Volkswagen Emission Crisis – Managing Stakeholder Relations on

the Web

Boyang Zhang, Jari Veijalainen and Denis Kotkov

Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Jyvaskyla, Mattilanniemi 2, Jyvaskyla, Finland

Keywords: Volkswagen, Emission Scandal, Social Media, Crisis, Issues, Stakeholder Theory, Reputation, Image, GM,

Toyota, Malaysia Airlines.

Abstract: Organizations establish their own profiles at social media sites to publish pertinent information to customers

and other stakeholders. During a long and severe crisis, multiple issues may emerge in media interaction.

Positive responses and prompt interaction from the official account of e.g. a car manufacturer creates clarity

and reduces anxiety among stakeholders. This research targets the Volkswagen 2015 emission scandal that

became public on Sept. 18, 2015. We report its main phases over time based on public web information. To

better understand the online interaction and reactions of the company, we scrutinized what information was

published on VW’s official web sites, Facebook, and Twitter profiles and how the image of the company

developed over time among various stakeholders. To investigate this, Twitter and Facebook data sets were

collected, cleaned, and analysed. We also compared this crisis in several respects with the Toyota recall

crisis in 2010-2011 that was caused by sticking accelerator pedals and floor mats, as well as the GM crisis

in 2014 that was caused by faulty ignition switches. Further we compare our findings with the Malaysian

airline crisis that was caused by the disappeared flight MH370 and downed MH14.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, all major organizations and businesses

have established their own profiles at various social

media sites in order to support the brand image and

launch new products or services also through these

channels. The major advantages of social media are

the rapid information dissemination and interaction

with customers and other stakeholders. When a

particular situation turns to crisis, more and more

public attention arises which might lead to harmful

consequences for the organization. Indeed, the

reactions of various social media user groups have

sometimes exerted a profound impact on the

organizations. In crisis communication, the

responses by the involved actors are vitally

important for the survival and growth of

organizations. Therefore, major failures in crisis

situations cause negative image spread and losses in

reputation for the organizations involved (Schwarz,

2012). The management of e-reputation requires

continuous monitoring of social media and other

Internet channels in order to anticipate the possible

brand losses (Denis et al., 2014). This paper

provides a case study of events around the VW

emission scandal with various stakeholders’

interaction, such as motorists driving VW cars,

various authorities and politicians in the USA,

Europe and Japan, shareholders owning VW group

shares, ordinary consumers and environment

protection groups. The observations on the roles and

motives of the major actors in social media were

performed based on several data sets collected since

Sept. 18, 2015. The target platforms were Twitter,

Facebook and some sites of VW and other

stakeholders. The scandal attracted attention from

many media; this research will elucidate the impact

of crisis on VW, and the crisis management

strategies of the company to mitigate the effects – as

evidenced by the data from the target platforms. We

will also analyse the data sets and how many times

VW was mentioned in Tweets and what kind of

sentiment the comments and tweets had towards

VW.

The 2015 Volkswagen emission scandal became

public on Sept. 18, 2015 in the USA, as EPA issued

a press release. On Sept. 23, 2015 several media

platforms were chosen by the authors to be

monitored in order to analyse how the scandal was

reflected in social media and at some websites. The

176

Zhang, B., Veijalainen, J. and Kotkov, D.

Volkswagen Emission Crisis – Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web.

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST 2016) - Volume 1, pages 176-187

ISBN: 978-989-758-186-1

social media platforms included Twitter and

Facebook (especially VW’s official Facebook page),

Volkswagen’s official websites and websites of

major news media companies.

The research questions addressed in this paper

are as follows:

1. How has the VW diesel emission scandal

(#dieselgate) evolved over time since Sept.18, 2015?

2. What are the stakeholders in this crisis and

what have their reactions been in social media

(Twitter and Facebook) and at some other websites?

3 What crisis communication theories could be

applied in this case to explain the online interaction

observed?

4 What kind of crisis communication strategy

has VW group followed in social media, as

evidenced by its official Twitter and Facebook

profiles and its official WWW pages?

To elucidate the above main questions we

investigate also the following sub-questions:

5. How many followers/friends does the official

VW group Twitter profiles and Facebook group

have, i.e. what is VW’s direct sphere of influence at

these sites?

6. How many tweets and Facebook comments

did different stakeholders issue during the crisis so

far?

7. How many tweets or Facebook comments of

ordinary users did contain URLs to web sources?

8. How many tweets were from ordinary users to

VW (VW mentions) and vice versa?

9. What were the main contents of the messages

of VW group in different phases of the crisis so far?

2 THEORIES ABOUT CRISIS

COMMUNICATION IN SOCIAL

MEDIA

The impact of social media on organizational

communication has received considerable attention

recently. Knowledge of crisis communication has

great significance for the smooth development of

organizations and their brands. Crises can be

perceived as complex events with high negative

influence but low probability that threatens

organizational viability and may have a shorter or

longer duration (Pearson and Clair, 1998). Because

of the potentially detrimental effects of a crisis on

organizations, these work on systematic crisis

response and recovery strategies. During a crisis the

public discusses the crisis online and often questions

the causes for the crisis and responsibilities of the

organization towards consumers and other

stakeholders (Schwarz, 2012). Social media is a

challenging arena for crisis communication for

organizations, because they cannot easily control the

sentiment and the direction the communication takes

in the social media during a crisis. The aim of this

paper is to better understand the impact of the crisis

as visible on the web and the crisis response

strategies of the focal organization, in this case the

interaction of Volkswagen group concerning the

emission scandal at core social media sites and on

the websites that are under its control. The results in

this paper are tentative, because, at the time of

writing this paper, the crisis is still going on.

