Lessons to Learn: A Hyper-charged Energy Drink Creates a Crisis for Panera
Felicia S. C. Gooden, M.S.
Strategist | Domestic & Geopolitics | AI/ML | Emerging Tech | Forensic Psychology | Product Design & Management | Risk Mitigation | Agile Project Management | Criminal & International Law
One of society’s greatest failures is the institution of slavery and the obsession with continuing to drain humans of their life source. When it comes to energy drinks, social ills are exposed, from social sickness leading to the need for the product to the obsession with getting people more energy by any means other than proper rest and healing.
Event: After drinking Panera's charged lemonade, a 21-year-old college student died from cardiac arrest. The victim’s family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the company, which has not offered comment on the incident.
Mundane Perspective: According to reports, the charged lemonade was merchandised with regular fruity drinks and marketed as being no more caffeinated than dark roast coffee. While such positioning may be astute from a sales and comms perspective, the decision proved to be fatal from a risk perspective.
Are sales and marketing teams no longer responsible for their own risk assessments? Is the need to make more money more important than proactively labeling and presenting a brand’s products and services in an ethical and responsible way? The economy is troubling, but this isn’t a time to cut corners and try too hard to push the envelope.
Esoteric Perspective: What kind of society are we creating and perpetuating that requires the need for energy drinks in the first place? Are humans truly nothing more than meat batteries that need to be recharged for the sake of systems and corporate machines? Slavery is as old as humanity but in the modern day and age. What is the source of this psychotic obsession with draining humans of their life source only to kill them with “products” developed for “optimization”?
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What this means for you: There’s always a need to push the envelope and drive innovation to stay competitive as an organization in any sector. Crisis communications professionals should be a part of every organization’s communications apparatus; however, well-trained, ethical staff are just as important as those employed to put out fires. The best way to manage a crisis is to plan and make strategic decisions that are most likely to prevent a crisis from occurring in the first place!
What to do about it: Study this case and learn from it. Is your company developing a new product just to drive sales or can bring holistic value to society? Is your next campaign sending mixed messages to unwitting consumers? Knowing that people can sue for anything and win, what steps are you and your team taking to develop products and plan rollouts that are least likely to elicit a lawsuit?
Are you contributing to the problems in society or building a brand that serves as the solution?
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