In has come a bold recognition that business must be seen, as Edelman’s press release puts it, “as a force for good and [more significantly] an engine for profit”. But – yes there’s always one very BIG one of those – there’s a major contradiction at the heart of the lessons Edelman draws from its own results:

Consistent financial returns, innovative products and a highly regarded senior leadership are primary factors on which current trust levels lie. However, listening to customer feedback and putting customers ahead of profits are more vital to building future trust. [taken from press release: here]

It is as if Edelman is saying profit, innovation, new products and good leadership will win you trust today but not tomorrow. This message is suspect for a number of reasons. For example, trust is strong in business in every part of the world in which there is sustained economic growth. We should note, indeed, that current evidence from China suggests that future trust levels will fluctuate in proportion to the rate of, and the degree to which people are optimistic about, continued growth and social development.

Now let’s look at the cognitive dissonance among the public that Edelman’s survey uncovers. Edelman reports that while business is on average much more trusted than governments across the globe, 49% of respondents want governments to impose more regulations and supervision on business practices. On this point Richard Edelman usefully takes the lead:

The interventions people are asking government to take are changes business can step up and implement on its own [taken from press release]

That’s seemingly a robust pro-business message. Except it isn’t enough. Honesty is called for. In the future the West is going to continue to compete with emerging markets in the BRICS and elsewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America. As a consequence, many of the calls that the public are now making to restrain and control business are going to have to be resisted; of course that’s not the same thing as ditching corporate responsibility. Winning that argument by challenging the public’s current perceptions will take a protracted and frank debate.

Otherwise it is more likely that business will say one thing and then be forced to do another under the pressures of the real world. Already, business has had to cut back on its biggest social responsibility to its employees and society at large: pension provision. In the future things are likely to only get tougher still on many many fronts – so let’s be straight or we seriously will lose people’s trust.

The key to building and maintaining trust and confidence is not difficult to fathom. Today, wherever there is uncertainty and angst about economic growth in the future, there has been a massive fall in trust and confidence in the present, which looks set to continue if things don’t improve.

Hence the best PR from now on must be focused on making growth happen by removing the barriers to innovation, experimentation and profit making; be they limits imposed by governments or self-abnegation and concessions to protest movements. That calls for a battle for hearts and minds in the realm of public opinion. It will involve making consumerism and corporations chic once again and advocating rapid technological progress and economic development.

The upbeat culture we require to win back trust and overcome cynicism is totally at odds with today’s downbeat anti-growth, anti-technology and anti-corporate, pessimistic climate, particularly in the West with its Occupy Wall St protests. However, as yet, the PR world, including the Edelman PR Agency, does not agree with my viewpoint. So I predict we will continue to remain part of the problem for some more time to come.

See also: Edelman’s wonky 2011 Trust Survey

Related posts:

1. How PR sells firms and trust short

Before I counterattack with some beef, we need to review the four definitions currently on offer. The definitions all presuppose (or purposely pretend) that PR is mostly concerned with managing relationships between an organisation’s stakeholders and publics. That was a misconception addressed in my recent post PR is more about messages than relationships. Anyway, here comes PRSA’s three proposed definitions in their full glory:

No. 1 

Public relations is the management function of researching, engaging, communicating, and collaborating with stakeholders in an ethical manner to build mutually beneficial relationships and achieve results. (Read the annotated version here.)

PS’s comment: this is a loose, slippery definition. How do you define, or who gets to define, what constitutes “collaborating ethically”? The words “mutually beneficial” are waffle because only one side pays our fee and we can’t represent both sides’ interests equally. There’s something anodyne about “mutually beneficial” because the perception of “mutual benefit” sustains relationships of all sorts. Moreover, every management function involves “engaging, communicating and collaborating with stakeholders” or it is not a management function. The words “achieve results” provoke the question: results for whom?

No. 2 

Public relations is a strategic communication process that develops and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their key publics.

PS’s comment: the logic of this definition is that if you are doing tactical and reactive PR you are not doing PR at all. Moreover, tough luck if you are not on the “key publics” list. Yeah, right. (Read the annotated version here.)

No. 3 

Public relations is the engagement between organizations and individuals to achieve mutual understanding and realize strategic goals. (Read the annotated version here.)

PS’s comment: What if your goals and those of your client are not strategic? How do you define strategic? As for individuals, they rarely relate to institutions strategically. Greenpeace might understand the nuclear industry and vice versa: so what?

Problems with PRSA’s method

What’s amusing about the three PRSA definitions is that they were the result of the collaborative work of hundreds of professionals who submitted their own definitions of public relations during a two-week crowd-sourcing phase. As the PRSA explains:

Working from a qualitative and quantitative analysis of this input, PRSA’s Definition of Public Relations Task Force proposed six possible definitions, which were circulated to our global partners. Based on their collective feedback, the three candidate definitions… emerged.

Attempting to define PR through crowd-sourced inputs is a recipe for producing confusion and compromise rather than clarity. The likelihood is that the blind will continue to lead the blind in the wrong direction. Indeed, the old saying about a camel being a horse designed by a committee springs to mind. Be that as it may, the process of deriving the proposed definitions is not my main concern: I’m more interested in the what than in the how.

What PRSA fails to grasp is that PR is a trade, not a profession. PR is not comparable to law, medicine, accounting or even to architecture. They have a specific body of knowledge to master in order to qualify and then professional bodies and codes to regulate practice backed by a legal framework.

Assessing CPRS’s definition of PR

Before I spell out the real role PR plays in the real world, let’s examine in some detail why the fourth definition from the CPRS is far from honest. CPRS’s definition, which they’ve adopted and others believe has universal validity, claims:

Public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communication, to achieve understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest. (Flynn, Gregory & Valin, 2008)

This definition throws up a host of issues. First there is the question of whether our first duty as PR advisers is to our clients or to the public. Do we swear allegiance to both on equal terms even though it is our clients, rather than the public, which pay for our services? Would it be ethical to treat both responsibilities equally?

Proposition A (“realise organizational goals”) is scuppered by Proposition B (“and serve the public interest”), unless we are to have a rather strained oxymoron.

PRs are paid to promote the interests of their employers. They promote A within the bounds of decency and the law. They do this – if they do it properly – professionally in the best sense of the word. That is in the public interest (B) in the sense that having one-sided advocacy is a part of free society since freedom is not merely the right to speak but the understanding that truth and good sense emerge from competing arguments.

In other words, the defence advocate is serving the pubic interest almost whatever the merit of his or her client. Almost all the time, the PR’s job is to persuade the public that A equals B. But unless these two propositions are simply supposed to be coterminous (which is a stretch) there is often an important tension between propositions A and B. In reality, PRs have to favour A under the cover of espousing B.

The honest PR would admit that PRs dress up A as B. They would insist that his or her professionalism dictates that they should warn the public about the threat of “deception” (or at the very least, one-sidedness) which lies therein. This is why it is so unprofessional and sad and demeaning that PRs should (often do) pretend that A and B are always, or even should or must be, a good match.

It has always been a comfort to me and to colleagues that doing A is clearly defensible (within limits) and doable whilst achieving B is as hard to achieve as it is to define.

Public interest is hard to define

It is the impossibility of defining pubic interest (B) which has reinforced our civilisation’s conviction that lots of A (“realise organizational goals”), done competitively but within limits, is really the best way of achieving B. I say this in the spirit of how markets, democracies and debates are organised in the free world and how they actually behave in practice.

None of this is to deny that a PR may want to enrich an employer’s view of what A is, and do it by framing a view of B which could be promoted. A good example of this is corporate responsibility (CR) and a commitment to sustainability.

