My profession seems to be obsessing on stakeholder relationship management. I see why. When the angry mob is howling at the gates, it seems sensible to pretend that crowds have wisdom. Like politicians, media and most bosses in the West, PRs are terrified of seeming elitist. They believe that leadership is no longer possible, or is toxic.

I have often banged-on about how PRs fear that corporations are seen as evil, so now mistakenly believe they must wear a bleeding heart on their sleeve. That’s not my point today. I want to stress here that it is a profound problem that PRs and many organisations – from firms to political parties – dread leadership and responsibility.

There’s a shortage of adulthood

What I’m on about today is related to a wider social problem. I think it’s time the grown-ups behaved like adults.

We live in a society in which people strut about in a macho culture of bullying, slap-head, hyper-fit, scowling aggression, but at the slightest set-back everyone’s weeping and in therapy.

Big cars, sharp suits and watches the size of dinner plates don’t confer anything worthwhile on a person. Aren’t you struck by how fragile the self-esteem of so many modern pseudo-adults seems to be?

We have watched stars, CEOs and politicians behave like greedy, petulant, hysterical teenagers rather than heroes, but what is striking about many of them is that they have so little fortitude. Most CEOs disappeared from view when the credit crunch struck. We just heard how the British Prime Minister’s inner circle phones bullying help-lines to complain about him. Their confidence is wafer thin.

At this year’s Davos we were told that profit, shareholder value and shareholders are no longer priorities. All stakeholders are now equal. Such talk came from Western leaders. The bosses in the East held their nerve.

We need corporations rooted in a solid culture

It’s this bifurcation I’m after. I want to try to make it understood that ordinary decency, a workable sense of fairness, a sellable ideal of enlightened self-interest - proper trust between firms and employees and customers and wider society – has to flow from a far deeper sense of corporate culture than can ever be achieved by becoming a weather vane.

Today I want to try to get a proper handle on this particular concern: that our clients cannot afford to aim to become whatever the ether-mob, the gobby bloggers, the placard-wavers fancy. They can’t pick up a self-definition by triangulating the top three or four messages they get from a consultant. Even if they did, they’d have to live it and that involves sticking with it and that involves ignoring the next fashion which hurtles into view out of the mists.

I am tolerably sure that floating along on public opinion is never good. It sometimes leads to rushing weirs and crashing Niagras, but more often to long dreary shoals where no-one’s boat floats.

The public says it wants to humble corporations and corporate bosses, just like it  says it wants to humble political parties and politicians. So it has created the risk that firms, parties and institutions become rudderless (sorry, I couldn’t resist another water analogy).

In fact though, if there’s one thing the public fears and distrusts more than strong, mean, unaccountable and self-serving public bodies and leaders, it’s bodies which are too weak to do their job.

Before we can have listening and flexible firms, we need to have firms which are quite strong and quite clear about what they actually want to be.

So the perpetual self-abnegation involved in stakeholder relationship management is a folly. I believe it is a chronic abdication of responsibility. It is also constitutes a surrender to short-term market and social instrumentalism.

It is a myth that the best reputations must be sustained by stakeholder management crowd sourcing. Good reputations are not based on living within limits set by consumer or voter research and stakeholder engagement, but on breaking down barriers and achieving something significant.

Reputations, trust and success

The best reputations arise from doing things and from keeping promises and delivering results and sometimes from managing failures well. Reputations that endure do so because they inspire.

Great companies and governments transform the world by creating demand and conditions that didn’t exist before. They often do so at great risk in the face of fierce opposition.

There’s more for PR to do than to get their clients to reflect what audiences say they expect or claim that they will accept. There’s more for PR to do than to try to forge consensuses before advising firms to make decisions. Good PR acknowledges that what’s wanted in society is not fixed. Great PR helps society transform the prevailing perceptions of sustainability on business, cultural and environmental matters.

Successful countries from the democratic UK and America to today’s China and India were not built on the back of listening, engagement and consensus, but on the back of courageous leadership and innovation. Let’s review a few examples.

According to Edelman’s trust survey, trust in business and government is strongest where stakeholder relationship management matters least and among the weakest where it seemingly matters most. By a significant margin, China leads the world in both categories. India and Indonesia score highly. While Russia records higher trust levels than do France and Germany.