2.1 Response Strategies and Crisis

Communication

Several researchers have proposed response

strategies in general or specific cases. An online

apology launch is one of the crisis response

strategies that tests the sentiment of the customers

(Coombs and Holladay, 2012). Providing solutions

in different steps, from creating confidence and

generating awareness, to enhancing understanding

and gaining satisfaction of customers, is a wider

framework to address the organization’s appearance

towards the public (Ledford and Anderson, 2013).

Hiltz, Diaz and Mark (2011) discuss the criticality of

the immediate reaction to emerging crisis and the

exchange of valid information. Even though the

timeliness of information is also underlined in the

case of natural disasters, in organizational crises the

timing is considered crucial while offering adequate

response and synchronizing the activities with

external stakeholders (Hiltz et al., 2011).

In crisis communication, the credibility of the

source of mediated information plays a critical role

in information diffusion. Confirmed organizational

and governmental sources (such as the Environment

Protection Agency) appear more trustworthy and

thus have more impact than user-generated content

(Freberg, 2012). Coombs and Holladay (2012) agree

that credible sources have an effective role in crisis

communication. Therefore, when it comes to the

dissemination of information from confirmed

reliable organizations and governments, involved

organizations should immediately begin to engage in

social media communication counteracting negative

tendencies in the crisis that threaten to go viral (Veil

et al., 2012). With the development of crisis, the

adoption of different response strategies are needed

encountering various issues that may emerge over

time. For instance, after a Malaysia Airlines MH370

Volkswagen Emission Crisis – Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web

177

flight vanished on March 8, 2014 the first reactions

of the public and press concerned the fate of the

victims, condolences to the families etc. Soon,

though, the discussions about the reasons for the

disappearance and about who is to be blamed for the

presumable disaster began. Later questions arose

about compensation to be paid to the families of the

victims, the necessity of changes in safety

procedures, etc.

The ability of an organization to monitor,

understand and influence the fast evolving

discussion threads in social media will be put to the

test, while the organization attempts to update its

messages to its social media profiles in order to

reach various audience segments (Freberg, 2012).

By monitoring social networks in suitable ways,

organizations can reduce the reputational damages

(Denis et al., 2014).

Monitoring of social media can be based on

chosen key words and when their frequency in the

message streams exceeds certain thresholds, alerts

could be sent to organizations (Rappaport, 2010;

Zhang and Vos, 2014). The mechanism would rely

on APIs offered by social media platforms that allow

keywords to be used to sieve out matching UGC

streams and collections. For instance, Twitter offers

a keyword based streaming API (“The Streaming

APIs | Twitter Developers,” 2012). Before the crisis,

a branding monitor assists product or service’s

design, marketing and public relations (Divol et al.,

2012). After that, organizations should constantly be

informed of online discussions concerning them and

react immediately before the sentiment is getting

negative. In the market perspective, monitoring the

reputation consolidation in social media also draws

on the competitors’ ideas which helps organizations

to build a stable e-reputation (Zailskaite-Jakste and

Kuvykaite, 2012). This activity could also

strengthen financial performance.

2.2 Stakeholder Concepts

Schwarz (2012) argues that stakeholders are those

groups of individuals and organizations that engage

in the stable development of organizations and

reduce uncertainty. The internal stakeholders mainly

include owners, employees, wholesalers and retailers,

and so forth if these are working within the

organization. In contrast, customer groups,

government agencies, and media houses belong to

the external stakeholders. Elefant (2011) agrees to

the influences from positive stakeholder engagement

in social media dialogues. In critical times, specific

decisions and actions are essential to stakeholders

(Davenport et al., 2012). The exploration of

stakeholder reactions in crisis communication has

revealed different interest groups (Coombs and

Holladay, 2012). In crisis contexts, attributions of

responsibilities have critical influence to the

judgement of organization (Schwarz, 2012). With

long extreme negative process, the roles of internal

stakeholders are vital for the crisis communication.

2.3 Communication Management

Issues that have a strong news value and that people

want to be identified with, will trigger dissemination

of information in social media. The emerging issues

are framed by the participation of actors including

influential users, organizations and some individual

users. The CEO, as the representative of the

organization, plays a key role in a managerial

position and also in crisis communication. For

example, Jeffrey Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com,

played a positive role in the Kindle crisis cases in

2009 (Coombs and Holladay, 2012). In 2009 during

the Toyota recall crisis, CEO Ako Tojoda took the

utmost responsibility for the sticking accelerator

pedals (Fan et al., 2013). Nadeem (2012) argues that

the top priority for a CEO is to approach all

customers in a crisis situation

Nowadays, the public begins to absorb news and

information from social media in a crisis situation,

as mentioned above. Users also seek confirmation

from a reliable source of information, such as

authorities and official organizations (Freberg, 2012).