Hence, the honest PR needs to make a distinction between espousing B as an instrumental matter for pursuing A, and as a goal in its own right. He or she also must distinguish between pretending to know what B really is, and adopting a popular view of B, or a view of B which was plausible but also suited A.

Obviously the more B is bent out of shape so as to fit A the less the PR can claim a real moral power for his use of B, or for his employer as it claims to adopt B. Therein lies the accusation of greenwash and much more, as the rift between reality and practice produces a credibility gap.

It is my view that authenticity, truthfulness and being aligned with reality will nearly always and in the long run trump fluff, flannel and puff (spin) when it comes to winning long-term public trust; even if the case put is uncomfortable and unpopular. That’s to say: the long-term “organizational goals” will usually be best met with honest PR. With any luck, being honest will usually strike the public as having been in the public interest too.

The idea that PRs serves the public interest has rhetorical appeal precisely because it is a loose proposition. We all have our own wildly differing definitions of what it is; even if sometimes it is also clear to all (most) of us what it is not. In contrast, being honest – and prizing honesty – is a principle that has stood up pretty well over time.

That is why it may be best to leave the public interest out of it. The International Public Relations Association (IPRA) Gold Paper No: 6 seems on safer ground when it notes that:

‘[According to the Dutch PR association] Public relations is the systematic promotion of mutual understanding between an organisation and its public‘. Or, as the British express it: ‘Public relations is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its public’.

I have a fairly decent quibble with the British definition. To “maintain goodwill” might involve a good deal of deception or systematic lack of frankness. “Mutual understanding” has its attractions because to understand something includes the idea that what one is learning is not untrue. (The English language does not allow that one can “know” or “understand” an untruth.)

My view of what PR is about?

If forced to pick one word that captured the essence of public relations I would opt for “advocacy”: the act of pleading or arguing for something in the court of public opinion to influence an outcome on behalf of clients, preferably by using two-way communication techniques. That is to stress that I am not all that interested in PR which persuades people to think a certain thing unless the PR has invited and accepted and met informed challenge by the target audience. However, I’m not convinced that we could ever arrive at a “catch all” definition of our multi-faceted trade.

At the end of the day, PRs have to acknowledge that they are not in business to push their own varied agendas on to their clients. Rather they represent – advocate – their employers’ interests. PRs are more like barristers than priests. True, they can – like doctors or management consultants – help fix their employers’ problems. True, they can – like diplomats – bring the wider world to their employers and sensitise their employers to the wider world’s needs. Be they however sophisticated, flacks are hacks – they are for hire. That does not mean they leave decency or professionalism behind when they go to work.

Indeed, the definitions I recommend for them may be more rigorous and personally costly than swimming with the tide of fashionable nostrums, which is my beloved trade’s commonest activity right now.

(Apologies to regular readers of 21st Century PR Issues who might just recognise some of the text above, which originated here)

Recommended additional reading:

Heather Yaxley: Why I don’t care about defining public relations

PR Conversations: A defining moment for public relations

Stuart Bruce: Public relations defined for the 21st century

Please Revise…: “Defining” Public Relations 

21st-Century PR Issues: How PR sells firms and trust short

No related pages.

In a letter to the FT last week, she criticises PRs who worked for Col Gaddafi and any who wouldn’t mind working for Iran. Setting out her own ideas, Fiske gets into a muddle and contradicts herself without shame or perhaps without realising it:

We [Public Relations Society of America] believe every person or organisation has the right to have its voice heard in the global marketplace of ideas. But for PR firms to represent dictatorships that do not afford that same freedom to their own people is disingenuous towards the liberties of a democracy and to democratic societies’ reputations as marketplaces for dissenting ideas.

Well, she can’t have it both ways. Either everybody has a right to a PR advocate, or they don’t. Her position, if we take what she says seriously, is that only people who run their countries according to the same democratic principles as the United States deserve PR counsel from the Western world. Moreover, Fiske writes in her letter:

Ethical public relations places an emphasis on counselling reputable organisations and individuals in developing and maintaining beneficial relationships with concerned stakeholders.

Nice work if you can get it.

Leave aside for the moment that Fiske is positioning the PR industry as the arbiter – which we are not qualified to be – of which person and organisation or country is “reputable” or what stakeholders are “concerned”.

Surely, the point of some very important PR is that it helps people who are considered (or may self-evidently be) unreputable. If they were of good reputation, they’d have scant need of our work. Oil companies need a lot of PR when their pipes and ships leak. Tobacco companies presumably need good PR all the time. (See Thank You For Smoking.) Ditto, professional downsizers. (See Up in the Air.) You get the picture.

The point isn’t that so-called sinners should be denied PR. Surely it is: what class of rogue is so utterly roguish that PRs shouldn’t take their money? Of course, we all have our limits, but they’ll likely be different.

A moment’s thought suggests that famous, outed, seemingly obvious rogues have a strong claim to PR’s efforts. They are the targets of huge, prejudiced, tediously liberal, right-on attacks, which are often unjustified. Why shouldn’t they have a defence? Besides, such media “victims” come with a huge risk for PRs, and that makes defending them an act of some courage, and therefore of some merit on those grounds alone.

I can easily imagine why for selfish reasons most PR agencies might reject Col Gaddafi’s reputed two million pounds sterling to launch a belated lobbying campaign against NATO. They would be right, I suspect, to assume the contract would do their reputations more harm than it would do his any good. Though if anybody does take the job, they should not be condemned by fellow PRs living in glass houses. (See PR Week).

There are far murkier waters than these, though. What about the covert-rogue? That’s the one who has a good and undeserved reputation and employs PRs to keep it that way. Is that acceptable work for a PR? The answer depends in part on how nasty the rascal is and how much the PR knows. (See “Deadly Spin” is mere spin.)

It is no good for PRs to argue that they don’t have to be any more picky than a defence lawyer. While courts of law might be symmetrical, the court of public opinion seldom is. In reality, the balance of opinion and media coverage is often tipped unfairly against clients. Hence we rightly assume the prosecution is competent and well-resourced: its best shot is likely to be pretty good and merits as good a response as is available. (See A new moral agenda for PR.)

It seems pretty obvious that Ms Fiske’s position is obviously way too saintly. She suggests that even if the US government was working in the past to repair relations with Libya and Syria, American public relations firms should have cold-shouldered them. Her qualification for our endorsement appears to be “people like us”. But that would exclude Saudi Arabia, China and Russia and many other countries in which PR is booming.

Of course, one could argue that in China PR firms mostly represent Chinese companies, rather than the state. Except that would be dishonest. In China the state owns most major companies and still commands the economy. It also gets its claws, admittedly indirectly, into the Western firms which operate there. (See Google comes of age in China.)

Ms Fiske works for the Public Relations Society of America. I imagine that it would like PR to be a respectable profession. Presumably its members believe that obeying a rather strict code is good in itself or good for business or both. I am interested in the merits of that sort of scheme. (See: When “friends” fallout over “dirty tricks”.) But I also admire the PR firms that say they don’t want to be part of the public relations industry’s hypocrisy.

No related pages.

My first instinct is that it is very hard to give general advice in a list of three that won’t fall apart at the first hurdle. So from the off I’m pretty convinced he’s going to make the biggest mistake of all. Error #1 being pat. In addition he made three other simplistic errors:

#2 asserting that perception always trumps reality;

#3 advocating the grovel;

#4 advocating over-reaction.

Levick says that in a crisis the first 24 hours are critical. But that’s far from always true. Plenty of proper crises unfold over days, weeks and even months. There is often nothing to be done in the first 24 hours bar trying to find out what’s going on (whilst issuing numbingly dull statements of concern).

