Posts Tagged ‘Business ethics’

Johnson & Johnson, the huge personal products company, apologized to a congressional committee this week after they got caught in a drug recall scandal.  Can this be the same company that set the gold standard for crisis response during the 1982 Tylenol tampering scare?  What happened? What were they thinking when they decided to do what’s called a “phantom” recall, where they hire people to go into stores and buy up all the inventory on shelves and they never reported problems with over the counter drugs including Children’s Tylenol?

It’s sad to realize that even companies who know what the right thing to do is, get caught doing completely the opposite.  Johnson & Johnson recovered quickly last time because they did the right thing.  Their customer base rebounded and actually grew because people felt the company could be trusted.  And they got years of free publicity when public relations professionals and media experts held them up as a shining example of how to handle a crisis and work with media in the middle of it.

There’s a new chapter in the Johnson & Johnson story and it’s not pretty.  Time will tell how much they have damaged their brand.