But What Did I Just Swallow?

Sometimes sometimes a crisis can have an unexpected beginning.

In the middle of the night, on the West Coast, the proverbial little old lady awoke in some discomfort. She grabbed for her familiar over-the-counter pain reliever. She fumbled with a few items on her night table, got some water, took the tablets and went back to sleep.

The next morning the lady began tidying up. She noticed several scattered tablets on the floor, some of which didn’t bear their familiar logo. She wondered what she had taken during the night.

She strolled off to the drugstore, presented the pharmacist with the mysterious pills and asked him what they were. He didn’t know but gave her a new bottle of her favourite brand.

She called the manufacturer’s toll-free number to ask if they would take a sample of the tablets and tell her what was in them. The company sent her a new bottle of tablets without explanation.

In ten days, the little old lady had two new bottles of pills for her trouble but was no closer to an answer to her question of what she had taken in the middle of the night.

Her next call was to an advocacy journalist at a national network. This story had all the elements needed to get on the air—a compelling victim, a West Coast focus, a classic David and Goliath tale, a tight-lipped company and memories of the Tylenol poisoning case, in which seven people died horrible deaths when someone tampered with that pain-relief product.

The journalist sent the pills to a lab for analysis. Then he made a stand-up broadcast from the company headquarters. His script spoke compassionately about the little old lady’s fears and indignantly over the company’s lack of response to her and to him. He created drama and mystery about what might have been in the bottle and, by inference, what might be in millions of bottles in the marketplace.

The punch line of the journalist’s dramatic item involved telling the little old lady that the mystery pills were a generic, differently marked tablet with the same ingredients as her usual ones. Most probably she had mixed up the contents of her own bottles and hadn’t noticed.

The lady got her answer and free tablets. The viewers were entertained with a short, dramatic story.

The only loser was the multinational company, with 100 years of brand equity at stake. It was operating against generic, over-the-counter products without patent protection. So the main thing it was selling in the marketplace was brand recognition, brand equity, quality control, reputation and the sum of its marketing-efforts over ten decades.

That seems worth protecting a little more vigorously.