“Public Relations are the proactive communication that an organization initiates and maintains with the media, its clients, and key internal and external publics. It provides organizations various tools that can be used to support brand building, research attitudes of consumers, and influence key publics. This simulation illustrates the use of Public Relations to develop a Public Relations plan and to use its various tools to manage a crisis” (University of Phoenix, 2010). A company must be able to communicate well with the outside environment to conduct public relations successfully. This is particularly true concerning crisis management. A real life example is the crisis management strategies undertaken by Johnson and Johnson during the Tylenol crisis in 1982. By managing relations well with the public, the company could diffuse a crisis situation that put the very existence of the company in question (cited in Devlin, 2004). The case study of the Tylenol crisis serves to illustrate the importance of well-managed communications strategies when it comes to concerning managing public relations in a crisis situation.
When the catastrophe broke out, Tylenol was the profuse merchandise of Johnson & Johnson. Leading the painkiller market, it was contributing 33% of the year-to-year profit growth of the company (cited in Watson, 2006). During fall 1982, some unknown parties removed a number of Tylenol packages from store-shelves in the Chicago area, opened those packages, removed the tablets, replaced them with cyanide contaminated tablets and replace those packages on the shelves without any apparent signs of tampering. As a result of the cyanide in the capsules, seven people died horribly and overnight, the most trusted product in the industry became the most feared product in the industry (cited in Swit, 1982).
The Tylenol crisis was the result of an act of