Reputation and Brand Management

Although this accident may not have affected the company directly in terms of financial performance, it lost part of its reputation. The company spent a lot of money on restoring the undermined image, although its efforts were not largely successful. The reputation of BP was made even worse by the responses given by the CEO Tony Hayward (Economist, 2018). In particular, the CEO tried to shift blame to other parties without taking full responsibility and making the necessary efforts to curb the situation. Despite some of the bad remarks made by Hayward, when the accident happened, the company tried as much possible to curb the situation. In order to solve the problem, Volkswagen came up with ways of reducing the diesel emissions.

First of all, the company acknowledged the fact that they were involved in manipulating the tests conducted to investigate the vehicle emissions. The CEO himself apologized to the customers by admitting that the scandal had completely damaged the public trust and customers as a whole (Zhang et al. In addition, the company decided to pay the fine as result of damage caused by the diesel emissions, although it was costly to the whole organization. The effort made by the company to compensate for the damage caused by the pollution proved to be important because after some time, Volkswagen started to regain its lost customers and sales. For example, it managed to win back the faith of some of the loyal customers.