But just to be clear, we do not encourage trying the Mountain Dew experiment at home.
A little background: companies often find that their executives and advisors disagree on matters of strategy. This is common due to inherent conflicts based on one person's professional responsibility for managing risk versus another's obligation to optimize opportunity.
In this case, the legal staff, focused, as they are want to do, on minimizing the potential impact of a lawsuit, has done its utmost to present a conclusive answer to claims of injury presented by an individual alleging he found a dead mouse in a can of Mountain Dew. Now, anyone with firsthand knowledge of what 'the Dew' does to childrens' teeth would be excused for cocking a skeptical eye at this claim. But lawyers must deal in evidence, not belief or perception.
And this is what brings us to those strategic differences. Marketing folk, whose job it is to accentuate the positive, will certainly understand the potentially detrimental impact on sales of claims that dead rodents are routinely found in sealed product containers. But marketing people are, by nature and assignment, tasked with taking the longer view. That, one surmises, leads them to understand that establishing the deadly chemical impact of concentrated exposure to the aforesaid product's ingredients could well be even more injurious to revenue growth, particularly if one's target market consists primarily of children who are no strangers to the pleasures of excessive consumption.
Science, and the majesty of the law, will have to establish which point of view prevails. We breathlessly await their findings. JL
Michael Sebastian reports in Ragan's PR Daily:
Time to switch to Mellow Yellow? According to Pepsi’s attorneys, a dead mouse will dissolve in Mountain Dew.
It’s the company’s defense against a lawsuit in which a man claims a can of Mountain Dew he got from a vending machine in 2009 contained a dead mouse. Mountain Dew is part of the Pepsi family. The man—who’s asking for damages worth more than $50,000, plus “other relief”— says that he sent the mouse to Pepsi, which destroyed it. Pepsi denies the man’s claim and wants the case dismissed. We’ll let the Madison County Record take it from here:
“In support of that move, Pepsi cited expert testimony that the mouse would have dissolved in the soda had it been in the can from the time of its bottling until the day the plaintiff drank it.”
The mouse would’ve turned into a jelly-like substance, according to LegalNewsLine.
The Atlantic Wire referred to Pepsi’s legal move as such:
“This seems like a winning-the-battle-while-surrendering-the-war kind of strategy that hinges on the argument that Pepsi's product is essentially a can of bright green/yellow battery acid.”
If the story continues to resonate—and thus far it has; The Atlantic Wire story on the topic is currently the website’s most clicked—it could be a PR disaster for the beverage.
Wonder what Pepsi’s PR department thinks of this legal team’s move.
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