Moreover, the PC, the internet and Google’s search engine are all examples of top-down disruptive innovations, not ones driven by bottom-up demand-led engagement-based consultation. They did not arise from listening to the market or to stakeholder groups.

Google

Google’s search engine was an innovative marriage between algorithms and computing power. Google created its own demand.

The motto of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin was “question everything”. As this review of recent books on Google explains, they were like postindustrial Henry Fords, using digital technology to eliminate all inefficiencies in traditional economies.

Ironically, Google’s Eric Schmidt’s recent Washington Post piece, Erasing our Innovation Deficit, advocates bottom up crowd-sourced innovation. It under-estimates the risk-taking top down investment and leadership which helped Google succeed, the internet take-off and the US put a man on the moon: see here. However, that weakness should not detract too much from the mostly timely, insightful points Schmidt makes.

Unloved Microsoft and lovable Apple

Microsoft at its peak never won our empathy. Microsoft never engaged with stakeholders. It hardly consulted anybody. Bill Gates wielded Microsoft’s power like a blunt instrument against all comers, including customers and partners. But if Microsoft was always unlovable, Apple is its polar opposite. Its fans adore it, believing it to represent an anti-corporate, culturally-fresh, arty sort of an entity. That’s mostly nonsense, but in any case Apple achieves this myth-making with top-down communication and command and control management.

Rock ‘n’ Roll

The electric guitar transformed music. It created new possibilities by creating new sounds. It helped spawn Rock ‘n’ Roll, including Punk, that outraged public opinion. But its hall of fame contains some of the greatest reputations of the last century. But as Simon Cowell shows, even this grass-roots business is managed from the top, even if it draws inspiration and talent from the bottom.

Ryanair: nobody’s friend

Last, Michael O’Leary’s Ryan Air’s low-cost digitally-networked business model revolutionised the airline industry. It was an achievement of an aggressive innovative genius, not of stakeholder collaboration, which he despises.

These examples provide evidence of Joseph Schumpeter’s law of creative destruction that drives the capitalist market. They support my argument that PRs who think our trade is all about aligning values, listening, engagement and relationships need a reality check; though I’m very pro using those techniques in the right context.

Key manifesto messages

In contrast, I say PRs should be more prepared to defend, advocate and promote risk taking. They should be less concerned about what’s acceptable and what’s popular. They should be more willing to celebrate elitism and success. They should be less concerned with the crowd as it is currently constituted or inclined to emote and opine.

PRs should be more willing to celebrate the arrogance of the change-makers who bring innovation to society. We should be less concerned with bad headlines and with tyranny of media produced crises. Instead we should focus our campaigns on achieving positive outcomes and on getting things done. We should be the torch bearers honing the narratives and messages of the people and forces which challenge or ignore society’s constraints. In that game PR plays a transformative role.

The blog which got me going

Here’s the article that inspired this manifesto: To listen, to engage: empty buzzwords? Let’s discuss. It sums up the risk adverse stakeholder relationship management approach of mainstream academic PR. According to this school of thought progress depends on winning the public’s trust by establishing empathy. For them it is all about connecting with stakeholders by gathering sense:

“The consequences of the interpretation-of the comprehension-of the gathered sense need to be explicitly related to the listener’s decision making process and are inherently fuzzy, non linear and situational. The competencies are creativity, feasibility, and time framing with their respective tools.”

This piece of gobbledygook is typical of current PR thinking. It springs from a misplaced faith in Grunig’s two-way symmetrical model of PR. Amusingly the author is so sure of his ground that he asks What comes after Grunig? and replies, “the answer to that looming question is that after Grunig…comes Grunig.”

The danger here is that Grunig’s supporters have ended up trying religiously to make reality fit the theory. That’s the trap, if I’m any judge of PR-related text, that the Stockholm Accords, arising from the Global Alliance’s World Public Relations Forum debate, is falling into right now.

In summary, my point is that PR is a multi-faceted, flexible profession. Sometimes it is top-down and one-sided. Sometime it is a two-way interactive real-time force. In whichever way it does its job, however, PR is an objectives-driven art rather than a science that’s reducible to orthodox formulas. My take home message is that PR makes its most useful contribution to society when it advocates transformative risk-taking on which great reputations are built.

