ABSTRACT
Chris Nelson, Crisis Lead for the Americas at FleishmanHillard, once worked with a client that needed to recall the batteries in millions of mobile phones worldwide. It was one of the largest consumer electronics recalls in history. In India, where those phones were many people’s only means of telecommunications, consumers lined up down the street to swap out their batteries, despite the fact that the batteries posed an almost immeasurably small risk of overheating. At one Indian store, when consumers learned that it would be a week or more before a new shipment of batteries arrived, they rioted and eventually attacked and killed the phone manufacturer’s store manager.
