While this article doesn’t directly discuss information cascades, Procter & Gamble became the first to launch an advertising campaign aiming to calm consumers over recent contaminations in pet food blamed for the deaths of thousands of pets across the United States. They purchased full-page advertisements in 59 daily newspapers.

This situation, when examined on a deeper, more network-oriented level, certainly is an example of an information cascade. It is interesting to ponder exactly how many people needed to lose their pets for some sort of negative information cascade to form convincing people to no longer purchase brands of pet food that were the culprits. What, exactly, would be the “tipping point” associated with a huge decline in the sales of these foods (or brands of foods)? To reference Gladwell’s book, how many Connectors lost their pets, and would feel strongly enough about it to do a good bit of damage to the companies responsible by spreading that information? Obviously, these two wouldn’t do much damage by actually verbally spreading the word, but if anything similar were to happen in the United States over a pet lost due to this contaminated food, the negative publicity would be even greater.

What would make an information cascade like this much, much more complicated than the linear and “open” (in the restaurant example, everyone could see where everyone else was eating) would be exactly those factors described above. People would not be able to tell what pet foods everyone else was buying and would obviously weigh the opinions of friends more heavily than some random person in front of them at the pet store, who may not even know about the contamination. Certain people (Connectors) will also make their opinions more well-known more easily (whereas in the restaurant example, people all had equal power in terms of spreading their opinion).

One more recent example of a similar situation would be the E. Coli scare for Taco Bell last December which is discussed by Tracy Samantha Schmidt in Time magazine in the preceding link. In it, she discusses certain failures of Taco Bell as a company in dealing with the ensuing negative information cascade (she doesn’t call it an information cascade, but that’s what it was). Jonathan Bernstein, a crisis-management consultant, says “The company’s response should be prompt, compassionate, honest, audience-appropriate and interactive.” These five qualities would presumably fight a negative information cascade. The article also mentions the 2005 incident at Wendy’s when a woman claimed to have found a finger in her chili and thus drove sales down more than 50%.

The author also brings up the issue of class-action lawsuits, which would make it much easier and cheaper (and thus more likely) for people to sue the company at fault. Participation in a class-action lawsuit would probably be classified more as a network effect rather than an information cascade, as the payoff would be direct and would directly affect people’s participation.