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Who was Tiger Wood’s audience when he apologized? Surely, he wasn’t speaking to the public because he has not really offended it, has he? Surely he wasn’t addressing his wife either?

On the contrary, he said his wife was blameless, which immediately provoked the responses (a) we knew that already, dummy; and (b) now I don’t like you for the way you’ve spoken about your wife in a PR thingy. So let’s get this straight: until the apology none of us had any reason to think he was a prat, like it was our business anyway.

The truth is presumably that Tiger Wood’s made his awkward apology for the benefit of his future at least partly with his sponsors. But the thought that they were previously completely oblivious to Tiger’s love of luscious ladies is too naive to believe. Tiger was rampant in his enthusiasms off the course. So if Tiger made a mess of his apology it was perhaps because it was insincere except for the regret at getting caught and having to clean up the mess.

But whatever the critics like me may say, what the hell else could Tiger Woods do? And doing it badly may be better than not doing it at all. The reality is that there’s a threatening popular culture at play in society which shrills, “apologise, reform, move on, or we’ll bring your house down.” Besides, one needs to shut things down: if Mr Woods hadn’t said his piece – at length and comprehensively – his re-entry to public life would have been dogged by the media’s sense that there was still some meat on the bone.

One could blame the media. But I don’t. The media reflects popular culture rather than makes it. No, it is the the two-faced smirking sponsors that I blame, and the public whose judgement they fear, of course. Tiger Woods couldn’t resist, for instance, taking a swipe at Accenture in his apology, whom he called “friends”, but who actually walked out on him.

On the face of it, the sponsors are right to be nervous. According to a survey conducted for PRWeek about the John Terry affair, 62 per cent said footballers’ personal lives shaped public opinion of them and a significant 71 per cent thought footballers appeared “above the law”. The funny thing is that neither John Terry or Tiger Woods has broken any laws, but that’s an aside. The public seems to demand of public figures what it would never demand of itself.

Sponsors fear cross-contamination between their chosen ones’ fallen reputations and theirs. This has created a risk-adverse climate. They and the public have become stuck in a cynical cycle of expressing moral outrage at exposures of what would once have been of little concern to anybody but the families of those involved.

But I don’t think we should take the public’s prejudices too seriously because the public doesn’t take them seriously either. So my call is to bin the research findings.

Here comes more advice. If sponsors want to appear authentic, they need to stop creeping to shallow and shifting public opinion. When the sponsors’ stars are found wanting in some way, they should stick by him or her. I am pretty sure the sponsors’ realism and their loyalty will resonate well with the public.

Can’t we respond like adults to the frailties of our super stars? What do you say?

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The survey is much less gloomy than it was a year ago, so two cheers for that.

According to Edelman, trust in business has stabilized and is trending upward, with a substantial jump of 18 points in the US (from an all-time low of 36% in 2009 to 54% in 2010). Trust in business falls into three categories (High: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, at 60-70%; Middle: Canada, Japan, US, at 50-59%; Low: France, Germany, Russia, UK, Korea, at 35-49%).

Moreover, Edelman reports that the three leading factors burnishing corporate reputation are now “quality products and services, a company I can trust and transparency of business practices.”

Financial results are now the least powerful factor in positive corporate reputation in most regions.

Overall it is all good news, but some of the conclusions are questionable.

Edelman’s survey reveals that trust in business is highest in some of the world’s least democratic countries.

The results don’t really support the notion that financial results matter least in most regions. It would seem that trust is high where performance is strong and weak where it is not. The modest recovery in trust in the weaker regions appears to be in line or apace with the recovery of economic fortunes there.

Transparency seems to matter most where results have been poor, and least where they have been good.

Moreover, the banking industry has suffered a profound fall from grace, with three-year declines of up to 39 points in markets ranging from the UK to the US to Germany. But banks remains highly trusted in China and India. While the automotive sector staged a comeback and is very highly ranked in developing markets.

I’m not surprised by these results. Scapegoating bankers has become a popular sport among politicians seeking popular appeal. Consumers in developing countries are now enjoying cheap motor cars and motoring, which their booming economies can deliver on a large scale.