Therefore, various official social media accounts,

such as Twitter and Facebook accounts of

organizations are worth investigating. In this context

we collected data from several verified Twitter

accounts of Volkswagen group in the USA and

Canada, as well and from the Facebook account of

Volkswagen USA. The goal was to investigate the

participation of the company in the crisis situation

that evolved publicly after the Sept. 18, 2015

revelation of US Environmental Protection Agency

(US EPA) that some diesel engines of VW person

cars (notably EA189) emit much more NOx than

allowed by the environment norms in the USA. To

some extent, the responses from authorities may be

filtered and delayed in some situations (Hiltz et al.,

2011), but in this case the issue was made public the

authorities (US EPA). VW USA reacted on Sept. 20,

2015 by admitting publicly, that it had equipped

certain diesel engines with cheating software that

keeps the NOx emissions at an acceptable level in a

laboratory/dyno test but lets them grow considerably

during normal use. The company apologized for its

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behavior and announced that it would take a full

responsibility for its actions.

3 CASE STUDY

3.1 Case Description: Volkswagen

Emission Scandal Aug. – Dec. 2015

The car emission norms both in the USA and Europe

have been tightened since the beginning of the 90s,

as concerns emitted nitrogen oxides (NO, NO

2),

carbon dioxide (CO

2) and monoxide (CO), as well

hydrocarbon (HC) and particle (PM) emissions

(Delphi, 2015).

During 2014, the United States Environment

Protection Agency (US EPA) got interested in the

test results that certain certified VW person cars

would not comply with the US environment norms,

as set forth in the US Clean Air Act. These were

based on the International Council on Clean

Transportation (ICCT) mandated real world tests.

The tests were performed by West Virginia

University scientists using one 2012 VW Jetta and

one VW Passat during 2014 (Thompson et al., 2014).

As was observed during the real test drives, the

engine of VW Jetta, for instance, generated up to 15-

35 times more NOx into the air than the current US

limit 0.043 g/km would allow, whereas in the dyno

test the values remained clearly under the above

limit. The VW group brands had been earlier

certified to meet either the US EPA Tier 2 / Bin 5

emissions standard or the California LEV-II ULEV

standard (see e.g. (Delphi, 2015)).

Based on the findings, US EPA asked VW for

explanation on the issue. It was not satisfied with the

response of VW. On Aug. 21, 2015 VW executives

admitted unofficially to EPA officials that there are

“cheating devices” installed to certain 2.0L TDI

engines. On Sept. 3, 2015, EPA threatened VW that

it will not certify 2016 diesel models any more. Next,

VW admitted officially to EPA that some TDI

engine control units had been equipped with

software that detects testing situation and regulates

the emissions under the given limits during the test,

but lets them grow in normal use. On September 18,

2015 EPA ordered a recall for certain 2009-2015

VW cars equipped with a 2.0L TDI engine (of type

EA189). The models included Jetta (2009-2015),

Jetta Sportwagen (2009-2014), Beetle (2012-2015),

Beetle Convertible (2012-2015), Audi A3 (2010-

2015), Golf (2010-2015), Golf Sportwagen (2015),

and Passat (2012-2015). Breaking news hit the

headlines in news media that according to the

announcement of USA EPA special emission testing

software (cheating software) had been installed to

certain VW person car models in order to cheat the

emission tests. The engine control unit was using the

information from several sensors to detect that the

car was tested for (NOx) emissions and tuned the

engine parameters so that the test was passed. The

share value of VW group dropped on the market by

25 %.

On Sept. 20, 2015 VW admitted that 11 million

vehicles were affected. Volkswagen encountered

fines up to 18 billion dollars. That same day,

Volkswagen Group of American, Inc., announced an

immediate stop-sale of new 4 cylinder TDI vehicles

in its dealer inventory.

The storyline in Table 1 contains the main events

up to the end of December 2015. Two additional

issues surface. First, COx emissions of certain VW

engines are claimed to be higher than announced by

the company. Further, some 3.0L TDI engines used

in 2009-2016 models also have a cheating device

installed. This is discovered by US EPA tests after

Sept. 18, 2015 and announced on Nov. 2, 2015.

Table 1: Volkswagen emission scandal story line.

Date Events

2007 Volkswagen applies qualified software and

system to meet the U.S. emission standard.

2008 Volkswagen publishes advertisement on clean

diesel cars that presumably meet the US emission

standards.

2011 Best Green Cars of 2011, VW Golf TDI; VW

Jetta TDI. (“Best Green Cars, 2011,” 2011)

2009-

2015

Strong diesel sales on US market, with clean

energy. The affected engine types were primarily

EA189 (1.2L, 1.6L, 2.0L TDI versions)

21.08.

2015

VW group representative admits orally to the US

regulators that VW has installed a cheating

software to some of its TDI models.(Gartner et

al., 2015)

03.09.

2015

VW group admits officially the existence of the

cheating software during a conference call with

US regulators after the latter threaten to withdraw

certificates from 2016 models (see above).

18.09.

2015

Californian Air Resource Board sends a letter to

VW (Hebert, 2015). U.S. EPA orders recall for

certain 2009-2015 VW car models with 2.0L TDI

engines and makes the issue public. Public

discussion on the Volkswagen scandal explodes;

Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. announces

an immediate stop-sale on new 4 cylinder TDI

vehicles in dealer inventory. (EPA, 2015; “EPA,

C,. 2015, EPA, California Notify Volkswagen of

Clean Air Act Violations / Carmaker allegedly

used software that circumvents emissions testing

for certain air pollutants,” 2015)

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Table 1: Volkswagen emission scandal story line (Cont.).

