Doing good and getting caught

In today’s integrated communication practice effective public relations no longer performs a supporting role. It now plays the principal character. It is essential in strategic planning, and is seen to be very important to your competitive success  more than advertising or marketing. It may sound like wishful thinking, but PR is leading the way these days, while traditional advertising appears to have lost its glitter.

Companies and individuals have successfully used PR to achieve great things or to repair damaged institutions and people. Thus, learning to use this powerful force for good is an imperative. Declaring “PR is the most commanding authority in modern society” is not an empty boast given the many success stories from big companies, influential personalities, threatened corporate reputations and PR crises and disasters, where PR plays a significant responsibility. And since it is globally replacing advertising as the promotional strategy of choice for individuals and organizations, it’s undoubtedly important to understand how PR works, and how you can harness its muscle.

In the book Rethinking Reputation: How PR Trumps Marketing And Advertising In The New Media World, Fraser P. Seitel and John Doorley examine why they think advertising has lost its advantage. The authors remark, “It used to be that a company, candidate or bank president could ‘purchase’ their way to prestige and positivity through advertising or marketing. No longer.” In this age, where images are established through 24/7/365 mobile, Internet, cable TV, radio commentary and non-stop social media conversations, reputations can no longer be built through top-down, paid media.

One’s reputation depends largely on honorable deeds communicated candidly and consistently through a steady stream of free media — releases and speeches, media appearances and charitable contributions, and Facebook and Twitter postings. Stated simply, a smart organization or individual today will acknowledge that in rethinking its reputation, PR must lie at the center of its strategy. The tome makes you realize the growing magnitude of word-of-mouth interactions and free publicity. Seitel and Doorley position their substantial familiarity to work in helping put together a blueprint for boosting what is potentially your most valuable asset — your reputation. Here are major takeaways from the book:

• All PR messages must be clear and consistent. The authors share the case of Jean-Claude Trichet to demonstrate how messaging can go awry if not managed well. Nobody especially cared for Trichet, the French civil servant who ran the European Central Bank (ECB) until November 2012. He was aloof and spoke in platitudes as Greece and Spain and Italy spiraled steadily downward. Trichet’s successor, Mario Draghi, was a welcome change. He was a banker, spoke with conviction and inspired global confidence — especially when he declared in London in July 2012 that the ECB would do “whatever it takes” to support the euro. But recently, when he seemed to backtrack on his earlier declaration, the euro and his own credibility took a hit. Such is the price one pays for inconsistent communication in the 21st century.

• Reputation depends on good behavior and honest communications. At the center must be what academics call “identity,” or what President Abraham Lincoln labeled “character” — what one stands for. To elucidate this point, the authors narrate the story of the torturous trail of Mevacor, the enormously successful drug that lowers cholesterol. After initial promising trials, Dr. Roy Vagelos, then CEO of Merck, heard about the news on cancer in dogs caused by a similar compound being tested in Japan. As such, he ordered the Mevacor trials stopped. This, however, didn’t make Vagelos lose heart. He had the guts to make the product available in securely controlled trials to patients with genetically high levels of cholesterol that threatened death at age 40. It proved efficacious and non-toxic, leading to full-scale trials and huge success in the market. “Vagelos believed in transparency before it became a buzzword.”

• PR gets through to consumers because of its power to engage. Tom Leatherbarrow, head of B2B at Willoughby Public Relations, says that within the business-to-business sector, PR is surely turning into an equal and complimentary partner to advertising — if not more dominant. He declares, “While advertising has a clear call to action, many clients are wanting to put over much more complex messages which do not necessarily demand an immediate ‘buy’ response.” Indeed, many are wanting to go beyond what is called “product pushing” to try and engage customers by using more sophisticated messages about added value and whole life costs to justify premium pricing strategies and customer benefits rather than merely product attributes. Here, PR is increasingly being seen as more empathetic to customer need.

• It’s best if you can have both accuracy and speed. Seitel and Doorley run through Georgia prosecutor Nancy Grace for being swift and floppy with the facts, and making misleading declarations. In the death of Whitney Houston, Grace reports, “Houston was found drowned in a Hollywood bathtub in 2012” and that “the LAPD has already reported that Houston’s death wasn’t the result of foul play or force or trauma to the body.”  In truth, Houston died in a Beverly Hills hotel and the investigating agency was the Beverly Hills Police Department, not the LAPD.  These details may not be material to Grace’s point, but the laxness is difficult to ignore. As an aftermath, Grace was rebuked by media for being more concerned with speed — first in breaking news — rather than with accuracy.