Levick says people get (1) stuck in fear (or rather believe that they’re the good guys); (2) stuck thinking more of what they always do will work in a crisis and (3) won’t make the radical changes which are needed. These amount to firms being in denial, and sometimes that’s a problem on all the scores he mentions, I agree.

But none of these general truisms implies or validates the formula Levick advocates. In short that’s that firms at the outset of a crisis should collapse into grovel mode; throw out the good with the bad of their culture (and sort it all out overnight) and shoot anything that limps providing it’s in their own camp.

Levick rightly remarks:

“You can never underestimate how much emotion plays a part in those crisis situations, in those critical 24, 48 hours.”

While that’s often the case, one of the commonest errors in a crisis situation is to pretend those emotions can be capped at the outset by PR spin and hasty action.

Of course, sometimes an immediate dramatic reaction is exactly what is required. In groceries, an instant product recall is a great move when E.coli bacteria is suspected to have contaminated produce. But in cars, it might be the right move only after days or weeks. (Why cause unnecessary panic, which can cause its own crisis?)

In the case of strife-ridden countries, which Levick says his advice covers, the full meaning of a challenge is seldom visible within days. Events rarely require knee-jerk responses so much as considered strategies and smart tactics. To say otherwise would be to put leaders at the mercy of impressions, which change like the wind.

But let’s get one thing clear. When things explode, when people get harmed or killed, property damaged and the environment polluted, organisations had better be penitent (but listen to their lawyers too) and never arrogant. This leads me on to take a closer look at Levick’s second distorted observation:

“Well, in a crisis perception always trumps reality 100% of the time.

“And one of the things that we need to recognize is that it requires a paradigm shift. We need to think and act differently.”

The point about PR is to certainly to stress to bosses that perceptions matter, and that action may be required to create a better perception. But PR does its best work when it bends false public perception into something like alignment with reality. If all we have to offer is to tell clients to accept whatever perception the media have painted, it reveals that we are not up to our job. The Levick line implies that all the paradigm shifts are on the bosses’ side: I say that we may need paradigm shifts all over the place, and they take time.

I do agree with Levick that lots of firms are often almost as awful as it’s possible to be at managing their PR hazards. Actually, their problem is threefold: thinking about risks in order to minimise them and thinking properly about how to deal with disasters when they arise and thinking about the PR dimension of the latter.

Companies – their CEOs and boards - ought to be stress testing the worst cock-ups they can imagine. Banks ought to have assumed that their run of good luck might be a bubble, and one of their making. Even saying this reminds us that at the highest level firms tend to be in denial about the risks they face. So it’s hardly surprising that they end up in denial when things go tits-up (as I know well, nuclear core meltdowns are a classic example of an industry falling into that trap). That leads me to question the last aspect of Levick’s advice:

“The third reason are the following three words: ‘why we can’t'…. everyone has been trained and paid to avoid risk. And now you are asking what risk should we take. And every one will always come up – no matter what the opportunity is. Should we recall the product, should we get rid of that division, should we fire that individual responsible. And everyone will come up with why we can’t. Why we can’t do it for financial reasons. Why we can’t do it for company morale reasons. Why we can’t do it for legal reasons. And the end result is that the opportunity early in a crisis to make a sacrifice and to do way with the brand, or the division or the person that is the cause of the problem ends up being lost…”

Fire a person? Get rid of a division? Do away with a brand? Make a sacrifice as a way out of a dilemma? Does he really believe that in most cases in most crisis-hit bodies they should take such drastic action in the first 24 to 48 hours of a crisis? Regardless of the facts? Regardless of whether one has just cause or not for doing so? I say that’s mostly rotten advice.

Though, as I said earlier, I agree that sometimes his advice might be exactly the right thing to accept. For instance, if the causes of a crisis are transparent, remedial action is obvious, if painful, and occasionally so if only for precautionary reasons.

Yet let’s not panic. Most firms could survive either following or ignoring Levick’s advice. There’s never been a car company ruined by a product recall. There’s never been an oil company wiped out by the consequences of an accident. The truth is that most so-called crises are not crises at all, but dramas. That’s life. Nothing gets done without hazard, and cock-ups come in all flavours. Hence, I maintain that case by case, the wheels fall off generalizations when it comes to crisis management guidance. That means that organisations and their PRs have to be canny and flexible – and certainly not pat.

Related posts:

1. How PR sells firms and trust short
2. How PR Sells Firms and Trusts Short

The White House, of course, does put a positive spin on all negative perceptions. The line is that the president inherited an economic mess that is taking longer than expected to fix; recovery is underway, affirming the president’s policies; the benefits of ObamaCare will soon become evident; Osama bin Laden has been taken out; the Afghanistan “preemptive withdrawal” strategy is working; and Libya is a matter for European and Arab countries and doesn’t require US leadership.

Still, much as we PR folks pride ourselves on our craft, there is a limit to what talking points can achieve. This narrative may satisfy political sympathizers but it is surely not enough to explain Barack Obama’s continuing level of popularity as the United States enters its election campaign season. Almost all of his predecessors had better economic records or could boast some significant progress in foreign policy. The fact is, Obama’s basic record does not compare favorably. So here are some non-spin explanations as to why he is still very much in the game.

First, there is currently no alternative to Barack Obama. Republican hopefuls have only just begun vying to win the opportunity to challenge him. The most likely choice at this point in time appears to be Mitt Romney, hardly a popular politician in his own party given the failing health care entitlement he introduced as governor of Massachusetts. Tougher opponents like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Chris Christie of New Jersey have said they won’t be competing. Several other candidates could emerge, including Sarah Palin, the bête noire of European intellectuals, but at the moment there is no clear leader rallying the conservative base.

Second, although the economy is doing badly, many voters are willing to give the president a little longer before judging whether his deficit-led/ weak dollar approach has helped or made things worse. The jury is still out on Obama’s economic policies.

Third, Obama is the consummate social justice politician governing in a social entitlement era. Most people in Europe have grown up expecting the state to take care of their old age and ill-health, and to intervene in economic activities for the common good. The United States is perhaps a generation behind this curve but its entitlement programs are in many ways more generous than Europe’s. The wheels of our entitlement culture are beginning to look wobbly, with riots in debt-ridden Greece, resistance to austerity measures in Portugal, and budget travails in California. But the financial limits of big government are still not widely accepted among independents and liberals. The US federal government has been protected from high interest rates by the reserve status of the dollar but with the big three entitlements – social security, Medicare and Medicaid – all heading towards insolvency, judgment day is coming ever closer to Washington. The backlash has begun in the United States with the Tea Party movement but hard political choices can still be deferred for now and Obama has even extended the gravy train with his controversial ObamaCare legislation.

Fourth, the US media is overwhelmingly pro-Democratic, pro-big government and overtly partisan. This means that the president does not have to contend with the same levels of scrutiny and criticism as his predecessor or his political opponents. The new electronic media and Fox News have injected some balance into the equation, but the playing field is still heavily tilted in the president’s favor.

Add to these four facets the personal appeal of the president, a predisposition among Americans to want their presidents to succeed, the absence of personal scandals and the discipline of former officials to keep differences to themselves, and we have the basis for Barack Obama’s current approval levels. In Europe, his unwillingness to flex America’s muscles, particularly in Libya, is also an approach that has been largely embraced.

But two things are sure to change over the next year. First, Barack Obama will have an opponent who will challenge and bring greater attention to his record. Second, voters will be entitled to make a judgment on the president’s economic record. Will they feel better off than four years earlier? Will they believe that the economy is getting better as a result of the president’s policies?