Date Events

20.09.

2015

CEO of Volkswagen group Martin Winterkorn

issues an apology for cheating during the

emission tests on a video, (“Volkswagen CEO

apologizes for cheating | Business | DW.COM |

20.09.2015,” 2015)

21.09.

2015

Volkswagen Canada launches stop-sale policy as

above; the share value of Volkswagen group

drops 23% after admitting diesel emission

cheating (Weiss, 2015)

23.09.

2015

Mr. Winterkorn resigns and takes the

responsibility as the CEO for the scandal.

(“Martin Winterkorn resigns as Volkswagen

CEO,” 2015)

25.09.

2015

Volkswagen USA launches a webpage with

information and possibility to identify the

affected vehicles and – later- to claim goodwill

packages https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/. The

same day in the US, EPA starts testing all light

duty diesel vehicles with a new testing procedure

in order to detect cheating devices (EPA, 2015)

29.09.

2015

New CEO of VW group, Matthias Müller

announces a refit plan for emission rigged

vehicles. (“New VW CEO says cars hit by

emissions-rigging scandal to be refitted,” 2015)

07.10.

2015

Volkswagen announces the recall strategies to

start in January 2016 and promises to by the end

of 2016 fix the affected vehicles. (Houston-

Waesch, 2015)

08.10.

2015

President and CEO of Volkswagen US had the

testimony before the house committee on energy

and commerce subcommittee on oversight and

investigations. (Twitter, 2015)

22.10.

2015

The emergence of new engine emission scandal;

the CO2 emissions are also larger than

announced in certain VW person cars. This is a

follow up issue. (Kottasova and Thompson,

2015)

02.11.

2015

More branches from Volkswagen were found to

have a similar cheating system on 3.0L TDI

engine for 2014-2016 models (EPA, 2015)

09.11.

2015

VW announces a $1000 goodwill package for the

owners of affected vehicles in USA (Beene,

2015)

19.11.

2015

VW admits to US EPA that the cheating device

for the 3.0L TDI engines has been in use since

2009 (EPA, 2015)

25.11.

2015

Audi, Porsche, VW ordered by CARB to recall in

order to repair emissions software. (“CARB

Forcing VW, Audi, Porsche to Fix More Diesels |

TheDetroitBureau.com,” 2015)

09.12.

2015

The company explains that the CO2 issue is over

(Zollino, 2015)

10.12.

2015

VW explains that the corporate culture and some

lower level managers were responsible for the

scandal. Schedule for recalls of cars equipped

with 1.2L, 1.6L and 2.0L diesel engines

announced for 2016 (Ruddick, 2015)

3.2 Twitter Data Set Collection and Its

Analysis

In Twitter, the tweets were collected relying on the

streaming API using the selection predicate: [(‘VW’

or ‘Volkswagen’) and (‘scandal’ or ‘reputation’)

and (‘diesel’ or ‘software’)]. Another collection was

performed using hashtags #dieselgate or

#dieselfraud after the first clause ‘VW’ or

‘Volkswagen’. These collections produced about 7

million different messages from Sept. 23 to Dec. 28,

2015 (in about 10 different, partially overlapping

files). Although the Twitter selection criteria were in

English, and messages in other languages should

have been excluded, many collected messages in the

data set were in German and in other languages.

An overall raw data table was created by parsing

the above raw tweet files. Each tweet content was

stored only once. The table contains data from about

7 Million tweets, among them also job

announcements, and discussions or advertisements

concerning general-purpose software such as

Windows or Android.

Therefore, a cleaning procedure was run based

on the above table that only selected those tweets

where the text fulfills the following predicate:

(@VW or @Volkswagen) or ((‘olkswagen’ or 'vw'

or 'EA189' or 'VW') and ('oftware' or 'candal' or

'iesel' or 'gate' or 'pollut' or 'raud' or 'fine' or 'stock'

or 'mission' or 'heating' or 'CEO' or 'share' or

'hief' )). This resulted in about 703000 tweets that

qualified. These still contained tweets in German

and other languages, but most of them, about

537000, were in English. The graphs below in Fig. 1

are based on this English subset.

In Figure 1 there is a clear peak on September 24

and 25, 2015 with about 34000-35000 relevant

English tweets collected on both days. Our

collection was discontinued because the collector

crashed unnoticed for 48 hours on Sept. 26, 2015.

The next reliable value is for Sept. 29, with about

21000 tweets. After that, the number of tweets per

day mostly remained below 20,000 tweets. The

peaks correlate quite nicely with the timeline of

major events.

The primary verified active accounts of VW

group are:

 Volkswagen Verified account

@Volkswagen (55K followers)

 Volkswagen Group Verified account

@vwgroup_en (about 4000 followers)

(German @vwgroup_de has about 2500

followers)

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 Volkswagen USA Verified account

@VW (about 450K followers)

 Volkswagen Canada Verified account

@VWcanada (47K followers)

 Volkswagen USA News Verified account

@VWnews (5300 followers)

 Volkswagen UK Verified account

@UKVolkswagen (127K followers)

 Volkswagen India Verified account

@volkswagenindia (50K followers)

 Volkswagen Motorsport Verified account

@VolkwagenRally (74K followers)

Figure 1: Qualifying English tweet set frequency 23.9.-

28.12.2015.