But it is surely nonsense to imagine that Chinese and Indian banks are more responsible, more ethical, better managed and more trustworthy than their Western counterparts.

According to Edelman, NGO trust has jumped profoundly in China in the past six years, from 31% to 56%, a level comparable to that found in Western Europe, India and the US. It seems that about 70% of respondents trust a company more when it partners with an NGO on important social issues.

But I ask myself whether partnering with NGOs is behind the high trust levels of  Indonesian, Indian and Chinese businesses compared to their counterparts in London, Amsterdam and New York.

Moreover, when people say they trust a company more when it partners with an NGO, we should ask some tough questions.

Does a firm partnering with an NGO acquire a share in the other’s reputation or vice versa? If it’s the NGO which confers trustworthiness, what exactly does the respondent trust in that relationship?

A partnership with an NGO does nothing to alter core business practices or performance, which is the real trust business needs to have bestowed upon it if it is to function effectively in the market.

According to Edelman, this year, business tends to be more trusted than Government. Government trust has risen in the US (substantially), France and Germany, but fell in Russia and was mostly stable elsewhere.

I’m surprised by the US result. Polls and election results there suggest that trust in Barack Obama’s regime is collapsing fast. It’s collapsing faster than anything George W Bush experienced in his first term. Obama, it would seem, is more popular abroad than at home.

Last year, by a 3:1 margin of Edelman’s respondents said that government should intervene to regulate industry or nationalize companies to restore public trust. Now it seems business is making a comeback in terms of favourablity.

That seems likely. But as governments seek to reduce their level of public debt the cuts will probably soon make governments more unpopular than ever. It is almost as if having got what they wanted, respondents will turn on governments when the latter attempt to balance the books (they’ll also turn on those governments that don’t).

Edelman’s survey reports that the credibility of chief executives has recovered but remains well below that of academics, financial analysts and NGO representatives. In a reversal of past trend, a “person like myself” has seen a drop in trust and fellow employees has remained stable, now at levels comparable to CEOs.

As a PR I welcome this. I think the results reflect how our business has helped CEOs reappear armed with messages. But clearly there’s more work to be done on that front. I’m also chuffed to hear that “persons like myself” (so to speak) are losing credibility and that expertise is once more rising up the scale of credibility.

Meanwhile, business magazines and analyst reports have widened their lead over TV, radio and newspapers as the most trusted sources of information about companies over the past few years. Corporate advertising is the lowest at 14%.

Well that’s no surprise either. But I’ve never trusted much what people say about the media. That’s not least because messengers often get confused with the message – and shot as a result. But the truth is the mass media matters as much as ever, and still sets agendas internationally.

Social media is all very interesting but it mostly feeds off the commercial media. Moreover, there has been a long-term decline in newspaper readership in the West and in the fashion of things magazines are filling much of the gap that that left.

Yes, I’ve never liked corporate advertising, particularly when its greenwash BP-style with slogans such as beyond petroleum.

There remains great skepticism about future behavior of business, with almost 70% expecting “a return to business as usual” by companies and financial institutions once the crisis is over. Two-thirds of respondents expect government to have active influence over the financial sector. More than 70% said reducing the gap between senior executive and ordinary employee pay and firing underperforming management was central to restoring trust in companies.

Linking pay and bonuses to performance makes sense, but that could result in even larger remunerations than during the last boom once things start booming again.

In conclusion, I ask is trust really, as Richard Edelman claims “an essential line of business to be developed and delivered,” or is it, as I maintain, something which flows from innovation, performance and delivery on promises? Is the heart of trust setting expectations and meeting them? I think so.

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1. Public trust in risk remains strong Financial Times (FT) research suggests that the public trusts itself to...

Investors can’t have it both ways. Given the contradictory responses, the one we should trust is the one respondents invest in. Lots of people seem to have resisted a “flight to safety”. What we seem to have is a generalised sense that one ought to feel at risk and say one has lost trust, whilst operationally one goes on trusting and taking risks with roughly whatever appetite one had in the first place.

