Tyson Foods: We'll Have the Pyrrhic Chicken, Please

The Tyson flacks showed good savvy at the end of last week, pushing out a 4:00 p.m. announcement on Friday that a U.S. District Court judge in Baltimore had ruled against a motion for a temporary restraining order against the chicken-producer's "Raised Without Antibiotics" marketing campaign.

By being the first out with the news, the company ensured that the story was framed as the judge rejecting the complaint, instead of as the judge being satisfied with adjustments Tyson had made to the original ads.

In reality, though, Tyson probably had little worry of being pre-empted, given that the motion was filed jointly by four competitors -- Perdue Farms, Sanderson Farms Inc., Gold'n Plump Poultry Inc. and Foster Poultry Farms. As slowly as individual companies often move in trying to muster public pronouncements on short notice, the chances were slim that four competitors could agree on a joint statement in less than a full lunar cycle .

The Tyson flacks also had to be pleased with getting the news out on a Friday afternoon, hoping it would disappear into the weekend ether.

Why? Well, the "adjustment" to their campaign is not particularly appetizing. Instead of the chickens being labeled as "Raised Without Antibiotics," the birds now carry this mouth-watering proposition.

"Chicken Raised Without Antibiotics that impact antibiotic resistance in humans."

Sounds yummy.

And that's why Tyson's victory was not much of a win at all, given that it simply drove more news coverage calling attention to the fact that their original claim was overstated. While the Tyson statement proudly hollered that the company made the changes on its own, the company can't be pleased that its differentiating claim now includes the phrase "antibiotic resistance in humans."

Earlier on Friday, Tyson also announced that it was cutting 1,500 jobs, creating a competitive story. Retrenchment stories with hard numbers are easy to write, and thus that event received much wider coverage. While the news of the job cuts probably didn't go over very well in Emporium, Kansas, where the lay-offs occured, that story is far less threatening to Tyson's image with consumers. Tyson surely didn't fire 1,500 people to create a distraction. But the company certainly had to be motivated to eat all of its bad news on a single day, as opposed to spreading the negative hits across multiple news cycles.

If Tyson's four competitors are truly serious, they'll extend the legal process in any way they can, using every procedural event as a means for making news and reminding the public that Tyson had to change its claim.

The WSJ's Lauren Etter provided the best summary of the facts underneath the label wranglings.

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