Tylenol Turns 50

Tylenol, one of the great American brands and great American products just turned 50. Impressively, Tylenol sales are up 9% year to date.

Among the many lessons that can be learned from Johnson & Johnson's management of a brand like Tylenol (identical in every way to the cheaper, generic acetaminophen products that sit on shelves across the nation), is the way J&J managed the 1982 tampering crisis.

Tylenol’s biggest challenge, the 1982 cyanide tampering scare in Chicago that killed seven people, is considered “a case study of how to deal with a brand crisis,” said Mark Bard, president of Manhattan Research. He said pharmaceutical companies such as Vioxx maker Merck & Co. and Bextra maker Pfizer Inc. “could learn some lessons from what happened 20 years ago. ”J&J had its sales force remove 264,000 Tylenol bottles from Chicago area stores; consumers also were urged to return any Tylenol they had for a safe bottle, and prompt alerts from J&J and the FDA kept the public informed, recalled Dr. Anthony Temple, head of medical affairs for McNeil Consumer in 1982.

If you leave people in the dark, you have a real risk of them never being able to trust you” again, said Temple, now senior medical consultant for McNeil Consumer. It took just a few months to regain public confidence, he said.

Bard said it was worth it for Johnson & Johnson to spend around $100 million on the recall to save its brand, given that nonprescription drugs are on the market for decades, compared with prescription drugs that lose patent protection, and thus most of their sales, in 10 to 15 years at most.

Timothy Burger
timothyb(at)timothyburger.com