Whole Foods v. FTC

Whole Foods’ CEO is taking on the Federal Trade Commission’s move to block the proposed merger between Whole Foods and competitor Wild Oats Market by taking his fight to the one spot he can control: his blog.

CEO John Mackey posted a treatise—I don’t know what else to call a blog post with an Executive Summary and a table of contents—to his blog yesterday, calling out the FTC for what he feels are at best unfair and one-sided tactics that the government agency is using to block the merger.

I find Mackey’s approach very interesting from a communications angle. First, this appears to be Mackey’s unvarnished opinion. In reviewing the post, he takes on several areas that I can’t imagine his PR team was comfortable with, including referring to the FTC as using “bullying tactics,” and doing a point-by-point deconstruction of the FTC’s press release announcing that it had found cause to block the merger. “You can’t fight city hall” is not a phrase in Mackey’s vocabulary. The WSJ Deal Journal blog even quipped “Mackey is part of a growing list of corporate lawyers’ newest nightmare…” as it analyzed Mackey’s blog post.

It will be interesting to see how the FTC decides to respond (or not) to this tactic. Comments on the blog are largely supportive, at least for now. Will this strategy appeal to investors? How will customers of Whole Foods respond to this? How will the CEO’s reputation fare?

This will be interesting to watch.