But the public is not merely contradictory. It is nonsensical (or the FT’s questions were). What, after all, is someone saying when they insist they trust themselves to look after their savings? That they would rather keep the loot under the bed? Or are they saying that they trust their own advice more than anyone else’s? Wot, and not read the FT? Renounce unit trusts and pension funds (both of which make choices about where to put their client’s money)?

Most investors, said the FT, did not think they were adequately protected by the state (another surprise given how the state has backed the banks). But, reassuringly, the FT reports that it is not only savers who are sticking with the status quo:

“…. a majority of respondents in all European countries and the US have not changed the amount of risk in their portfolios, three in 10 Americans, one in four French and Germans and one in five Italians and Britons said they were now taking less risk. In Spain, three in 10 have reported that they were willing to take more risk.”

It seems, also, that most people in Britain, Germany and France have not altered their attitudes towards investing in the stock market compared with two years ago. So while some have reduced their risk, most have not, and some are already ready to up their risk levels.

The FT results reveal – if you can reveal the obvious – that the public has lost confidence in individual risk assessments and in the reputations that were once built upon sound risk management (trust and keeping promises used to be at the heart of City-type values). But what does this mean? That an institution can be less trustworthy but just as worth investing in?

So how can the PR high ground be seized without resorting to talking populist nonsense?

The best way to face the challenge is for banks and institutions to take the defence of their reputations in to their own hands (there’s a useful call to action in PR Week by Anthony Hilton: Bankers Still Live In PR-free Zone).

Moreover, if firms want to avoid the worst forms of regulation then they have to promote self-regulation as well as openness. My colleague Richard D North puts on it on a sister sister site – here and here - like this:

Instead of writing lots of rules which must be obeyed, the best regulators would name and shame firms and sectors which had not produced the sorts of voluntary schemes which offered appropriate (always optimum, not always maximum) safety. Those warnings would then reinforce the market’s tendency to produce satisfactory safety. The firms and sectors which were exposed would see custom drying up or stakeholders demand premiums.

That would really be a return to the values of “a man’s word is his bond”.

By the way, those wanting to read my more detailed account of the future of financial PR in the new era can read it here.

No related pages.

Let’s start at the beginning. Since the ancient Greeks perfected rhetoric, persuaders have used every trick in the book. And since then, too, the debate has raged about whether such techniques constituted an artform-cum-science as claimed by Aristotle, or whether they constituted no more than flattery as Plato maintained. And, perhaps, Machiavelli’s The Prince was the first psychological-PR handbook for despotic rulers (I’ve not read enough to know if that’s true or not). Edward Bernays seems sensibly to state:

Although ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia were despotic monarchies, public opinion played some role in the national life. The governments of those ancient empires spent a great deal of money and ingenuity in building up the reputation and importance of the rulers.
(Edward L Bernays, Public Relations, University of Oklahoma Press, 1952)

But Bernays also offers a more profound insight:

The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people [stakeholder relationship management hadn't been coined back then]. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed. In a technologically advanced society, like that of today, ideas are communicated by newspaper, magazine, film, radio, television, and other means….. Modern individual psychology and social psychology provide the basis for persuasion, a symbol of pluralism and fluidity.
(Ibid.)

So for Bernays – and for his uncle Freud upon whose thinking he relied – human nature and human social psychology were not fixed, not hard-wired. They were in important measure social constructs, capable of study and manipulation, and indeed so because not – as it were – ingrained. For instance, Gustave LeBon, the originator of Crowd psychology, made a useful contribution to modern PR theory. But the crowds that formed his subject were part of urbanized life. His crowd was a modern phenomenon driven by the end of rural (isolated non-crowd) life and the emergence of modern networks of communication and industry. I make this point in defence of my heroes such as Bernays, Carnegie, Freud, Levitt, Lippmann and Maslow. They all popularized the use of social science theory in our trade.

There has, however, always been a darker side to this issue. It has covered everything from racism (slavery/apartheid), anti-semitism (fascism) or phrenology (the theory stating that the personality traits of a person can be derived from the shape of the skull). These all relied on the view that there is a fixity in human beings and human relations. 

The history of these mechanistic accounts of human life makes me nervous of modern explanations of human behaviour based on neuroscience or evolutionary biology. (Though I accept that mental illness is something different and often has a neurological origin.)

