Jengates Blog

First question I have is how did Nalgene get to be the poster child for making bottles that contain bisphenol-A? Isn’t there anyone else to pick on who makes stuff out of this chemical?

Now that you ARE the poster boy, Nalgene…what are you going to do about all the folks who bought your bottles over the years?

I own a few of their bottles and I do like them. Now what do I do? Recycle them? Throw them away? Use them to hold my spare change?

Now I don’t have anything against Nalgene. I think they are probably a great company. But so far they haven’t really done anything to stem the tide of negativity surrouding this crisis. What Nalgene did was just announce that they were going to stop making bottles with B.P.A. According to their website, they are going to phase out production of it’s Outdoor line of containers that contain Bisphenol-A.

Here are a few things that I would suggest if this kind of crisis opportunity happened to my company:

1. Set up a special email address and/or phone number for people to contact you if they have questions about their Nalgene bottles. Do this right now.
2. Set up a recycling program for all the bottles that are now going to stop being used. Or at least educate people on how and where they should recycle their bottle(s). My bottle has a recycling symbol that looks like a 7 with a triangle around it. What does that mean? I found out what it means, but I still don’t know how to recycle it. Nalgene could have educated me on this.
3. Offer coupons to anyone who owns a Nalgene bottle made with B.P.A. to buy a new one that doesn’t contain that chemical. If you want, I’ll send you a picture to prove I own three or four. I won’t mail them to you…that wouldn’t be very green.
4. Maybe they could do a promotion with their retailers to have folks drop off their bottles for recycling and pick up a new one for free or a reduced price.

Through a simple web form, they have the opportunity to collect the names and addresses of all the people who own their bottles. Nalgene has the opportunity to connect with every one of their customers through a variety of programs that they could set up right now.

They have the opportunity to sell (or give away) a whole bunch of new bottles and keep their customers happy, instead of having their customers look for other alternatives.

They have the opportunity to make it right for all the people who feel like they now own damaged goods.

They say there is no such thing as bad publicity. I agree as long as you manage it right. So far they haven’t really impressed me.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.