The major profiles of Volkswagen group in North-

America are @vwgroup_en; @VW; @VWcanada;

@VWnews. (@VWOfficial is a verified account of

Vanessa Williams with about 293000 followers at

the time of writing that has nothing to do with

Volkswagen). The content of tweets from the

verified accounts mainly falls under strategic

communication activity and re-direct to other

websites with solutions in the collection period. For

example on September 27, 2015 @VW tweets:

“Visit http://VWDieselInfo.com for information

regarding affected TDI vehicles”, with image on Das

Auto and words explaining the situation and affected

TDI vehicles. The site mediates official information

to customers and general public about the crisis. On

the front page the company apologized (for

betraying customer’s trust - but not for polluting the

air!), offered a 2.0L goodwill package, and shared

answers to FAQs raised by the emission fraud. The

web sites are the central vehicles in taking care of

the crisis. Twitter messages are just used to guide

the customers to the web sites or people are asked to

contact the call center or a local dealer.

About 471000 English relevant tweets include

one or more URLs that refer to earlier Twitter

contents or redirect to another website. There are

about 161000 retweeted tweets in the above subset,

i.e. circa 30 per cent of all qualifying are retweets.

Roughly 10000 tweets in this set are sent by verified

users, whereas about 60000 retweeted tweets and

3500 quoting tweets refer to verified users. Only

1400 tweets retweet a tweet from @VW, none from

@Volkswagen. Further, only roughly 33000 tweets

were in that respect original, that they did not quote

any other tweet, and were neither a reply to, nor a

retweet of earlier tweets.

On Sept. 18, when the crisis became public, VW

USA published tweet linking to a video with the text

“Adam Scott is throwing a party. Are you on the

list? #VW#VWAppConnect”. Nothing is said about

the crisis. The next tweet is from Sept. 25, 2015

where the site publishes an apology of Mr. Michael

Horn, the CEO of VW USA, concerning the

emission scandal. It starts “Volkswagen would like

to offer our deepest apologies to those affected by

our violation of CARB and EPA emissions standards.

We will remedy the issue, and we will make things

right in order to win back the trust of you, our

customers, our dealers, the government, the public,

and our employees.”

In the above text fragment VW USA admits that

it has violated emission standards and promises to

correct the issue so that the trust of the named

stakeholders can be regained.

3.3 Facebook Data Set Collection

The official Facebook account of Volkswagen

makes use of the chat platform. One can argue that

the posts from the official VW account attempt to set

the discussion agenda. User comments are primarily

related to the official agenda. For instance, at the

beginning of the crisis on Sept. 24, 2015 the original

post contains the key words of “CARB and EPA

emission standards”; therefore, there is a huge

amount of comments about the standards and

questioning whether a particular car is among those

affected. On Sept. 27, the post is about launching the

http://VWDieselInfo.com/ website. Comments are

mainly about how the website works and how to

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

35000

40000

18.9.2015

25.9.2015

2.10.2015

9.10.2015

16.10.2015

23.10.2015

30.10.2015

6.11.2015

13.11.2015

20.11.2015

27.11.2015

4.12.2015

11.12.2015

18.12.2015

25.12.2015

Tweetsperday

Volkswagen Emission Crisis – Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web

181

contact the company. As discussed above, the above

site offers functionality, through which car owners

can insert the VIN of their vehicle to be informed

about whether their car is among those affected.

The verified account controlled by Volkswagen

USA is https://www.facebook.com/vw. There are

about 24 million Facebook users who like the page.

Our group collected posts, comments and replies

using the FB Graph API

(https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api).

We targeted 9 posts published from September 16 to

November 17, 2015 by VW USA on the above page.

The posts attracted 13,122 comments and 6,954

replies, where 85 replies were published by

Volkswagen USA. Figure 2 is built on the number of

comments and replies by date.

The reason for collecting the data from the

Facebook account above, is because there, unlike in

Twitter, VW USA sets the agenda itself.

Figure 2: Facebook Collection Set.

The content of comments from Volkswagen USA

was categorized into three initial groups:

 Apology strategy

 Redirection to the website about emission

recall: https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/good

will_package_; www.vw.com/contact

 Customer services (other car related issues

except emission scandals).

The content of all Facebook comments could be

divided into four categories:

 Arguments of fans of the brand

 Arguments of critical consumers

 Reactions of Volkswagen group

 Others

3.4 The Role of Official VW Websites

This section is about the collection of official

website of Volkswagen in USA, Canada and Europe.

 Volkswagen USA:

www.vw.com

The first page contains a direct link to

https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/; the latter is

about the emission scandal and explanations

of the current status. http://media.vw.com/

This is an official media site of VW USA. On

the first page it has a button TDI Updates that

exposes press releases concerning the diesel

scandal from http://media.vw.com/releases/.

The latter contains all press releases.

 Volkswagen Canada:

www.vw.ca

The first page again offers a direct link to

https://www.vwemissionsinfo.ca/ but at the

bottom of the page.