Moreover, some commentators have also rightly pointed out that all PR techniques are value-neutral and are open for use for both good and bad purposes.

For a contemporary in-depth discussion of neuroscience’s possible wider social implications, I recommend this book review by a peer of Chris Frith’s Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World.

Whichever side of the expert argument – the reviewer’s or Firth’s – you take, it offers little support to the notion that neuro-PR is possible today. For the record, my Enlightenment and post-modernist-tinged views, which inform my PR practice, are instinctively hostile to Firth’s belief that free will is just a manufactured state of mind. Firth’s point, however, should not be confused with Bernays’ concept of manufacturing consent just because the words and meaning sound similar (I’ll defend Bernays in another article soon).

What interests me here is why there is renewed interest in the benefits that neuroscience could bring to our industry. Toni Muzi Falconi explains it thus:

I refer to what many researchers and practitioners are beginning to realize: opinions are much less correlated to behaviours than they used to be only ten, fifteen years ago.

If this is even only partially true, it means that we (as well as the market, political and social research industry) need to focus our attention much more on understanding behaviours than opinions.

And this certainly raises the necessity that we revise our listening processes through a much better knowledge of both psychology and neuroscience.

What people say they think, and what they do (or how they vote in secret), often seem dramatically out of sync. That’s not new. Hypocrisy is not new. (It’s true that mass cynicism is a very modern trait, but even so, in Soviet Russia it was for many years a national mass underground sport.) Few people – as Bernays knew all too well – have thought in depth about their world view. It is, then, no wonder most opinion research highlights shifting, confused responses even when the opinions given seem to be most emphatic. A good dose of commonsense could very easily square the contradiction between the opinions given to researchers and people’s actual behaviour in the real world. 

And here comes my counter-intuiative punch. I think that the insights of science aren’t especially powerful or sinister when it comes to determining PR outcomes or even influencing opinion. I don’t think that either PR or, indeed, propaganda can be held responsible – even if they played a part – for Stalinism, the Nazis, or Apartheid South Africa; if only it were that simple.

One might as well use all the insights one can: scientific or not. They’re not likely to be more sinister or stronger than ordinary commonsense or wiliness, or more influential than the many other factors – say, chance, culture, economics, geography, history, personalities and politics – that determine outcomes in society.

Hence, I’m not advocating closing down discussion about neuro-PR or any other form of PR or discarding any scientific tools that might prove useful. But I don’t think neuroscience will be influencing anybody’s PR practice and line of argument any time soon.

By the way, Heather Yaxley did us all - me, certainly - a great service in her excellent blog post on this theme.

No related pages.

First, I’ll risk summarising Richard Edelman’s take on the survey’s findings as reported by the FT:

(1) Trust in government and business used to be inverse, now they’re less so.
(2) The public trust firms which focus on good products and happy employees rather than merely on shareholder value.
(3) Firms need to talk more about their value to society (not merely) shareholders, and they (firms) don’t like that.

But (and more to my taste) the survey also says that the market is believed to be as likely to contribute to a return to growth as business or government are. And trust in business is back, though trust in government is back even more.

Edelman’s know I am friendly and admiring critic of their surveys, and the following remarks are in that vein.

On (1), it would be a bit surprising if people weren’t a bit wobbly about business in 2008 and a bit less wobbly now. And presumably they feel they can trust business more because they have learned that they can trust government to do its best to fix business’ problems (especially if it poses systemic risk). It isn’t a surprise that people enjoy wondering whether they trust business or government more, but of course business and government are mutually dependent. That was always so, even if the balance between the two shifts as circumstances do. Moreover, different societies frame that relationship differently (in some, tension is regarded as productive, in others, symbiosis is.)

On (2), isn’t this the same thing as saying that people now trust firms that they believe are trustworthy: ie, likely to be building long term value without social controversy rather than going in for spivvy short termism? It doesn’t surprise me that people are looking for wider signs of trustworthiness granted that share prices have proved an unreliable indicator.

On (3), firms may indeed need to talk about their resilience and sustainability; that is, their commitment to long-term shareholder value. But that rather contradicts Richard Edelman’s downgrading of shareholder value’s importance (or reframes it). Long term business sustainability is probably a good proxy for social value and approximates to the kind of social value a firm can actually think and act – talk – about usefully. This will only apply to some firms. (Not, for instance, to a firm designed to produce one film and then disband.)

