Robert Andrews would forever remember when his phone rang on Friday, September 30, 1982. He was assistant director for PR at Johnson & Johnson, whose pain reliever, Tylenol, was the best known over-the-counter drug in America. On the other end of the phone was a reporter from Chicago, looking for a comment.

“He told us that the medical examiner there had just given a press conference—people were dying from poisoned Tylenol,” Andrews recalled in a 1990 interview. “It was the first knowledge we had here in this department. We told him we knew nothing about it.”

Brands live in terror of moments like these—a sudden debacle that puts their name in the news, their reputation in question, and their future in doubt. Which is why, for Kenvue (the J&J spinoff that assumed custody of Tylenol in 2

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