Similar to VW USA, it has a direct link to the

emission scandal solution, it provides FAQ

and a channel to send questions to the

company... Interestingly, the section “What

happened” ends with “No one in Canada is

responsible for what occurred.”

 Volkswagen Europe:

http://en.volkswagen.com/en.html The site

first asks whether the user wants to the

English or German version of the site.

The first page on both versions offers EU

rules and regulations on the CO2 emission

tests and fuel consumption (but no

information on NOx issues). Under the button

Current Customer Information the site

publishes text where the company promises

to sort out issues as soon as possible and

press releases of the Executive Committee of

VW concerning the emission scandal. It also

offers a button Check if your car is impacted

that takes the user to a page where one can

insert VIN and see whether the vehicle is one

of those with the cheating software or has

CO2 emission issues.

Volkswagen media press: (Crisis response

strategies in the first page)

https://www.volkswagen-media-services.com/en/

The site offers two buttons on the first page,

Information on Diesel-Issue and Information on

CO2-Issue. Once clicked, they return search results

from the media pages, mainly metadata to press

releases and links to pdf-documents. It also contains

a 6 minute long video, where the functioning of

1000

2000

3000

4000

5000

6000

7000

Facebook

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182

EA189 engine exhaust gas processing is explained

and the corrective measures to remove the cheating

device are described, along how much time the

correction takes for each engine subtype (30-60

min).

4 FINDINGS

In this section, observed behavior of VW group and

other stakeholders while the emission crisis evolved,

is discussed. It is not easy to render the response

strategies for this thorny crisis which touches many

sub issues. The root cause of the scandal is VW

group’s attempt to deliberately break the

environment norms and show its engines clean

during tests. The cheating was exposed and the crisis

became public with the breaking news announced by

EPA revealing that Volkswagen’s diesel cars violate

Clean Air Act. The confirmed information triggered

a heated discussion in public and multiple issues

began to emerge with questions and rumors in social

media.

The first response strategy of Volkswagen is

issuing an apology towards customers and other

stakeholders and a stop in selling affected diesel

models. According to Coombs and Holladay (2012),

the apology strategies are considered a clear

acceptance of the responsibility for the crisis.

Volkswagen admitted its responsibility in the

scandal and began to investigate and provide

solutions. In crisis communication terms, the

apology response strategies of Volkswagen are

clearly structured and planned from the moment that

the news broke.

The reactions seem to have been planned since

August 2015. Already on September 18, 2015,

Volkswagen stopped selling 4 cylinder TDI vehicles

and took them from dealer inventory (which makes

sense, as certain diesel models may not necessarily

have a valid environment certificate any more). Two

days later, Volkswagen issued its apology

concerning the cheating software. Five days later,

the former CEO Winterkorn resigned and accepted

to take the responsibility for the scandal. Even

though the apology strategy was implemented

quickly, a huge number of people began to discuss

the scandal in social media. Our tweet collection

started on Sept. 23 and we could observe a peak of

around 35000 matching English tweets on 24

and

of September (and further tweets in German,

Spanish, etc.). On Sept. 29 and 30 there still were

around 20000 matching tweets in our data set. 6235

Facebook comments and replies were observed on

25th September on the official account of VW. One

can argue that the crisis became widely known after

the CEO Winterkorn resigned and the CEO of VW

in the USA, Horn, issued a public apology after

which the company launched a special web site

https://www.vwdieselinfo.com/ that shared

information and later offered a “2.0L goodwill

package”. On October 7 and 8, there is another peak

of 16000-20000 tweets when Volkswagen Group

announced that the recall will start in January 2016,

and promised to provide fixes before the end of 2016.

At the same time the President and CEO of

Volkswagen U.S. gave testimony before the House

committee on energy and commerce subcommittee.

On November 3, over 16000 tweets were observed,

as on Nov. 2 more car types from Volkswagen were

found by EPA to have a similar cheating system on

3.0L TDI engine for 2014-2016 models.

Subsequently, Volkswagen re-directed questions

to the above webpage from both Twitter and

Facebook. In addition, other webpages of VW were

provided with specific FAQ questions; exact

affected vehicles; recall methods, fixing times, and

more.

On September 22, 2015 @vwgroup_en tweets:

“See video: Statement Prof. Dr. Martin Winterkorn

http://ow.ly/2bvosA”. In the video the CEO issues

the apology for customers, addresses the main

stakeholders and promises to cooperate with the

authorities and clear the issue to the bottom. On

September 25, the profile tweets: “Matthias Müller

appointed CEO of the Volkswagen Group

#VWGroup http://vwgroup.to/SFKtS” and “The

Volkswagen Group is restructuring: Supervisory

Board passes resolutions for new organization

#VWGroup http://vwgroup.to/SFOj4”. This

confirmed the resignation of the previous leader,

introduced the new CEO, and presented possible

solutions.

As mentioned before, @VW, the official account

of Volkswagen USA tweeted on September 24:

“Update from Volkswagen regarding the EPA

investigation:”; on Sept. 27

it tweeted: “Visit

http://VWDieselInfo.com for information regarding

affected TDI vehicles.” It thus first apologized and

then provided solutions to customers. @VWcanada

followed the same strategies. Moreover, @VWnews

retweets @VW’s “update from …” tweeted the

above and @vwgroup_en’s “Matthias Müller…”

and so on, to provide transparency to the general

public.