We should also look beneath the surface at the relationship between trust government and business in places like China, a one-party dictatorship, and the UK, a Western democracy.

I fear that Edelman make two opposite mistakes. On the one hand, they sometimes take too much of the opinions they record at face value. Not least when they diss trust in the media, which I have long-argued is a popular sport that people don’t take seriously. The media remain the main vehicle for formulating a picture of the wider world precesely because it is more trusted than not. On the other hand, Edelman believe business need to engage more and more widely with society, and beyond commonplace business criteria (such as shareholder value). For me, this forces firms into talking nonsense. I’d rather firms framed their commercial objectives as clearly as they can, including a desire to thrive in the long term (if they do).

So, a superficial reading of Edelman’s interesting data may tempt firms and PRs into poor strategies and tactics. Meanwhile, here’s some links worth following here & here & here & here.

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According to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer, the public is now nervous of banks and finds itself reliant on government. Can you imagine any other survey results at this moment?

Don’t get me wrong. I love a survey: they’re fun. I love Edelman’s survey: it’s annual and so we get a decent run of material. I love it that my industry has a firm doing research, and doing it consistently.

Still, when anyone says they have survey data on people’s happiness, or who they trust, prepare to get forensic.

Edelman’s data are no surprise. And sure, restoring trust in some firms will be like climbing Everest without oxygen. At one level, the firms face a technical job: getting solvent again. They also have to overcome a well-earned reputation for vanity and cockiness. That’s a human issue of huge interest.

But what a fabulous opportunity this presents for the PR industry. Do our job right and we will be able to hold out heads high when our children ask: “What did you do in the Great Crisis of 2009, daddy (and mummy, of course)?”

CEOs and world leaders shouldn’t ski off the mountain’s edge in panic. Instead, they should interrogate the contradictions in the Trust Barometer’s findings. It seems three-quarters of consumers say they won’t buy products from a company they don’t trust. But, according to the latest IMF forecast, overall consumption and output in some markets looks set to drop by a few percent at most in the developed world. While global economic growth is still predicted to be a half of one percent, which is effective stagnation, rather than decline.

So either the public has more trust in firms than they say, or they are lying when they say they won’t buy from the “untrustworthy”.

Fact is lots of firms have retained the trust they need. And you could go further: we do in some sense still trust banks, since they are still doing most of what most of us ever used them for.

If people are not buying cars or houses, a lack of trust has nothing to do with it. The problem is a shortage of money and credit. We can’t have it both ways. We don’t trust banks now because they were so profligate before. Being mean makes them hateful, but more trustworthy.

When people say they won’t buy goods from corporations they don’t trust we should not take take them at their word. We aren’t shopping now because we are all shopped-out after a decade-long binge, and we’re feeling insecure. But I don’t hear consumers refusing to be customers of this or that firm through lack of trust.

I think people are talking nonsense to Edelman’s researchers.

They are expressing their anger about the state of the economy and sending an emotional message via a survey. Given the mess we are in, who can blame them?

Governments might well be more trusted than previously. Any port in a storm. Besides, the whole point of “The State” is to be a lender and regulator and everything else of last resort. However nobody seriously expects or wants governments to take over any industry, including banks, except as a temporary measure. The public is arguably as angry at state intervention with taxpayers’ money as it is at the private sector’s recent incompetence.

Moreover, Edelman reports that NGOs are getting the most trust in every region of the world except Asia-Pacific. But we don’t trust or expect NGOs to run banks, manufacturing or even our regulatory systems. So, it is an interesting point that they are liked more than before, but not a very insightful one.

Besides, we may be trusting NGOs because trust has to be placed somewhere. If you stop trusting journalists, politicians, businesspeople, etc – in some sense other non-controversial bodies (like charities) seem comparative beacons. They didn’t earn more trust. It got dumped on them. Nothing changed.

But, sure, we’re a bit short of people to trust just now. Good, one might say. A bit more scepticism (a bit less trust) might have kept us safer all along. Richard Edelman is quoted saying:

It has been a catastrophic year for business. It’s going to be harder to rebuild our economies because no institution has captured the trust that business has lost – trust is not a zero-sum game.

