The latest company to join the Crisis Communication Case Study Club is Mattel, which announced in mid-August a recall of 19 million toys in 43 countries. The recall was prompted by the discovery of hazardous levels of lead paint and potentially harmful magnets in several of its toy lines.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Eckert did 14 TV interviews and fielded calls from 20 reporters on the day the recall was announced. In all, the company responded to 300 media inquiries in the United States.

While it’s clear the company was well-prepared to respond to the crisis (as any company should be that has had 28 toy recalls in the last seven years), Mattel shows us that no amount of planning can account for an executive’s apparent lack of a pulse. While it’s true the company’s crisis response was able to convey all the appropriate information to affected parties, it made me wonder whether a company’s crisis response can be too good.

Eckert and the entire corporate communications department at Mattel took the “We’re mothers and fathers too” approach to getting angry parents back on their side. This means that a bunch of people sitting around a conference room at some point agreed that the best way to respond to a crisis would be to remind people that their own children also were playing with lead-laced toys.

By attempting to humanize themselves and come off as sincere, concerned parents, the team gave the public a window to its cold, dystopian corporate culture. Every syllable and mechanical gesticulation in Eckert’s video is scripted, presumably by the automatons in the company’s legal department. If this man is a parent, I weep for the children who have to spend family dinners across the table from him.

Perhaps the most poignant response in the blogosphere to the Mattel crisis was from Maureen Keene, the mother of a 2-year-old child who had purchased some of the tainted Mattel and Fisher Price toys. In an open letter to Eckert, Keene questions whether the company can be sure this is the first time this has happened. She also called attention to the fact that 300,000 toys were potentially in the hands of children for up to 60 days. “As a mother,” she writes, “this is out-rageous and unacceptable to me.”

No matter how many times a company says it is sorry or how sincere it claims to be in its after-the-fact delivery, nothing will ever hold a candle to the old adage about an ounce of prevention, which is essentially Keene’s point. Front and center at Mattel.com in the days after the crisis hit is the claim, “The world’s premier toy brands.” If the world’s premier toy brands contain materials that can make children ill, I’m going to go out on a limb, play copywriter for a moment and rewrite their tagline as, “A big toy company who would love to earn back your trust.”

Few people knew the name Robert Eckert before Mattel’s PR nightmare, and it was clear in watching his video on the company’s Web site and seeing him in interviews why they tended to keep him locked in the corner office. If this man was sincerely a concerned parent, it didn’t show. If this man was concerned with reading exactly what the legal department told him to read, word for word, in a single take, then he did a fantastic job of communicating that.

Mattel should be praised for its speedy and thorough response. But if they think that’s all that’s needed to earn back consumer trust, they’re sorely mistaken.