ten years and tens of millions of dollars to admit that Betamax was inferior), they still have quite a PR task ahead of them:

Ø Leftover inventory is going to eat into their bottom line and affect stock price
Ø Consumer confidence in the Toshiba brand will decline
Ø No amount of product support is going to soothe the buyers’ remorse of 600,000 owners of Toshiba’s expensive HD DVD technology.

One could say that early adopters must assume these inherent risks when buying the latest technologies, but we all know that consumer Darwinism won’t matter when reporters write about the $300 door stop sitting atop the family TV.

Yet, amidst this PR nightmare is what one of my senior vice presidents calls a “Tylenol Moment.” If you’re old enough to remember, Tylenol rewrote the book on crisis communications and emerged from a national poisoning debacle with minimal damage. Toshiba should take a page from that book and show the public that they won’t leave consumers stranded with obsolete technologies.

This type of proactive outreach – while expensive – would reap significant returns in terms of consumer confidence, future sales and overall brand credibility. Toshiba has a lot of options; smart PR folks could turn this negative into a long-term positive.

Ronn Torossian

5W PR

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 10:17 pm and is filed under PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.