Almost every business or company has had a scandal at least once and it is PR’s job to make sure that crisis doesn’t ruin their reputation. There is no way of telling when these crises are going to occur, but it is important that the public relations side of the company acts fast and takes control of the situation. I’m sure we can all remember the trend when teens and children were posting videos of themselves on the internet eating Tide pods, more specifically called the “Tide pod challenge”.
In the article, Brand Crisis Management: Responding to the Tide Pod Challenge, this “challenge” and its outcome is discussed in more depth. The company Procter & Gamble never thought that creating colorful pods that you put in a washing machine would result in people being rushed to the emergency room. There were 220 teens that were affected by this challenge according to The American Association of Poison Control.
Forbes also responded to this crisis with an article called “Four PR Lessons To Learn From The Tide Pod Challenge”, which mentions some of lessons that were learned after this challenge happened. A few things that you need to do in situations like these are plan for the unexpected, be reactive, be proactive and to consider your target audience. In the article “Responding to the Tide Pod Challenge”, Amercius Reed mentions that “It’s remarkable but not super shocking. Kids do dumb stuff, in fact, they always have — but only this generation has had the opportunity to showcase its behavior on social media.” Social media creates a type of peer pressure and the attention these kids were getting from these videos was exhilarating. Golbeck mentions in the same article “It’s got to be intoxicating as a teenager to have 20,000 people look at you and the thing that you did. There is this pressure and this responding desire to get positive feedback, to get attention — exactly the same mechanism that we see working in traditional, face-to-face peer pressure. But now you have this much bigger audience and the opportunity to get a lot more attention, and that makes it easy for these sorts of activities to spread.” In the scholarly article, “The Rationality of Literal Tide Pod Consumption”, one commentator of this crisis mentions that the problem is people are fooled by packaging that looks similar to food. As this is the case for some companies, it wasn’t the case for this one. “The underlying reason for adolescents to do this is to publicly engage in risk seeking behavior as a means of seeking status, and as such is very similar to adolescent substance abuse.” There were few that blamed Procter & Gamble for making their packaging look “appealing” but never once did they encourage such behavior.
This crisis was not in Procter & Gambles control, but the way they responded to it was. The Crisis Communication Model explains how companies should communicate in a crisis. It is obvious that Tide pods are not edible and that social media was the main problem in this situation. Since the videos have been posted, Procter and Gamble used corrective action and worked quickly with YouTube to get them removed. Reed mentions “From the perspective of brand crisis assessment, I think Tide did everything that you’re supposed to do. There are three things you’re supposed to do: You have to validate concerns. You have to show action. And you have to control the narrative.” One of the differences with the communication crisis model and Procter & Gables crisis is that the company did not apologize. They validated their concerns with eating the tide pods, but they did not hold themselves responsible, which I think was the correct thing to do. There have been many trends in the past few years that broke the internet. The cinnamon challenge, the ALS ice bucket challenge, and the tide pod challenge. As long as the concerns are raised about attempting these challenges, the companies cannot do much more when social media takes over.
Figure 10.5: How to Communicate in a Crisis
Since this challenge, the company has now turned it into something positive. There are many photos and gifs across the internet that show the dangers of attempting this challenge. I think that the company did an astounding job responding to this challenge and it even resulted in more customers and brand awareness. But, at the end of the day, please don’t eat Tide pods.
Murphy, R. H. (2019). The rationality of literal Tide Pod consumption. Journal of Bioeconomics, 21(2), 111–122. doi: 10.1007/s10818-019-09285-1
Wilcox, D. L., Cameron, G. T., & Reber, B. H. (2016). Public relations: strategies and tactics (11th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
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