Crises occur with monotonous regularity, whatever business you are in. Obviously some industries have more newsworthy crises than others-a burst oil pipeline is more most likely to hit the headlines than a failure in the ticket machines at a provincial railway station-but crises nonetheless need to be handled well, and a failure of the ticket machines on the London Underground would certainly make the headlines.
In some instances, companies need to be bold in their responses. There's no point in tickling a issue with a feather whenever you should be beating it with a stick. Johnson & Johnson is really a multinational healthcare business. Apart from producing baby powder, lotion, and also the like, the company manufactures over-the-counter pharmaceuticals such as Tylenol, a painkiller widely used worldwide.
In 1982, seven Tylenol clients died of cyanide poisoning. The cause turned out to be deliberate sabotage, by person or persons unknown: in other words, some crackpot made the decision to poison individuals. Johnson & Johnson immediately recalled the entire stock of Tylenol then on the shelves of American stores (31 million bottles in all) for a total cost of about $100 million.
The FBI believed that this action was unnecessary, since all of the instances had occurred in the Chicago area only, but the FBI are not PR experts. Johnson & Johnson's bold action was a PR triumph: even though sales dropped significantly at first, within a year they had reached their former levels and Tylenol is now the biggest-selling analgesic in America.
In this situation, bold action showed that the business cares about its clients: even though there was almost no chance of anyone from outside the Chicago area being poisoned, Johnson & Johnson's action reassured individuals and, equally importantly, it was newsworthy. At a local level, seeing business officials removing product from shelves made the news and was highly visible for the "man in the street."
Celebrity endorsement could be a major boost to PR activities, but at the same time it can be expensive-someone famous is likely to want to cash in as quickly as possible, simply because today's celebrity is tomorrow's has-been. Celebrity endorsement also carries risks of another kind: the celebrity may do something disreputable and this might tarnish the product or business image.
Cole & Mason manufacture various kitchen products, but they're probably best recognized for their pepper and salt mills. These are upmarket, state-of-the-art utensils and Cole & Mason wanted to promote them effectively on a little budget.
Food shows are perennially popular on TV, partly because they are fairly cheap to make, partly simply because the viewers like to see great food presented well, and partly because they are effective programs for selling advertising to supermarkets. Cole & Mason made the decision to recruit a celebrity chef to promote their products.
The clever part was that they didn't recruit someone who was already famous: they identified a newcomer to the celebrity chef scene, and signed him up while he was nonetheless fairly unknown. They got him to use the mills on the show, and to pose for photo shoots with the mills: the photos were sent to magazines with covering stories and, where appropriate, recipes.
Lunches hosted by the chef for journalists, cooking demonstrations at exhibitions, master classes run by the chef for competitors winners, along with a series of postcards featuring him and his quotes about the benefits of Cole & Mason mills all followed on in a twoyear campaign. In effect, the celebrity chef was the glue that held together the components of a big campaign, but it was all done fairly cheaply by signing up the chef early in his career.
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01242011
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