Coke’s the real thing. (So much so, they sell bottled water.) Everyone loves Google. (Or used to.) Everyone loves Apple. (Except all the folks who don’t.) Everyone’s crazy about Starbucks. (Except for tea drinkers, Peet’s fans, fans of small business, and so on.)

Besides being insanely popular and having detractors, what do these brands have in common? Well, not much—except they all rank at or near the top of Interbrand’s list of the world’s most valuable brand by brand value.

Compare these brands—and most of the brands on that list—to Toyota and two things jump out:

1. Toyota’s in a future-defining media crisis right now. With the exception of the financial services brands, most of the rest of the top of the list aren’t.
2. All of these brands have a huge and healthy group of functional detractors.(1) And until recently, Toyota didn’t.

It would be easy to feel sorry for Toyota, particularly if you have a Prius or other non-malfunctioning car and happen to love your experience. But that would be the wrong response. In my view, this is probably the best thing that could have happened to the brand.

The expert commentariat have come to a consensus view that if Toyota can just do what Tylenol did in the 80s they’ll be fine. But I think that’s basically stupid advice. Tylenol’s management, their product, the timeline between issue and response are all so fantastically different from Toyota’s there’s simply no way for Toyota to follow that playbook.

More importantly, the world’s changed a bit since the 1980s. So have brands. In the 1980s, Tylenol owned their brand. In 2010, Toyota’s brand is owned by...Toyota owners. This may sound odd, but it’s not much different from the way political parties operate. Who “owns” the Democratic or Republican brands—the pols, or the people? At the end of the day, it’s you and me and our kitchen-table conversations.

That’s why I think this is such an opportune moment for Toyota. Because there’s a whole lot of love there among the brand owners. And there’s nothing that makes someone who loves you stand up and take notice like seeing you there on the ground with a bloody nose.

There aren’t many brands out there who could count on a sympathetic response to lift them, but the high satisfaction among users and low level of functional detractors makes it likely that Toyota can count on brand evangelists to elevate the brand.

So, what should Toyota do?

• Aiko Toyoda should offer a sincere apology (again) but this time targeting US and European car buyers. He should apologize for not being quick enough in response. And that’s all. We all know cars are complicated. We want them that way. End of story.
• Toyota should offer up a real-person testimonial campaign. It would be easy and obvious to do this with consumers, but I wouldn’t use them. I also wouldn’t use Toyota employees. I’d reach out to garages of every shape and size. Message: there are more Toyotas on the road than just about anything else. And we almost never see them here.
• They should offer up brand advertizing saying, “when you think Toyota, you think quality. We do, too.”

And then...Toyota should shut up and let it ride.

(1) Functional detractors are people who oppose the brand for functional reasons intrinsic to the brand. If you don’t like Macs, it’s probably because of price, design, software, or a number of other factors Apple controls. Toyota has a fair number of non-functional detractors who don’t like them for reasons Toyota can’t control—like for example because they’re not a local company (like Ford or GM for Americans, Fiat for Italians, Volvo for....that’s a tough one). Point is, Toyota can’t really help being from somewhere, so opposing them on these grounds isn’t the same as disliking PCs because they come bundled with Vista.