Public relations cannot claim the credit for the president’s approval ratings. Too many other factors are at work. A lot will happen between now and Election Day and, as the campaigning gets underway, the real spin starts now.

No related pages.

Here’s what Mr Blatter had to say at a press conference yesterday to his critics who were calling for his re-election to be delayed:

“Football is not in a crisis, only some difficulties… If governments try to intervene then something is wrong. I think Fifa is strong enough that we can deal with our problems inside Fifa… If you see the final match of the Champions League you must applaud… We are not in a crisis. We are only in some difficulties and these will be solved inside our family.

“The executive committee of Fifa was very pleased to receive the report of the FA regarding the allegations made by Lord Triesman at the House of Commons… We were happy that we can confirm there are no elements in this report which would even prompt any proceedings.

“If somebody wants to change something in the election or in the congress of Wednesday, these are the members of Fifa… This cannot be done by the executive committee, it cannot be done by any authorities outside of Fifa – it’s only the congress itself that can do it. Congress will decide if I am a valid or non-valid candidate.”

Spoken like the bold realist and constitutionalist. Very good “stag-at-bay” stuff. I also thought Mr Blatter was brilliant to say that he wanted to sort out governance - especially on the pitch, and then in his committees. First things first, he implied.

I know: he clearly lost his rag at yesterday’s press conference. He’s an old-style Swiss apparatchik. He is sometimes prone to control-freakish outbursts when faced by a hostile crowd. His PR advisers need to drill in to him that he must keep hold of his statesman-like mask in such situations. But, overall,  it was a very good performance.

His down-to-earth frankness was admirably refreshing. He made it crystal clear that he is, at bottom, accountable to his members (call them his core stakeholders). They have procedures and methods, which he is following, for handling elections of FIFA officials. Only his members, not the media or British prime ministers or the English FA, can unseat him or set the agenda.

Mr Blatter was surely right to say that he dealt with the executive committee members the world’s countries sent him. It was, however, a politically risky remark for him to make. In an ideal world, it was a statement of truth that would have been better coming from someone else. But it wasn’t an ideal world for Mr Blatter yesterday, and I guess he couldn’t hold himself back.

The really good news is that for once the media have not re-set the main agenda; they have not been allowed to take control. Indeed, my beloved British media lacked grace and wisdom perhaps especially because they realized that they were going to lose this battle against him. They behaved liked spoiled rats robbed of a feast. I say they are in denial about the realities of the game. Anyway, it was nice, solid stuff, a glimpse behind the mask.

The truth is that football’s reputation (here I mean its popularity) does not depend on FIFA’s reputation (here I mean its squeaky-clean image) so much as on FIFA’s competence to manage big events and the game’s general affairs. The fact is that FIFA does a good job of managing both.

It is the product that’s FIFA delivers that is loved, not FIFA. And, yes, like the referee FIFA sometimes unavoidably becomes the center of attention and that’s tough.

But in the eyes of the fans, the owners of football clubs and the game’s administrators are a necessary evil. The UK has many club owners who could be considered dodgy, but their money and enthusiasm are more than welcome in the game. Anyway, our English FA hardly sets a shining example of competence that would give it any moral authority over FIFA – see here here and here.

As for sponsors such as Adidas and Coca-Cola, they are not dumb. Sponsors know all about football’s quirks. There have been no surprises. Their recent tut-tutting to journalists is humbug. It will come to nothing because the likes of Coca-Cola and Emirates need the game as much as it needs them.

Of course there may well be a case for reform. Like the EU, the UN, the Olympics and other international bodies, FIFA is a candidate for corruption and for pork barrel politics. Corruption and manoeuvres are always a risk with federal systems where the periphery sends representatives to the centre. Corruption also thrives in situations in which big money, power and reputations are at stake but where there is little scrutiny.

FIFA has a major hand in how a big pot of money is spent and where it is spent. Naturally, FIFA has many supplicants. And, yes, there’s been poor oversight by media and member countries over many years.

It is also true that the British media, which are now screaming loudest at Mr Blatter, are always more agressive than any other when they smell a story. They have a courageous history of tracking down malfeasance in their own abrupt, sometimes rude manner. They are rightly feared by plenty of international bodies which are used to a complacent press.

Still, and contrary to what the British and other media say, Mr Blatter may be exactly the man to put FIFA right, provided he understands how to get the Corporate Governance and scrutiny right in future. Of course, I’m presupposing that he is good at this job, but my gut says he is. He probably knows where the bodies are buried. Besides: one was hardly ecstatic about the main rival candidate, Qatar’s Mohamed Bin Hammam.

I don’t say he’ll make either FIFA or himself lovely or loved, but they may both survive and do pretty good work.

Here’s my parting message:

Are you listening CEOs and PR gurus in crisis-hit organisations? Mr Blatter has shown you all how to come out fighting and win by sticking up for reality and by repelling media freeloaders from taking control of his ship. He won’t be bullied no matter how big the headlines get decrying him and his organisation.

The lesson from this struggle is that firms and institutions don’t have to let the media take control of the agenda during a crisis…. all it takes to win is some PR nous and some balls.

No related pages.

This playground spat was sparked by some leaked emails to the blogosphere. It seems Facebook wanted to traduce Google’s new Social Circle offering for violating users’ privacy rights without being identified as the shit-stirrer. The cause of the media “outrage” was an upfront admission from BM in an email trail that:

“I’m afraid I can’t disclose my client yet.”

One supposes the reason for non-disclosure was that Facebook’s reputation on privacy matters is arguably worse than Google’s. BM added, however, that the full facts of the case they were advocating were already in the public domain. In other words, they were inviting somebody to follow up some pointers.

So, never mind that BM has apologized for their role in this; I’ll criticize that in a moment. I’m going to argue that their two PRs behaved pretty well (see here for leading PR Steve Earl’s similar opinion).

In this instance, BM were dealing with somebody who knew the agency were being paid by a third party for PR work. The PR agency also believed that their potential advocate supported the views they sought to spread. They outlined some lines of argument which were already in the public domain and not unreasonable. The blogger they approached was advised to check BM’s facts for accuracy and for the degree to which he agreed with them. What does it matter who was paying BM? Would it have mattered if it was the Devil? I think not.

Sure, BM broke their own ethical code of practice. They did not walk the moral talk they spout. But the worst thing about this whole episode was playing the blame game. Questioning a client’s integrity is not a good image for our trade. The denial from Facebook also did the firm no favours. Facebook is now, anyway, once more the main target of the media’s angst about the “betrayal” of user privacy rights.

The best response from both parties to the exposure of their relationship would have been simply to admit to it. Silence might have also sufficed. Unfortunately, my beloved “so what?” would have been problematic given how BM was flouting its own code of conduct.

But let’s not let the media off the hook. Their outrage is bluster. The media rarely tells their readers which story was sparked or parked by a PR working on behalf of a particular client. Readers are mostly left in the dark about the who, the what and how of the birth of a story. If it were not so, the names of PR agencies, political insiders and their staff would be all over nearly every story published.

Quite rightly, the best media – just like the best PRs – look to the accuracy, veracity and fairness of what they say, write and advocate to establish their credibility.

The fact is a writer might have all sorts of interests and prejudices – including commercial – when he states this or that opinion. He might have shares, or old grudges, or – yes – a payment directly from a party to write a particular piece. Does it matter? The answer has to be, up to a point and depending on the circumstances. For instance, a paid employee writing about their firm cannot pretend to be an independent bystander. An analyst or financial journalist recommending a share as a buy, and who has a personal financial motive for doing so, must declare it openly etc..

