The gold standard in crisis marketing is the response to the Tylenol poisonings. The way Johnson & Johnson dealt with the crisis and it’s aftermath is now taught in university-level courses as the right way to deal with a crisis that threatens your company and your cash cow product. 

What did J&J do right? First, they didn’t go into stonewalling mode. They aggressively dealt with the problem, taking not just the high road, but doing everything possible to insure the safety of the public at their own, considerable expense. To begin with, they pulled all the product from the shelves. Their share of the painkiller market dropped from 35% to 8%. In time, they relaunched the brand, with triple-safety seals to prevent product tampering, and mounted an aggressive P.R. and marketing campaign. The result? They bounced back within a year, to become the dominant brand in analgesics. Oddly, they never caught the poisoner. More oddly, it did no long-term damage to J&J or to the Tylenol brand. 

You could argue that a Governor or President is primarily a crisis manager, at least in this day and age. Of course, when you bring crises upon yourself, you’re either supremely confident – or supremely stupid.

We know that Blagojevich is the latter. We can hope that Obama is the former, and is smart enough to have steered clear of G-Rod’s folly over selling O’s former Senate seat. 

What we should all be interested in, as marketers or as those that use marketing, is how Obama will respond to this crisis. So far, he seems to be taking the J&J model to heart. He’s aggressively attacking the problem. He’s not ducking and covering. And he’s promised openness – a critical factor, because sunshine is the ultimate antidote to corruption. 

I don’t know where this will lead. I’m no fan of Obama and I did not vote for him. But he’s going to be my President, so I hope that he and his staff are innocent of anything that will drag the country down into yet another scandal. Obama tends to surround himself with some talented people. I hope they are up to the task of the most demanding type of crisis managment. And I pray for the citzens of Illinois, that they can get rid of G-Rod, his cronies, and anybody else guilty of corruption, so they can erase their rep as one of the most corrupt states in the Union.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 9:43 pm and is filed under marketing, media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.