Tylenol Crisis Case

Tylenol Crisis

In 1982, Tylenol had a crisis that had the potential to send the company into financial ruin. Johnson & Johnson's most profitable product, Tylenol, had been tampered with and was causing deaths in Chicago. Fortunately, Tylenol acted immediately, giving the proper example how to handle a major crisis in business. While taking a deeper look at this case, I will be taking you through a detailed summary of the case, how Tylenol handled the attack, and how this case relates to moral reasoning in the text.

Tylenol had been the cause of strange and sudden deaths in the Chicago area due to tampering of the extra strength over-the-counter pills. Two-off duty firemen had made a connection between two reports which both mentioned Tylenol in them. Someone had tampered with the pills by putting 10,000 times the lethal limit of cyanide in them. As soon as Tylenol was deemed as the cause, the nation was warned immediately through local broadcasting and even cops driving through neighborhoods using loud speakers. The who or why, however, was not answered right away. Nobody knew who had allegedly tampered with the pills. However, Tylenols distribution center was not to blame; the tampering had happened after they had been shipped out from the actual plant. As if things could not go worse, the scare brought others who tried to copycat the Tylenol poisonings, using other products as well, creating more of a scare. There was mass publicity about the events, and it did not seem like Johnson and Johnson would climb out of the hole they were in.

Despite the scare and the publicity that attacked Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson gave every business the perfect example on how to handle a nationwide crisis when your company seems ruined. The company put the safety of the consumers first instead of only thinking about all the money they would lose. The company chairman, James Burke, immediately got together a strategy team on how to inform the public and save the brand at the same time. Of course, warning the public was of first importance. The company also pulled all of its advertising of the product as well as all capsules of the Tylenol brand which cost Johnson & Johnson over a hundred million dollars and over 31 million bottles off the shelves. Johnson & Johnson also was open about the crisis to the public and wasn't trying to constantly hide anything. In fact, they used the media to communicate to the public about the scare and set up various communication outlets to the public to inform what was going on.

In the book, there are two basic moral principles that are discussed. These two theories are the teleological and the deontological theories of moral reasoning. According to the book, "A common example of a teleological or consequentialist theory is the classical theory of John Stuart Mill, which we have already touched on, that is, the view that we should always