Nevertheless, as a reader, I am most interested in a writer’s opinion. If I find it interesting (well-argued, peculiar, entertaining, whatever), then I’m likely to be influenced by it. If I see a writer’s byline, I will be drawn to it if he was interesting in the past. Their new bit of writing will either continue to amuse, or fail to, on its merits. I can usually judge those myself. But sometimes I depend on the authority of the writer’s editors for my sense of the writer’s merits. That’s where the reputation of the likes of The Economist or WSJ etc. matters most.

So let’s keep this real. BM did not really sin. Our industry should come clean about how it and the media really functions and about on what premises trust and integrity really rest.

No related pages.

A health warning. This is a 20 minute read. It’s a feet-up, cup-of-coffee or glass-of-wine read.

Its section go:

Trust: where’s the decline, really?
Inside the minds of kowtow thinkers
PR: The trade that hates itself
Different types of ARM PR
Three cases: BP, BA, France Telecom
The perils of modern individualism
Firms and institutions do not have to hate themselves
References

Trust: where’s the decline, really?
We are said to be in the middle of a crisis of trust. Since the public relations industry is supposed to be all about building the stuff – and since it has been well paid for at least 50 years to be ubiquitous and effective in doing so – one might expect us professional schmoozers to feel a bit guilty. Well, we don’t (or at least not much). We are more inclined to think that our clients rather deserve to be pilloried by the media and the public. Indeed, we are doing quite nicely out of advising businesses and other bodies on how to fix or manage the malaise.

As a matter of fact, I am a shade sceptical that businesses really are in the doghouse at all. When the ‘problem’ of the reputation of business first surfaced, I started looking at research on the subject. I was struck by the incoherence and inconsistency of what researchers claimed to have found. At the University of East Anglia, for instance, the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment led the way in agonising over the public perception of risk. In one paper, it found that only a very small percentage of the residents of Norwich were prepared to trust information from government or firms [1]. A few more (but still only a very few) trusted information from the media. More people trusted doctors or scientists. By far the greatest number of people placed their trust in environmental campaigners, friends and family.

Given my way of looking at the world, this was bizarre, to say the very least. It did not seem to accord with the realities of where one looked for accurate information. When I turned the page, though, this selfsame report seemed to find something a bit more cheerful – and somewhat at odds with what I had just read. It appears that a Mori poll had found that, while less than half of the population was inclined to trust scientists to speak honestly, those scientists who worked in industry were rather more trusted than were those who worked for government. Those scientists who work for campaigners were distrusted quite strongly.

In short, industry need not think that its voice is uniquely tainted. Indeed, for all I know, its reputation might improve quite a bit if it spoke as many truths as possible and let time prove them accurate. It might even help if these truths were harsh.

Let us (just for the sake of it) assume that some public opinion research is accurate – or at any rate influential. Research by the Edelman PR agency indicates that firms in China, Indonesia and Brazil are more trusted than those in the UK, Germany, France or the USA [2]. Why might that be? One reason for the anomaly may be that the public in the BRIC countries – the new ‘Tiger economies’ of Brazil, Russia, India and China – is naïve about firms. Maybe, though, it is not so much about naivety as about a genuine – and even quite well-informed – hopefulness about progress.

Perhaps industry in the emerging economies is confident of its merit. Perhaps we should mourn the decadent, self-doubting introspection of modern western mores.

I am in PR and it behoves me to look at the part played by my own trade in shaping or influencing the western public’s attitude to its firms. PR professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) are increasingly reluctant to defend the reputation of western firms. They would rather just go along with the prejudices that their researchers think they have uncovered than take on the tougher job of challenging them. They tell CEOs that their firms are hated or not trusted because capitalism is hated and not trusted. A vicious cycle ensues.

Many of us PRs are, of course, arts-type people with arts-type prejudices. We are (or would like to be) part of the metropolitan liberal world rather than the gritty commercial and entrepreneurial world. Like admen, we think of ourselves as ‘creatives’ rather than go-getters; as do-gooders rather than mere achievers. We often display a distinct dissidence, just like the journalists we spend so much time trying to influence. (Yes, I know PR is more than just media relations, but most PRs remain obsessed with social and mainstream media regardless.) If we were to be split into camps, these would be ‘liberal pragmatists’ and ‘pragmatists’: people with the wrong agenda or people with no agenda save for convenience. Either way, PRs have largely decided that what the media wants it ought to get.

Meanwhile, we PRs should not beat ourselves up too much either. Journalists say they don’t trust us. The public says it doesn’t trust the media. It’s all nonsense. Journalists get most of their information from PRs. The public gets most of its opinions from the media – mainstream or social. As a PR, I am able to spoon-feed journalists my information because what I say is accurate and well evidenced. They do not expect time to disprove what I tell them. That is the point about being professional: we have far more to gain from being accurate than we have from lying.

Going back to Edelman’s survey, its results show that PRs are less trusted as spokespeople than are lawyers. Who cares? I do not really believe that the public has any idea what PRs do, so it pays ignorant punters to play safe and to say they don’t trust spinmasters [3].

The problem with PRs today is not lack of credibility or influence. Rather it is how we exploit our powers of persuasion and how we perceive the world. PRs have convinced firms to launch pre-emptive communication campaigns aimed at stakeholders that (a) admit to the mistakes Darwinian capitalism is supposed to make; (b) apologises for the past practices; and (c) promises and demonstrates a willingness to reform. The objective, so it is argued, is to restore trust and to secure or maintain the licence of business to operate in a hostile world. Meanwhile, corporates and other institutions have accepted that self-abnegation is a sound strategy, because they accept that PRs know their trade. But do they? Have PRs become too willing to act as the prosecuting counsel and the advocates of cringe?

Something is wrong when, to take one example, the public’s trust in banks in India and China outweighs by far its confidence in London, New York or Zurich institutions [4]. Or rather, for all their recent failings, western banks are – at least in principle and largely in practice – a part of the wealth-creating open societies that host them. It may be that Asian banks, say, are less prone to hazardous innovation than are their western counterparts. But we ought to wonder whether they are more transparent, competent or trustworthy.

Therein lies another dimension that should make us a little more sanguine about the seemingly low levels of trust in western institutions: healthy scepticism is not the same thing as lack of trust, but it is a part of what keeps the West dynamic. That is certainly true of our scientific culture, and it has become almost too true of our democratic political culture. The corporate world is really quite prone to smugness and complacency. For that reason alone, it could probably do with a good dose of external challenge to keep it on its toes.

Still, I say PRs have sold business and society short. Of course, sometimes the public and the media call on an institution to apologise, reform and move on (ARM) for good reason. This is obviously the case when a firm or an institution knows it is guilty as charged. One example of this was in Canada in 2008, when listeria contamination of some Maple Leaf Foods products killed 22 people and harmed many more. When the origin of the contamination in its plant was identified beyond doubt, the firm accepted responsibility and unhesitatingly sought to make amends. But in most crises, actually locating blame is not such an easy task, and the issues involved are by no means one-sided or obvious.

In incidents such as Shell’s failure to dispose properly of its Brent Spar oil platform, France Telecom’s supposed responsibility for mass suicide, the Catholic Church’s child abuse scandal, or even Toyota’s recall of millions of its cars, the truths involved were conflicted, uncomfortable and awkward for all the parties involved. But in every one of those cases, most PRs urged the bodies concerned to surrender their integrity to the crowd and beg forgiveness, regardless of the facts.

