The opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics had no shortage of spectacle. But one of the most poignant moments had nothing to do with sports or pageantry, but came during a 30 second spot from one of its sponsors.

Toyota, one of a dozen automakers sponsoring television coverage for the Olympics, offered a mea culpa of sorts for its string of recalls, which have now totaled more than eight million vehicles worldwide.

"Recently, our company hasn't been living up to the standards that you've come to expect from us or that we expect from ourselves," says an announcer, while a series of images show a father flanked by his wife and children, presumably from the 1960s, shaking hands with a Toyota dealer, and American workers in factories assembling new cars. The automaker, the announcer says, has taken bold steps "to restore your faith in our company."

The media campaign is one small part of Toyota's larger effort to restore what until this year had been perhaps its greatest public asset: credibility. But rebuilding that trust will require extraordinarily deep levels of internal assessment, say several experts in the field.

"You don't establish credibility through PR spin," says John Shook, a senior advisor at the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI). "You establish credibility through integrity and accomplishing deeper levels of integration."

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Toyota, for its part, made a string of public announcements on this front. On Feb. 17, the automaker's president, Akio Toyoda, offered several steps aimed at restoring the public's trust, including installation of new brake-override systems in future models and quicker disclosure of defects. Toyoda also said the company would be overhauling its approach to quality and safety.

But according to Shook, the embattled automaker is facing the same set of challenges that any number of companies before them have faced: coordinating efforts and maintaining an efficiency and quality on a global scale.

"I think that what's happening here is an indication of how difficult it is to maintain integration on a global scale," says LEI's Shook. "It's a problem no company has really conquered. Back in the day, functional expertise was fairly simple and geographically was more contained. But today, in terms of technology, scale and geography, the challenges are exponentially greater."

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