At the same time, fierce discussions between

loyal customers and critical haters grabbed attention

on the Facebook chat platform. It is, on the one hand,

Volkswagen Emission Crisis – Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web

183

observable that a “brand supporters” group defended

the brand by posting former experiences intended to

protect the brand’s reputation. On the other hand, a

critical “brand haters” group commented negatively,

spreading rumors and negative information that

harmed the brand’s reputation.

A controlled sample was selected to provide a

sentiment analysis of the tweets. The categorization

was based on three values, positive, neutral, negative.

The targeted data set consisted of about 25800

tweets in any language where @VW is mentioned.

Every 100

tweet in ascending order of the time

stamp was selected resulting in 258 tweets to be

manually checked. The results show that the

sentiment neutral occurs in 152 tweets, positive in

28 tweets, and negative in 78 tweet. The latter tweets

contain complaints about the crisis or the reaction of

VW group to it. Positive sentiment thus forms a

clear minority.

The German government was being blamed for

taking no action and it was demanded that it should

also take responsibility in the emission scandal. It is

commonly known that Volkswagen is the largest

automaker in Germany and aims at becoming the

largest in the world. Several news media have

reported that Angela Merkel’s government had

known about the Volkswagen cheating software in

July 2015, but this has been denied by the German

government. The discussion of the role of the

German government is still going on and damage

control strategies appear to have been set up. For

instance, demands are made that certain software

should be made public by automakers. This is in

order to protect the reputation of “Made in Germany”

technology exports. From the economic point of

view, this crisis could be the Volkswagen investors’

nightmare because of the rapid share price drops.

The value loss affects stakeholders, not only in

Germany, but also in the USA and in other countries.

In summary, Table 3 lists different stakeholders’

reactions along with each stakeholder’s role.

There are similarities and differences between

the current VW crisis and the Toyota crisis in 2009-

2010. The latter was caused by an unintended

acceleration of the vehicle. The first found reason

for this was a floor mat incursion that gave rise to

the recall of 5.2 million vehicles on Nov. 2, 2009. A

bit later it was discovered that the gas pedal itself

was also sticking and the recall was amended with

2.3 million vehicles due to these problems in

January 2010. The National Highway Traffic Safety

Administration reported that the problems had

caused 37 deaths in the USA (Healey, 2010).

Around 1.8 million vehicles were recalled in Europe,

Table 3: Stakeholders’ reaction in detail.

Stakeholders Reaction

VW group CEO Apology issuance; Response

immediately; solution offering

(through web sites).

VW retail

car dealers in

the USA

Stop-sale to affected vehicle and

Volkswagen buys back used diesel

vehicles at pre-crisis prices.

German

government

2014, Auto industry listed a turnover

of 384 billion euro, around 20% of

German industry revenue, 2.7% of

German GDP.. Several damage

control strategies are followed by the

government officials.

Environmental

authorities of

USA (EPA)

and EU

countries

EU is in contact with EPA on

emissions tests and seeks energy

cooperation in environmental

protection, test standards are

reformulated.

Consumer

group with

affected

vehicles

Arguments of fans of the brand,

arguments of critical consumers,

complaints and questions of the

affected car owners.

Other

authorities,

like tax

authorities

Car tax is in some countries based on

emissions, especially in the European

Union, e.g. Volkswagen drivers run

away from higher emissions tax in

UK, governmental organizations face

tax losses.

General public

and

environmental

groups that are

concerned

about the air

pollution

Protests and negative voices arise;

health related aspects are mentioned,

with concerns for continuous long-

term economic growth.

Competing car

manufacturers

After the scandal, Toyota addresses

long run emission-free hydrogen cars;

Mercedes, BMW and Peugeot are

accused over fuel efficiency cheating;

Volvo, Renault and Hyundai worry

about the future EU tests and update

car parts.

Traditional

media

TV stations, newspapers, media

companies are operating in mostly

neutral voices with major headlines to

monitor the growth of the crisis.

There are similarities and differences between

the current VW crisis and the Toyota crisis in 2009-

2010. The latter was caused by an unintended

acceleration of the vehicle. The first found reason

for this was a floor mat incursion that gave rise to

the recall of 5.2 million vehicles on Nov. 2, 2009. A

bit later it was discovered that the gas pedal itself

was also sticking and the recall was amended with

2.3 million vehicles due to these problems in

January 2010. The National Highway Traffic Safety

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Administration reported that the problems had

caused 37 deaths in the USA (Healey, 2010).

Around 1.8 million vehicles were recalled in Europe,

and 75.000 in China. The massive recall cost

approximately 2 billion U.S. dollars in lost output

(new model manufacturing) and sales. During the

crisis, Toyota had established a website to inform

relevant consumers. Blogs were a leading indicator

of the negative image of Toyota (Fan et al., 2013) in

the social media. Only on Feb. 5, 2010, about 3

months after the first recall, Akio Toyoda, the CEO

of Toyota announced an apology to consumers for

the massive recall. Toyota had lost 22% market

share since January 21, 2010, its stock dropped 12%

in February 2010.

