Products can be defective in any number of ways that can cause a person bodily harm, but typically they are broken down into three main categories: Design defects, manufacturing defects, and marketing defects.
Design defects are products that the entire product is more or less defective. When something is defective by design, it means the whole thing should have been deemed unfit to be released in whatever capacity it was released in. If a company designs a necklace that gets tighter and tighter every time you step into the sunlight, for whatever reason, this would be an obvious example of a design defect. It simply is not safe or useful in its current form and, as a result, it could cause an injury. This type of defect usually occurs because it was not thoroughly tested or inspected before the product was put on the market.
The next type of defect is a manufacturing defect. This means that the design portion was acceptable, but somewhere along the line, something went wrong while it was being made. Recently Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay billions of dollars over claims that they knew their baby powder product could be harmful and did not warn consumers. This could either happen to the whole of the products that were produced or, more commonly, there was an error and only a select amount was made to be defective. In each of these different types of defects, someone else along the chain of command is usually at fault, if not the whole company at large by association.
Lastly, there is a marketing defect. This may not be what you’d expect as a result of the name, but it actually deals with the warnings and instructions typically found on the back of the product. It’s not always something as simple as a misspelled word or misleading sentence that leads a consumer to be injured. In these cases, it often has to do with what the manufacturer left out. If they fail to warn you about a potentially dangerous side effect of a product, then they can be held liable for the resulting harm that occurs. If a chemical product fails to tell you that it can give you third-degree burns if it comes into contact with skin, that would be an example of a marketing defect.