Odd PR Crisis

Procter & Gamble has an odd PR crisis. Adolescents are eating the brightly colored packets of its Tide laundry soap. They are poisoning themselves in the process. The company has no way of stopping them but for sanitizing social media where teens boast of their exploits. There are no good ways to seal the tubs holding the packets such that teenagers can’t get into them. The company stopped babies from playing with the soap by doing just that. Teenagers are too smart to be foiled, but they aren’t intelligent enough yet to understand the dangers. Designers didn’t think about this when they developed the packet, and why would they? Who would have guessed that youths would ingest cleaning products as a way of showing off? Nonetheless, it is now a crisis for the company. It is as odd as a previous crisis the company suffered when Born Again preachers claimed that its “Man in the Moon” logo was the sign of the devil.