Inside the minds of kowtow thinkers

One of the leading advocates of the kowtow PR culture in the UK is Sandra Macleod, group CEO of Echo Research. Her firm’s research on behalf of leading companies is often used by PRs to persuade CEOs and institutions to reform the way in which they behave, rather than to sell their core values more effectively. Here Macleod outlines her thinking:

“In our early days of innocence, many mistakes or misjudgements were made. We are paying the cost for it now – with pollution, climate change, distrust and mistrust. The ‘corporate speak’ train has reached its terminus. But awareness is the first step to the path of greater enlightenment and fundamental change and improvement.

“Harvard Business School Professor of Business Administration Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s new book SuperCorp argues that capitalism is at a crossroads. The old ways of doing business no longer work.” [5]

Macleod explains and endorses Kanter’s opinion that customers trust companies that do more than just provide goods and services. She also agrees with Kanter that workers are inspired by commercial opportunities, in which people go to work every day with the idea that they have two jobs: one to ‘do my job’ and the other to ‘change the world’. The ‘AAha factor’, says Macleod, is ‘we can do well by doing good’. She says that, by forming partnerships across sectors, firms bring together capabilities that promote the greater good, creating value for society beyond today’s markets and products. This is crucial. This style of PR argues that firms can only thrive by deeply, really internalising criticism from the world of activists and campaigners, including those who are profoundly anti-capitalist. In Kanter’s words:

“That has the potential to solve enormous social and environmental problems and, as a by-product, restore confidence in business. I hope that is the 21st-century model for the future of capitalism.”

In the same piece, Macleod quotes an article in the McKinsey Quarterly in support of her position:

“While unfortunately, short-term thinking is now endemic to business strategy… the financial crisis has increased the public’s expectations of business’s role in society. Most companies have maintained or increased their efforts to address socio-political issues, and many have already derived better-than-expected benefits from doing so.”

This view requires interrogation. The McKinsey line is interesting because it seems to imply that business is (a) short-termist in its approach and (b) long term in its societal aspirations. Is that not inviting us to say that the thing many people would like is for business to be business-like for the longer term? And if it achieved that, it wouldn’t have to get all self-conscious about saving the world? The major lesson of the recession, after all, was how bad things get when business fails at its day job, as the banks did.

As an advocate of ARM PR, Sandra Macleod captures well the new anti-competitive capitalism that her research says the public wants. She envisions a world in which:

“Governments [take] a stand and businesses [are] no longer seen as [the] unacceptable face of capitalism as balance sheets count [the] costs of social and environmental impact through policies, levies and taxation.

“A new science of qualities of life will emerge whereby growth and evolution are not seen as a competitive struggle but as a cooperative dance.

“Growth will be redefined beyond politics to a land of opportunities focusing on a better civil society and well being – in a world, as Senator Kennedy argued that ‘makes life so precious and makes us proud to be citizens of our countries and planets.’”

Macleod’s naivety (though I have no quibble with the value Senator Kennedy put on life) would once have been laughed at. The major point she misses is that it was market forces that built the great societies we live in. She too readily dismisses our heritage and denigrates the reputations that grew out of it. Moreover, her view does not reflect the tough realities that workers, firms and countries face as they battle to improve productivity and compete with each other in the real world (though the taxes are real enough). But Macleod’s line is the vision that many PRs recommend we sell to the public.

Another leader of the kowtow PR culture is Richard Edelman. He has a prominent platform at the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit, where he has reported how:

“…the consensus of CEOs was in favor of evolving the model away from Milton Friedman (the social responsibility of business is to make profit) toward a more nuanced approach of business’ positive contribution to society. Michael Porter, professor at Harvard Business School, said, ‘The greatest competitive advantage for business will be social. We used to believe there was a trade-off between profit and social issues. Now we know differently. We thought work place safety and environmental stewardship were expensive, but the highest return on investment comes from zero accidents and reengineering the supply chain to make you more efficient. Companies which understand complex social issues will turn them into competitive advantages.’” [6]

So, CEOs are being advised to present a utopian vision to their publics, in which all stakeholders are treated as equals, and in which firms exist to form partnerships with NGOs that are designed to promote ‘societal good’. They are even expected to pretend that business can or must engineer zero accidents and zero risk, which is downright misleading.

I want to be careful here, but not mealy-mouthed. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and high levels of safety are – up to a point – Very Good Things. However, though some of today’s CSR is invaluable and well executed, I do (rather unfashionably) believe that much of it is useless or silly. Be that as it may, the main point I want to get across here is that corporates should not always and everywhere wave the white flag in the face of criticism. A permanent affectation of guilt is as psychologically dangerous for a firm as it is for an individual.

The trade that hates itself

The strange thing is that PRs have little confidence in the social contribution they and their clients make to society. For instance, when Richard Edelman describes how his company makes a social contribution to society, he reveals a distaste for the ‘unreal-world’ practices that lie at the heart of his core business: defending and promoting other people’s reputations and businesses. Instead, he urges his staff to ‘live in color’:

“What I mean by this phrase is that we have a responsibility to live in the real world [partly by doing pro bono work]… We must recognize that there is a responsibility to have continuing education in our field that is dependent on getting out of the office, beyond the small world of billable hours, into a big world of imagination and social contribution.” [7]

His message appears to be that billable work does not make a significant social contribution to society, and that its content is detached from the world of imagination. He seems to be saying that we PRs reconnect with the world by doing stuff outside the office, rather than by creating the world we live in at work. In my experience, however, pro bono often risks becoming merely a stressful, self-interested extension of work and brand building (that is not virtuous at all). There is no dispute about the benefit of staff leading an active and constructive social life beyond paid work. But Mr Edelman ignores the obvious point that his staff need to remain billable, so as to live full and productive lives with their families in their communities. What I oppose is the dispiriting and demoralising consequences of Mr Edelman’s ‘live in color’ mantra, which denigrates his core business’s value and PR’s contribution to society.

Different types of ARM PR

Sometimes the focus of ARM PR is limited and sometimes it is wholesale. When it is limited, it involves reforming business practices, adopting CSR and sustainability programmes and resolving to do better in the future (some of this is certainly progressive). But when it’s wholesale it involves redefining a business, often for very dubious reasons. I have identified three broad camps into which firms and other institutions fall when it comes to ARM PR:

1. Those who adopt ARM as a PR strategy while not believing it. I think British Airways and BP fit this bill.

2. Those where the most senior people genuinely believe that the business has failed morally to some degree. Body Shop, Ben and Jerry’s (especially in its pre-Unilever incarnation), Timberland and maybe even HSBC belong here. The effect is that they seem anti-capitalist and appear to want to create a thoroughly post-Darwinian corporation.

3. Those that have suffered a cock-up and believe energetic apology is the most
effective strategy, whether or not they believe they are actually guilty. Here I would cite Toyota, certain banks and France Telecom. In the non-corporate sphere, one might add many UK social services departments.

So firms go along with this ARM PR agenda with varying degrees of honesty and enthusiasm. Some businesses have turned their anti-establishment agenda into a major part of their claim to integrity. Body Shop’s message, for instance, was validated by the genuine (and rather absurd) anti-corporate enthusiasm of its mouthy CEO and chairman. Similarly, it may be that HSBC’s adoption of CSR is genuine, given that its boss, Stephen Green, seems a genuine (and perhaps religiously motivated) enthusiast. But then again, banking and banks are about profit and loss, and there is no escaping the fact. The problem with all three approaches is that they all involve a display (to varying degrees) of self-hate, self-pity and cynicism about the nature of business per se.