• You can’t possibly win with spin. If you listen to critics of the profession, “PR is spin.” Seitel and Doorley dispute such a claim and accentuate that “Spin is inappropriate and counterproductive.” They identify former US President Bill Clinton as the “first modern politician to use spin to alter political reality.” They aver, “It can be argued that the pervasive modern-day practice of ‘spinning’ — defined by the late William Safire as a ‘deliberate shading of news perception and an attempted control of political reaction’ — emerged in the wake of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998. PR people should avoid spin because it damages reputation, with long-term effects. As the authors highlight, “If you lie to the media once, they will never believe you again.” All you have as a spokesperson for a company, an organization or an issue, is your credibility. Once you lose it, you’ve lost everything. Never, ever lie is the cardinal rule of PR.

• Recapture credibility by blogging. The case of ExxonMobil exemplifies this principle. The company spent and continues to spend large amounts of time, money and human capital to face the communications challenge of a reputation still stained by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. ExxonMobil aims to shift public sentiment to “an honest and constructive voice in public discourse, defined by principles and proper action, focused on solving problems.” The company’s journey, led by chief communicator Ken Cohen, began with determining what the problem is, and using its own research model to track its reputation. The corporate communications team sought to close the gap between the company’s negative perception and positive reality by taking part in the discussion. The team informally, and without an agenda, meets environmental and human rights NGOs two or three times a year. To this day, Cohen blogs regularly and ExxonMobil frequently uses its corporate Twitter handle to connect to people. Given its efforts, Seitel and Doorley opine, “The true test of an ExxonMobil reputation is whether the company is perceived by its publics the same way it perceives itself.”

• CEOs and public figures are vehemently warned against tweeting. To back up this recommendation, the authors use the example of Anthony Weiner, an up-and-coming Democratic star, and an odds-on favorite to win the 2013 mayoralty race in New York City. Weiner’s star dimmed when he issued a strange announcement that his Twitter account had been hacked and a sexually suggestive photo was sent in his name to a young woman in the Northwest. But persistent journalists found out later that he had lied in his declaration, and he was censured in a big way. The moral of the story: Social media are wonderful, but if you are a person with easy access to national media and a name recognition that’s getting brighter, don’t risk what you have by using Twitter recklessly.

An opposition to this view from other practitioners quickly surfaces, arguing, “If the CEO is the face of the brand and they like to tweet, why not let them? Understandably, tweets do go wrong, but a steadfast rule against tweeting is not always wise.  Brand capital gets left on the table when you are too restrictive with CEOs and how they can and can’t communicate. Many heads of companies display a level of genuineness that no one else in the company can bring to its stakeholders.” Four memorable lessons stand out in Weiner’s story: don’t lie; silence grants the point; in a crisis, take charge immediately; and the truth will out.

• PR is about developing discourse, engagement and relationships. Tom Watson, PR professor at Bournemouth University, says this eloquently. To him, traditional advertising is focused on display. As you become increasingly conversant in networked societies, the role of PR becomes more important as it creates value that advertising can’t.” In fact, PR workload picks up during belt-tightening periods. As editorial consultant Anne Massey states, “A squeezed budget buys precious little advertising but a lot of targeted, sales-driven, profile-raising PR coverage, and that’s what’s in demand during hard times.” It will be interesting to see whether PR budgets grow apace as the economy improves, or whether there’s a rush back into advertising once budgets swell enough to warrant it.”

• Any talk about PR taking over from advertising is overstated. This bold premise was delivered by Gavin Devine, CEO of MHP Communications Agency, who insists that there are many cases of stunning advertising campaigns that impact clients on needs: “Selling mass-market products, or achieving widespread behavioral change, is often best achieved through above-the-line activities,” he underscores. PR may claim the digital space, but Devine points out that advertising also has a role to play here. He adds, “Digital and social media campaigns prove that there is a place for both industries to coexist and collaborate, as these campaigns often have elements of both PR and advertising. What we’re seeing much more are joined-up campaigns, where PR builds on traditional advertising and vice versa, often through social media activation. Using PR and advertising together can help achieve message continuity across all media platforms, and to all audiences — consumers, employees, investors and stakeholders.”

Granted that what Devine said is true, it’s hard to disprove the claim of PR to a growing space at the heart of companies’ overall marketing strategy in the light of the evolving landscape of communications. After all, as the authors emphasize,  “When PR works well, it has greater credibility than advertising, whether it’s street cred or the more formal kind measured by big polling firms — because when someone else says something good about you, it’s worth infinitely more than when you say something good about yourself.” 

Cutlip and Center, the authors of the first book I read on PR, claim, “Public relations is doing good and letting people know about it.” Harold Burson, the other half of Burson Marsteller, one of today’s largest PR agencies, updated the claim when he declared, “Public relations is doing good and getting caught.”

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