The Chicago Tylenol Murders

In the year 1982, someone decided to tamper with the Tylenol sold in the Chicago area. The unidentified person laced several bottles of Tylenol capsules with the poison potassium cyanide, causing a series of deaths in the Chicago area.

Johnson & Johnson is Tylenol's parent company, and its actions during this debacle have gone down in history as one of the most notable examples of a crisis management situation. The company immediately looked into the plant operations to find the root of the poisoning, but quickly learned that the tampering did not occur at its plants. This meant that it must have taken place once the product had reached Illinois. J&J faced a dilemma, how best to handle the crisis without damaging the reputation of the company, when the company had quickly established that it could not be held liable for the tampering.

In the case of crisis management, PR practitioners must make quick decisions, and this could easily lead to backlash if a wrong decision is made. J&J's PR team made the life-saving decision to put its customers first. The following is a list of tactics that were used in salvaging the Tylenol brand:

• A nationwide voluntary recall took place, involving approximately 31 million bottles of Tylenol, representing more than $100 million in sales 
• Consumers were told not to use any type of Tylenol product until the cause of the tampering had been established
• Production and advertising of Tylenol ceased 
• The company offered to exchange all Tylenol capsules that had been purchased for Tylenol tablets
• Relations were quickly established with the Chicago police, the FBI, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
• A toll-free crisis phone line was set up for concerned consumers 
• Senior executives, including CEO James Burke, were readily accessible to the media. 
• As part of a longer-term response, the company reintroduced Tylenol capsules with new triple seal tamper-resistant packaging

The decision to recall $100 million worth of product is not a favorable option in the eyes of shareholders and business executives, but when the future of your brand is at stake, $100 million is a small price to pay. For Tylenol and J&J, the risk paid off immensely. Thanks to the rescuing efforts of J&J’s PR team in 1982, we can all walk into any store today and easily pick up a bottle of Tylenol.

A PR practitioner is always looking for opportunities to build relationships between its clients and its client's publics. That’s essentially what they are paid to do. In the case of the Chicago Tylenol Murders, J&J's emphasis on the safety of its customers instead of its finances enhanced its corporate reputation and salvaged its future as a moneymaking brand. As most business people will say, trust is a difficult virtue to acquire among customers. Johnson & Johnson's PR efforts built a level of trustworthiness in the Tylenol brand that did not exist before the crisis, and if it had been handled differently it would be hard to say if Tylenol would have ever recovered from the crisis.