Recall Poses a PR Drag for Philip Morris : Business: Firm denies basic charge that cigarettes cause illness, but must deal with immediate health issues raised by possibly contaminated filters.

When your products already are implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, how do you craft a warning that they might make people dizzy?

The massive cigarette recall ordered by Philip Morris poses public relations headaches that go far beyond those typical when products are pulled back from retailers’ shelves.

The company launched the recall Friday afternoon, saying it was withdrawing an estimated 8 billion cigarettes from the market. The culprit: possibly contaminated filters that could cause wheezing, coughing and dizziness, along with eye, throat and nose irritation. The recall includes popular brands such as Marlboro, Benson & Hedges, Virginia Slims, Merit, Basic and others.

While denying--as it always has--the fundamental charge that cigarettes cause cancer, emphysema, heart disease and other long-term health problems, Philip Morris had to isolate and confront the immediate health issues raised by the apparent contamination.

“They were in a no-win situation,” said Jerome D. Williams, a marketing professor at Pennsylvania State University.

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On one hand, the company could hardly ignore the contamination problem, he said, but on the other, the recall was bound to set off an immediate storm of criticism, accusing Philip Morris of hypocrisy.

Crisis communications experts said that Philip Morris, the world’s biggest cigarette maker, has no choice but to ignore the ironies being pointed out by anti-smoking interests.

“The product has its critics; it’s been accused of causing cancer and other problems,” noted Michael Sitrick, whose Los Angeles public relations firm specializes in business emergencies. Therefore the company’s response, under the circumstances, should not focus on the longstanding criticisms but on calming the fears of smokers--the only audience that really matters, he said.

“People aren’t going to stop smoking,” Sitrick said. “They’re just going to stop smoking your brand.”

Sitrick said it is important not only to remove the defective products from store shelves quickly but also to reassure consumers that the problem won’t happen again. In that respect, he said, it does Philip Morris no good to get embroiled in a public dispute over responsibility for the contamination.

Philip Morris attributed the contamination to a material used in making filters it had purchased from Hoechst Celanese, a New Jersey-based chemical company. The material “was contaminated before it arrived at Philip Morris facilities,” the cigarette maker said.

Hoechst Celanese, however, said it had reviewed and retested its manufacturing processes and the material in question and found them to be “within specification.”

According to Sitrick, one of the most effective recent crisis management performances was that of Jeffrey C. Barbakow, who took over as chairman of National Medical Enterprises in 1993. At the time, insurers were suing the hospital company (now renamed Tenet Healthcare Corp.) for fraud, and state and federal agencies were investigating allegations that it had paid bounties to procure patients for its psychiatric hospitals.

While not admitting guilt, Barbakow instituted forceful programs at the company to prevent such problems from occurring in the future. The safeguards helped NME’s reputation with potential patients, Sitrick said.

“You can’t do anything about what already happened,” he said. “You can only affect what happens now.”

Philip Morris, in full-page newspaper advertisements Sunday, publicized a 24-hour, toll-free phone number for information about the recall and offered full refunds to consumers. The company reiterated its statement that it was possible none of the contaminated cigarettes had reached retailers.

While major retailers such as Vons Cos. and Safeway quickly began removing the recalled brands from their shelves, there were reports Sunday that smaller vendors were not all getting the message.

“I’ve heard the reports. But nobody told me not to sell them,” Mike Zeidan, owner of Michael’s Pit Stop in San Francisco, told the Associated Press. “You’d think you would hear from Philip Morris. But I didn’t hear anything, so I didn’t do anything.”

The company sent Mailgrams to some vendors and began dispatching sales representatives to collect cigarettes, saying it might take two or three days to reach all stores. Philip Morris said it expected to personally contact all 370,000 retailers nationwide by the end of the holiday weekend. The company plans to post special blue placards once potentially contaminated cigarettes are removed from a store.

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Crisis experts said that while the company takes what steps it can to defuse the contamination problem, Philip Morris must simply resign itself to taking lumps from its critics--or, perhaps worse, being laughed at.

Ian K. Mitroff, director of the USC Center for Crisis Management, said the ironies of the situation threaten to make the recall exercise “turn into a Monty Python routine.”

Joked satirist Stan Freberg, who refused tobacco accounts when he ran an advertising agency: “From now on they’ll have to change the wording of the warning on the cigarette pack. Instead of saying, ‘Cigarette smoking may be dangerous to your health,’ they’ll have to say, ‘Cigarette smoking may be really dangerous to your health.’ ”