Three case studies: BP, BA and France Telecom

BP’s ‘beyond petroleum’ was self-deception

Peter Sandman, the former PR consultant to BP, has given an insider’s insight into the rebranding of British Petroleum. He described how the company first became simply BP, then went on to adopt the lower-case bp on its logo, and finally redefined the meaning of BP as ‘beyond petroleum’. He cited this as an example of a company adopting the ‘reformed sinner’ persona. Addressing a group of PR and mine managers in Australia in 1998, he said that this:

“…works quite well if you can sell it… [Big oil companies] have done a very good job of saying to themselves, ‘Everyone thinks we are bad guys… We can’t just start out announcing we are good guys, so what we have to announce is we have finally realised we were bad guys and we are going to be better’… It makes it much easier for critics and the public to buy into the image of the industry as good guys after you have spent a while in purgatory.” [8]

John Kenney, one of the two Ogilvy & Mather executives responsible for BP’s ‘beyond petroleum’ tagline, outlined their methods in the New York Times [9]. He described how they talked to people on the street and heard a lot of gripes about oil companies. From what he says, he does not discount this sort of view or filter it or ponder its validity. He does not seem to care whether the views he hears are well informed, prejudiced or intelligent. But he decides to try to fix the perception problem – as indeed was his job. So Kenney and his boss develop a line which says, in effect: Look, BP are doing all sorts of things to address the ‘oil problem’.

The compelling attraction of Ogilvy & Mather’s ‘beyond petroleum’ tagline was that it matched what their research revealed: that the public claims to hate the oil business. Rebranding BP appeared a sensible way of outflanking public opinion by showing that the business was equally uncomfortable about the nature of its core business. That might have been a credible position had BP been serious about getting out of oil. But it wasn’t.

There was, of course, a rather major problem with the notion of BP going ‘beyond petroleum’. The realities of global warming (whether scientific or political) made oil more attractive than coal, just as it made gas more attractive than either of them. Demand for oil soared during the boom times. New drilling techniques were developed and new oil fields discovered. It soon became clear – and all along should have been – that BP was not going to be ‘fossil fuel free’ so much as ‘fossil fuel plus’. Hence Kenney writes in the New York Times:

“I guess, looking at it now, ‘beyond petroleum’ is just advertising. It’s become mere marketing – perhaps it always was – instead of a genuine attempt to engage the public in the debate or a corporate rallying cry to change the paradigm.”

BP was forced to rethink its ‘beyond petroleum’ stance after a couple of crises revealed that it was neglecting its day job. In 2005 there was the explosion that killed 15 people and injured more than 100 others at a BP plant in Texas. Then the following year there was a pipeline corrosion and oil leak crisis in Alaska. Both incidents highlighted that BP should have been more interested in petroleum and safety than in the company’s super-planetary virtuousness. The setbacks resulted in a change of leadership and a shift of emphasis back to oil. These events led some BP staff to re-label BP as meaning Big Problems [10].

As I write, in the Gulf of Mexico BP has just managed to staunch the flow of the biggest oil spill in US history. In terms of reputation, this is perhaps the biggest issue ever faced by any company. Since the Deepwater Horizon oil platform blew up and sank in April, oil has been gushing almost as furiously as Barack Obama’s anti-BP rhetoric. He has, of course, re-rebranded the company ‘British Petroleum’: this is a man who understands that the Americans are torn between respect for and dislike of the British. The handy trope of British arrogance is always available to American propagandists.

This all serves to remind us that the original rebranding of British Petroleum as BP/bp (not to mention ‘beyond petroleum’) was about as forlorn as the relabelling of Windscale as Sellafield after the nuclear plant’s chimneystack fire of 1957.

But it is moot whether – just because it became fairly adept at love-bombing the green vote – BP became any less competent in engineering terms. Though I suspect strongly that, if BP did lose engineering focus, this was because its drive for profit and deals was disguised behind a veil that misrepresented reality to both the company’s employees and the public. Arguably, ‘beyond petroleum’ became a risky distraction and a demoralising influence on the company’s reputation, safety culture, sense of self-worth and identity. In fact (and the appointment of Tony Hayward as CEO shows this, as does his subsequent replacement by Robert Dudley), BP was busy reminding itself of the merits of being technically competent and focused on the core business even as God, in his inimitable way, bowled it an untimely beam ball.

The reality BP had accepted was that its oil business had grown in size and risk, while its safety record in the US had gone downhill:

Two refineries owned by oil giant BP account for 97 percent of all flagrant violations found in the refining industry by government safety inspectors over the past three years… Most of BP’s citations were classified as ‘egregious, willful’ by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. [11]

According to the ABC news website:

“[Occupational Safety and Health Administration] statistics show BP ran up 760 ‘egregious, willful’ safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.” [12]

We do not know what BP’s American future will be. I for one certainly hope it will thrive there precisely because it does the right thing on every front in the Gulf, beginning with proving engineering diligence and continuing with being clear about its responsibilities (including their limits). I also hope that Barack Obama pays the full price for his finger-wagging and scapegoating, and not least for his pettish dislike of the British.

Presumably, Barack Obama is throwing as much mud as he can at BP because he recently lent his support to offshore exploration. He can thus in some sense be assumed to have approved of the regulatory regime that signed-off on BP’s operations in the Gulf.

Of course, the challenge for BP will be to switch from presenting itself as a self-hating sort of organisation that is keen to disguise its real, so-called ‘grubby’ purposes as it seeks to appeal to green opinion. I have mostly argued that firms should not cringe. At this moment, of course, BP must be penitent. But I shall risk saying that it must not stop being thoroughly adult. Insofar as it has done wrong, it must quite soon admit its part of the blame. It can then build on what seems to be its current quite sensible strategy – which is to say that it will stand by those it has damaged. Let us hope that BP can now play a noble role in a general corporate desire to move beyond infantilism.

The truth is that BP was always very, very petroleum. ‘Better (or even Best) Petroleum’ would have been – will be – a better tagline than ‘beyond petroleum’. But here’s another important truth. BP’s long-term trustworthiness and profitability may well survive this disaster, just as the Gulf of Mexico might recover more quickly than many observers expect. What is more, the disaster is likely to make it clear how the two properties of trust and profit are inextricably bound together.

BA: briefly ashamed of its flag’s roots

British Airways is another company that felt compelled to appear embarrassed by its roots. In 1996, it famously took the Union flag off its tailfins, logo and stationery.

The BBC reported at the time how BA’s aim was to create a cosmopolitan-feeling airline, not one trading on past glories of the Empire. It quotes Bob Ayling, the then head of BA, saying: ‘Perhaps we need to lose some of our old-fashioned Britishness and take on board some of the new British traits[13].’ The new ones were cited by Ayling as being linked to Britain’s ‘new’ friendly, diverse and open-to-all cultural image, rather than its old, rather remote and aloof one.

The Union flag was replaced on the carrier’s fleet by the many colours of the world. Symbols of the Ndebele tribe of Zimbabwe, animals and trees appeared on its Boeings. The airline’s Citiexpress Embraer sported Paithani – a variety of sari – on its tailfin. The company said its new ethnic makeover – costing £60 million – connected with the modern world, and not least with the 60 per cent of its passengers who were not British. In the process, BA rebranded and reformed itself.

