Whole Foods CEO Illegally Blogging?

This past year, Whole Foods, the Austin based organic food company, was set to merge with its largest rival Wild Oats. That is until the CEO of Whole Foods was caught blogging under an alias undermining the credibility of Wild Oats. To some it was not a big deal, too the majority it was a CEO trying to lower the value of the competitors stock before the potential of a huge merger. In the world of finance, mergers, and of course the FTC, this was a major PR crisis.

On top of the already embarrassing discovery, John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO was quoted as telling board members that the merger would "eliminate forever" a company that could compete in the natural foods industry, adding that it would also help to "avoid nasty price wars." This is where the real problem began. It was in these two remarks that Mackey opened the door to the FTC for investigation into potential antitrust law issues.

One would think that a CEO who is trying to acquire its main competitor would immediately get on TV or online and send out an apology, but not Mackey. Mackey instead decided a better idea would be to justify his comments by counterattacking the FTC investigation. Mackey was quoted as saying, "If eliminating a competitor is inherently 'bad' or 'wrong' then the FTC should probably never allow any mergers to ever occur, because most mergers necessarily mean the elimination of a competitor from the marketplace."



The only apology Mackey ever made was in regards to the blogging incident. The company on the other hand did not stick by their CEO and instead, said it was the personal thoughts of Mackey and not the greater Whole Foods company. Not the most eloquent CEO but one must give him props for sticking with his guns.

In the world of PR this was a disaster. A CEO who is breaking antitrust laws, as well as writing statements on Yahoo financial blog imitating a customer. A crisis to say the least that this company, in general did not do much to handle. It seemed almost as if it merely disappeared, but was never resolved. There were many crisis management firms called in to help in the disaster, all of which had no impact on the outspoken CEO.

In my eyes the company did not handle this is a good manner. They should have immediately acted on what he had done, made serious comments, and made them public. The CEO especially should have contributed to damage control of his own doings. Although this was not a HUGE public scandal, to those who really invest time in this, it was. This was a good example of PR gone bad.