Crises are easier for organisations to handle if they are clearly the 'victim' of someone else's malicious actions. They tend to get a sympathy vote and the benefit of the doubt from the media and the public.
Product recalls due to sabotage (as in the case of Tylenol in 1982 - look at the Electric Airwaves Resources page for a case study on how Johnson & Johnson handled this), aircraft hijackings and the like come into this category.
But this does not mean that effected management and communicators can be complacent. The media tends to cover crises through three stages of questioning: What has happened and why? What action is being taken to resolve it or ensure it cannot happen again? Who is to blame? Sometimes these phases follow rapidly on from one another. Sometimes they are more drawn out.
In the case last month of Nurofen Plus, the company may well have been a victim of sabotage. Nobody has suffered from taking any incorrect pills (unlike the Tylenol scare where seven died). Reckitt Benckiser has not yet been blamed for any human health consequences although it has been criticised for slow and scant public information in an age of social media immediacy.
But at some point it will probably be revealed how the tampering occurred. Then the media will start to ask questions about the security of the pharmaceutical supply chain. What internal processes existed to prevent this happening? Was management alerted in the past to this being a threat and what actions did it take? Might there be management culpability after all?
Nurofen communicators will surely be preparing to get ahead of the curve; taking action now to reinforce brand narratives and messages with key stakeholders. It might not come but there is no harm in readying themselves for a potential second round to this affair.
The game may not be over yet.
Andrew Caesar-Gordon
