Johnson & Johnson Case Study

SUMMARY OF THE CASE

The case is about two crises that the Johnson & Johnson Company faced. The first crisis was in 1982 where a 12 year old girl died from taking extra strength Tylenol followed by 3 more deaths in the same day and 3 more deaths the day after. A lot more deaths occurred and were caused by the same capsule. It was caused by cyanide, where the capsules were laced with 65 mg of cyanide. The company reacted by recalling all the bottles of the extra strength Tylenol and by the end of the year they invented a triple strength package to prevent tampering of the product. During this period their market share went from 37% to 7%. In 1986 another death occurred from the same Tylenol extra from the same tampering of cyanide and they had to recall all the bottles again and said they were going to make them in tablets and caplets only. In 1989 persons were dying and developing liver problems because of overdose of Tylenol. Analyst was saying that Johnson & Johnson should have been more explicit with the directions and facts on their labels. These deaths were caused because of the main ingredient in the capsule which is acetaminophen. Johnson & Johnson reaction to the label was not as good as their reaction to the first crisis they did not seem as interested to warn customers about their project.

Question #1

What did Tylenol do right?

In the case of the cyanide lacing Johnson and Johnson the company:

• Exercised corporate social responsibility

• Acted in an ethical manner

• Put consumer safety above profit

• Responded quickly to public issues and concerns.

• Regained a significant amount of market share for stakeholders

• Partnered with the media to aid their position and create a positive outlook based on their earlier response.

• Offered 100,000 incentive to help capture the assailant

Question #2

Conduct a CSR analysis of Johnson &Johnson. How do they measure up to fulfilling their various social responsibilities?

Lexicon defined corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a business approach that contributes to sustainable economic, social and environmental benefits for all stakeholders. It stated that CSR is a very board concept that addresses many and various topics such as human rights, corporate governance, health and safety, environmental effects, working conditions and contribution to economic development.

Johnson & Johnson expressed good corporate social responsibility in the case in 1982 where the company took responsibility for what took place with tampering of their product despite it was not a fault of them, because the products were on the shelf when the tampering took place. The company placed their customers first in that they took the entire product off the shelves which cost them over 100 million dollars as they did not care about the profit they cared about the well-being of the consumers. They also offered refunds and provided safer tablets for the consumers free of charge. They also invented a triple tamper-proof package which shows that they took into consideration the initiative of not having a repeat of the incident. They did a launching campaign to market to their consumers that they improved their packaging and the product is more secure. Johnson & Johnson (J&J) had fulfilled their corporate social responsibility (CSR) in 1982 where they placed the welfare of the consumers before all else. They had conducted good CSR of fulfilling the ethical principles of welfare, duty, rights, integrity, honesty, Fairness, and dignity.

On the other hand with the crisis of the overdose in 1989 the company did not exercise good corporate social responsibility. The company refused to put the safety of their consumers first when it was made known that their main ingredient acetaminophen was causing deaths and liver damage when consumer took