Industry and consumer news sites and blogs have been abuzz the past few days over Johnson & Johnson suing the American Red Cross for misuse of the red cross logo!
(I tried to think of a really good pun involving commentators seeing red and getting cross, but then I remembered that a good pun is an oxymoron.)
For those of you on holiday last week, some background:
- In short, J&J claim exclusive rights to the red cross trademark on commercial goods, and that their rights are infringed by the American Red Cross granting use of the logo to commercial partners for use on various products more or less in competition with J&J’s.
- The American Red Cross claim that J&J do not have exclusive rights in the commercial domain, and that the two organisations have been effectively both using the red cross emblem on competing commercial goods ever since the American Red Cross began commercialising first aid kits over 100 years ago.
- The public war of words was started with this press release from the American Red Cross. A statement in reply from Johnson & Johnson, and a rebuttal from the Red Cross, laid out the claims and counter claims.
Setting aside the foundation of this dispute for a moment, what I found particularly interesting was that, in a rather clever turn on crisis communication, J&J are blogging on the matter. (Also noted today by Francois Gossieaux at Emergence Marketing)
In a post entitled “You’re doing what?!”, J&J’s VP Public Affairs Ray Jordan wrote:
So, I’ve now lived a classic corporate public affairs nightmare: announcing a lawsuit against the American Red Cross. Would I have chosen this exercise as a reputation-building opportunity for Johnson & Johnson? No, of course not.
The approach is very interesting. Instead of the cold dead language of another press release, we get first-person point of view from a J&J spokesman. Adriana Lukas, who has been advising J&J (and other companies) of the potential of blogging as communications tool, says:
We now have the words from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Not a voiceless press release but a real human being telling J&J’s side of the story, from the inside.
Her post on the topic puts forward an excellent analysis of the control issues that corporations face in choosing like J&J to blog, to openly discuss with the public and accept all manner of commentary and debate. As she puts it:
The price for getting your story out there is losing control over where it ends and who adds to it. The ‘reward’ is the ability to bypass the media, an unmediated and more human reach to those who care about the whole story, not just the outrage of the day in the papers.
And as Johnnie Moore sums it up in “When corporate blogging gets tough…”:
Yes, with blogging your fingers get more dirt on them, but you do stand a chance to get a more real engagement. This is a quite a shift for any PR and I give credit to JNJ for blogging it with a human voice. The comments there make very interesting reading – you realise there are many different perspectives on what’s happening and that JNJ are willing to have the conversation, not try and skirt round it.
Blogging needs to be accepted as another means of corporate communication, another tool in the belt if you will. Prior to that blog entry, comments like that of Chris Brown were only to be expected really:
J&J’s press release is analytical, not emotional. The only emotion sounds like they are whining.
Ray Jordan’s blog post delivered what commentators were looking for, and has generated quite a bit of support in resulting comments and related blog entries and news stories. Another press release just would not have delivered that result.
With the holiday period over and a return to business-as-usual, I found myself reading a number of posts concerning retail RFID on Evan Schuman’s blog StorefrontBacktalk, notably Metro Group’s decision to put some muscle behind its RFID programme by penalising suppliers who fail to comply with its requirements.
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