Comparing the Toyota and VW crises, in both

cases there were failures in crisis response and

internal communication inside the corporation. In

the case of Toyota it has been noted, that because of

the lack of internal communication, decision makers

could not immediately receive alarm signals from

the market (Anthony P. Andrews et al., 2011),

whereas it is not clear how well the top management

of VW was informed about the discussions with

EPA during 2014-2015 concerning the observed

high emission values. This underlines how

significant communication is with customers and

authorities, but also points to the role of frictionless

internal communication. According to some reports,

the corporate culture inside VW was not healthy, or

pressure to perform so high, that this kind of

cheating software could be deployed for many years.

General Motors (GM)’s ignition switch scandal

in 2014 is also in some sense similar to the VW and

Toyota crisis. It began in February 2014. The GM

scandal was caused by an ignition switch that could

accidently turn off the engine while driving and stop

airbags from inflating. This led to 124 deaths (as

opposed to zero passenger or driver casualties in

VW case). 30 million cars were recalled worldwide,

and it did cost the company around 4.1 billion U.S.

dollar to fix the problem. GM immediately

established websites to inform consumers, just as

VW did after the scandal broke. The new GM CEO,

Mary Barra, issued a video with an apology – like

Winterkorn did later - and a new vehicle safety chief

was announced one month later. In March 2014, GM

shares were down approximately 14 % since the

Barra took the CEO position on January 15, 2014.

This scandal is still developing. It revealed a lack of

internal communication in the organization, as

voices from the safety department were neglected by

decision makers, who in spite of the warnings

applied low cost strategies. As to VW, the senior

managerial level would have to be strongly aware of

activities of the entire organization to prevent

detrimental design decisions.

Compared to the case of Malaysia Airline

“MH370”, all the above crises have a negative

impact on organizations, but the organizations’

reactions are totally different. Especially

Volkswagen’s responses were immediate and

efficient, several apologies and resolution strategies

were applied, relevant car owners could easily be

located and technical solutions were developed.

Compared to the slow and inefficient handling of

MH370 crisis, VW seems to have done better.

Malaysia Airlines seldom replied on the official

Facebook account during the crisis to people that

posted messages and it neither set up special web

pages to inform the public. Malaysia Airlines is

“technically bankrupt” since June 2015, although not

only the fate of MH370, but also MH17’s downing

in East Ukraine on July 17, 2014 has been of

importance in this respect.

5 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

RESEARCH

In this work, we have presented a specific case study

in crisis communication that is still going on, namely

the VW emission scandal and compared it to similar

cases. The scandal became public on Sept. 18, 2015

and went through several phases while new issues

surfaced. We have taken the information concerning

the crisis from media outlets, official web sites of

VW, Twitter streams and official VW USA

Facebook page. From the latter two we have

collected larger data sets. It also turned out that the

company did not engage much in private

communications with customers through social

media (Twitter or Facebook), but rather set up web

sites and shared links to them. However, on some of

their web sites the company collects questions from

audience and answers them in a FAQ section. It is

worth noticing that VW had at least a month time to

plan a crisis strategy, because it admitted already in

August 2015 to the EPA that a cheating device was

installed. VW probably also studied the Toyota and

GM cases. In conclusion, various response strategies

of VW group could be observed, including apology

making, acting immediately, and offering solutions

to affected customers. VW was active online in

preventing further reputation damage. The case

provides hints how to design and implement crisis

response strategies when an organization is facing a

Volkswagen Emission Crisis – Managing Stakeholder Relations on the Web

185

similar crisis in the future.

A limitation of our study is that we only

collected data from one account in Facebook and

had challenges in getting collected a reasonably

representative set of tweets. A further limitation is

that we did not study extensively major media

outlets and the way they handled the VW, Toyota, or

GM crises. The vast majority, 88 %, of tweets

related to VW contained a URL, most of which

might be web sources belonging to various media

houses. The exact distribution of the referenced web

sources is for future study. For future research, we

also suggest to analyse the emerging sub issues to

shows how different issues evolve during the crisis.

The first challenge of keyword based stream

collection from Twitter is to start the collection right

from the beginning of the crisis and continue it

throughout the crisis. We started the collection on

Sept. 23, 2015 when the tweeting activity was still

rising. The second challenge is to find the right

keywords. In this case the hashtags such as

#dieselgate, #vwgate, #dieselfraud appeared rather

soon after Sept. 18, but not all the relevant tweets

contain them. The keywords ‘VW’ or ‘Volkswagen’

appeared rather often in relevant tweets, but also in

various ad tweets. We took all the tweets into the

final set that mentioned @VW or @Volkswagen,

because most of them seemed to concern the crisis.

There were over 30000 of them. Our entire data set

only contained about 200 tweets sent by @VW, but

a manual check showed that the account had sent

over 1000 tweets between Sept. 17, 2015 and Dec.

28, 2015; only 7 were clearly relevant. In them the

company announced the major events, like

Winterkorn’s video speech, the establishment of the

VWdieselinfo.com, the recall schedule and the

goodwill package.

In general, Twitter and Facebook data collection

suggests the growing tendency towards state-of-the-

art heated latest issues. Monitoring Twitter might be

a part of an early warning system for organizations

to be able to generate accurate responses later. This

research evidenced the high impact of current crises

in the online environment and highlights the

relevance of social media monitoring to facilitate

organizational crisis response strategies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors were supported in part by the Academy

of Finland, grant number 268078 (MineSocMed).

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