But isn’t this circular? We’re frightened. But the trouble will pass and we will become less frightened.

Other key findings also come with a measure of upbeat signs. Here’s a script:

Edelman: Trust in nearly every type of news outlet and spokesperson is down from last year. Trust in business magazines and stock or industry analyst reports—last year’s leaders—decreased from 57% to 44% and from 56% to 47%, respectively.
PS: Why would we trust the media which didn’t warn us of our impending doom and has no striking solutions for it?

Edelman: Globally, only 29% trust information about a company from a CEO—down from 36% last year.
PS: Perhaps, but the Edelman survey also reveals that sixty percent said they need to hear information about a company three to five times before they believe it. So they are more likely to want to hear more – not less – from everybody, including CEOs, analysts, experts, academics and media. Leaders still have to lead and show they have confidence in their ships’ ability to float.

Edelman: Only 13% trust corporate or product advertising—down from last year’s low of 20%.
PS: Sure. Why not say you distrust everything, just to be safe?

Edelman: In the UK, France, and Germany, trust in business was already at a low level of 36% among our tracking audience of 35-64 year-olds – and stayed there this year. The only EU countries where business made a notable gain in trust were the Netherlands and Sweden.
PS: What? No change? That shows that events had no impact. So perhaps we need to dig deeper into what message respondents are sending us. How do we square the absence of trust in corporate utterance with the mainentance of trust in the bodies as a whole?

Edelman: By a 3:1 margin, respondents say that government should intervene to regulate industry or nationalize companies to restore public trust.
PS: Regulation and nationalisation are profoundly different things. And both come in lots of  forms. The question and answers are sort of meaningless.

Edelman: In the major Western European economies of the U.K, France, and Germany, three-quarters say that government should step in to prevent future financial crises (73%, 75%, and 74%, respectively); in the United States, not even half (49%) say that the free market should be allowed to function independently.
PS: The public currently hates the “free market” and wants more government control. Who doesn’t? But again I doubt any very large or long-lasting politicial shift here. We’ll see.

Edelman: Globally, the call for government intervention also extends to issues like energy costs, global warming, and access to affordable healthcare, as respondents, by at least a 2:1 margin, say government has the primary responsibility for solving these issues. But business must collaborate: Two-thirds (66%) expect business to partner with governments and advocacy groups to solve these issues.
PS: Great. Death to socialism! Long live the state fixing market failure with the minimum of intervention.

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The study was released by “goodpurpose“, a consultancy at Edelman, the big PR firm. The only surprise is that nearly a third of consumers said something different. Only brave people declare themselves as uncaring when asked a motherhood-and-pie question.

Obviously, there is something to be said for people’s and firms’ good intentions coming together to get something worthwhile done.

The fact is that firms are also quite right and virtuous when they cater to what people really want (never mind what they say they want). The high-price, feel-good offer may not be all that meritorious. For starters, it excludes the poor and may not be as angelic as it claims.

Surely there is a competitive advantage to be had from the firm that says we offer a no-frills approach that leaves the cash in your pockets to do what good you think needs doing. In a recession such a promise has appeal. Given that banks and others have failed at their day job, is not the most important contribution business can make to the good of society the proper management of their fundamentals?

Moreover, are firms really the best bodies for promoting good causes? Are they the most efficient managers for overseeing environmental, community or other initiatives outside of their core expertise?

One could argue that by taking on such responsibilities on behalf of consumers firms are encouraging passivity on the part of their customers. Wouldn’t it be better if customers were active and independent when it comes to contributing to the greater good and good works? Active good work is really good, passivity is less so, surely?

The other issue is how can we be sure that firms are really doing the good they claim? Carbon offsets, for instance, have questionable value.

My point is not that good cause marketing is wrong or bad PR. It is just that this is a complicated issue. It is not as straightforward as Edelman would have us believe. The subject needs a wide airing so that firms offer customers real choice that appeals to their core stakeholders.

Lastly, it is time we went beyond being surprised by motherhood-and-pie opinions revealed by surveys. Oh, and isn’t there something rather bossy about all this? I find it brings out the bolshy in me.

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