Tylenol Scandal Case Study

Johnson and Johnson is a company who has been around since 1886 with products ranging from baby items to pharmaceuticals. One of their bestselling products, a subsidiary, with over one hundred million users, Tylenol was responsible for 19 percent of Johnson & Johnson's corporate profits during the first few years of the company starting. Tylenol was the absolute leader in the painkiller field accounting for a 37 percent market share, outselling the next four leading painkillers combined, including Anacin, Bayer, Bufferin, and Excedrin. Had Tylenol been a corporate entity unto itself, profits would have placed it in the top half of the Fortune 500 (Berge, 1998). In the fall of 1982 the company was confronted with a crisis when seven people from Chicago’s West Side died mysteriously. It was then determined that all those people that died, had ingested an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule laced with Cyanide. The news of this event traveled quickly and was the reason of a massive, nationwide panic. Johnson and Johnson then had to make an executive decision on how to respond to this crisis. It was ideal for them to launch a public relation program immediately, in order to save the integrity of both their product and their corporation as a whole. The company's first actions was to immediately alert consumers across the …show more content…
They created a public relation program that protected the public interest and gave full support to the media. The company choice to put customer’s safety first before they worried about the company’s finical loss. This also cause for Johnson and Johnson to be praised by the media for its socially responsible action. Before the crisis Johnson & Johnson had not actively seek press coverage, but as a company in crisis they recognized the benefits of open communications in clearly disseminating warnings to the public as well as the company's stand (Broom,