To BA’s surprise, it discovered that its core values – all of which were hard-core, old-time, unabashed British – were prized by its non-British customers almost as much as by its British ones. Following a public rebellion led by consumers and a PR meltdown led by the media and politicians, the Union flag reappeared, with a BA spokeperson proclaiming:

“Rod [Eddington, Ayling’s successor as CEO] feels that Britishness is at the core of this airline’s appeal. We are a global carrier, but we are British and proud of it – and it is not just Britons who like our Britishness. Rod wants BA to be associated with Britain in the same way that BMW is associated with Germany, symbolising quality in a way that is understood worldwide.” [14]

France Telecom disingenuously admits guilt

Ever since it was semi-privatised in 1996, France Telecom, Europe’s biggest internet provider and third largest mobile operator (trading as Orange), has faced mounting competition and has been busily restructuring its business. Responding to union and political pressure, the company has been reluctant to make too many staff redundant. It has attempted instead to hang on to most of them, and in so doing created its own nightmare. Though it fired 60,000 employees, it redeployed many more thousands of otherwise redundant staff to newly created posts. It retrained many of them as salesmen, known as mobilités professionnelles (meaning they often worked away from home).

In reality, France Telecom workers were being pushed into unfamiliar roles, in jobs that were ill-defined. Staff sensed that many of them were in unsuitable positions, doing non-jobs that had no future or any real reason to exist. Meanwhile, management applied pressure to make the new structure work effectively. Given that most of the workers had no real role to play or any real prospects in their new jobs, they became understandably stressed and frustrated. They felt undervalued and under threat.

As discontent grew, so the focus of people’s anger concentrated on a spate of suicides and attempted suicides among France Telecom staff over an 18-month period in 2008–09. Some of these suicidal staff left notes blaming the company, and some of them attempted suicide at work. However, there was no real evidence that the company’s change-management strategy was to blame. As Oliver Barberot, France Telecom’s head of human relations, told the French satirical weekly newspaper Le Canard enchaîné:

“It’s [the number of suicides] not that dramatic, I have seen worse. The number of suicides is not even going up. In 2000 there were 28 and in 2002 there were 29 [compared to 24 suicides in the 18-month period that provoked the headlines].” [15]

However, despite the number of suicides being below the national average for the age profile of its staff, and despite the number going down rather than up, the company did not defend itself. It did not do so in the fond expectation that this would restore its reputation. Instead, it suspended its retraining programme of mobilités professionnelles. It employed more human relations staff and physicians who specialised in occupational medicine. It sent its heads of department on tour around France to investigate why their workers were so unhappy. First, Louis-Pierre Wenes, the architect of the modernisation drive stood down. Then the chief executive, Didier Lombard, was forced to resign, though he has remained the company’s chairman. In the process, France Telecom found itself paralysed for more than a year. It has yet to recover.

In effect, France Telecom ‘apologised’ and promised to ‘reform’ and to ‘move on’ in response to ‘outraged’ public (read media) opinion. By doing so, the company made it harder not only for itself to function as a business, but also for other firms to manage similar structural and emotional issues. So here is why I think it is immoral to resort to ARM PR in cases where the employer knows it is not the guilty party:

(1) ARM invites firms falsely to portray themselves as villains (think BP with ‘beyond petroleum’ and Shell with its Brent Spar oil platform).

(2) ARM invites firms falsely to assert that they can manage their affairs in ways that do not cause pain (France Telecom).

(3) ARM invites firms to dissemble (after all, it is untruthful to say you accept blame when actually you don’t and there is no evidence that you should). For instance, if France’s culture makes middle-aged men prone to suicide, does it help society to head off blaming France Telecom and then for France Telecom to blame itself?

(4) ARM creates moral hazard: campaigners know they can make false accusations and make their targets pay – think Pfizer with its Trovan crisis in Nigeria, where it stands accused of killing 11 children in a clinical trial [16]

(5) CSR – one could add sustainability and corporate responsibility generally – is an empty shell, inviting contempt, unless it speaks to business realities (think about the moral crusade against banks and what it will actually take – and what we shall have to accept – to get them working properly again; and think public sector cuts and the truth of the pain they will cause).

The perils of modern individualism
I make the point on my blog 21st Century PR Issues [17] that there is a problem with modern individualism: it makes people nurture their vulnerability and makes them see themselves as victims of capitalism, whereas in fact they are more likely victims of emotionalism, nonsense and downright deception. In short, France Telecom said it cared for the inner self of its employees when it didn’t; or, if it did care, it said so when there was only so much it could do to help (which was not much).

Of course, ARM PR works in the short term; but over a longer period it is corrosive. It buys firms breathing space in a crisis. It also breeds an underlying unease among the public(s) about motives, and gnaws at the self-confidence of the very firms that practise it. For instance, it is interesting to note that the suicides and stress at France Telecom were all among those workers who kept their jobs: presumably those who lost theirs suffered less angst because they knew where they stood.

The turmoil at France Telecom is a classic example of self-hate and self-flagellation gripping western business. France Telecom was by no means an uncaring monster; its problems stemmed from its attempt to please too many of its stakeholders – particularly the unions. Of course, leaving aside France Telecom, France itself is a country where things tend to be controlled by the state. Many of the company’s problems were created by political considerations. However, the logic this case highlights will be recognised by lots of employers (not least British Airways, which nearly fell into the same trap with its over-indulged trolley dollies).

Firms and institutions do not have to hate themselves
Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, carried out a study based on interviews with the heads and human resource departments of 98 of India’s 150 biggest companies on the key differences between Indian and western bosses. According to the CNN website, he found that:

“…every leader interviewed gave a specific social purpose as being the goal of their business. Those purposes ranged from improving healthcare in India, to getting cell phones to people who don’t have access to communication tools, and proving to the international community that Indian companies can lead in IT.” [18]

Thus Indian bosses are committed to motivating their staff around whatever it is that the core purpose of the business happens to be:

“In terms of lessons for managers elsewhere, one of the most important things is that Indian leaders lead with a sense of social purpose.”

So one has to promote one’s firm as having a social purpose. Of course that makes sense. But for some reason, in the West we seem to have reached a point where sticking to the knitting – doing the things the firm is overtly dedicated to – will not suffice. Indeed, this has come to seem deeply suspect. Only the ‘add-on’ of CSR is sellable.

But the core purpose of a pharmaceutical or a phone company is the same in New York or Newcastle as it is in New Delhi. The difference is that in India it is pushed to the fore as the reason for the firm’s existence.

These things are necessarily nuanced. Indian bosses reported that they had less pressure to meet quarterly targets than their western counterparts, and therefore they could set more long-term goals. That indeed is a luxury worth having.

Certainly the West has a problem with planning for the long term, and we must fix that. But it is worth noting that the Indian economy is massively profitable on the back of low labour costs and a focus on core purpose, and that its focus on financial performance is relentless.

The self-confidence of Indian and Chinese business contrasts sharply with the ‘miserablism’ of the West. This leads me to my conclusion.

Right now, it is not so much that PRs are lying about the real world (though sometimes they do), as that they are recommending – whether from conviction, cynicism or pragmatism – that firms and other institutions should wear the badges of self-hate, self-pity and low self-esteem on their sleeves. The problem is that such sentiments are now deeply embedded and internalised at all levels of society. Hence, there is an urgent need for a more robust, self-confident style of PR to emerge. Not least because the world is changing.

There is a new balance of power emerging in the world as the BRIC countries rise to prominence without the restraining hand of the West’s insecure emotional baggage. Survival in this new environment calls for robust, often brutal and agile strategies and tactics, delivered at speed by leaders who are accountable for their decisions. In support of this challenge, PRs should be discussing how we position and sell this new world to the masses – among whom many will be losers and many more winners. Rather than knocking them, we should be shoring up the backbone and confidence of western firms and institutions.

References:
1. Tim O’Riordan, Claire Marris and Ian Langford (1997) ‘Images of science underlying public perceptions of risk’, in Science, Policy and Risk. London: Royal Society.

2. Edelman Trust (2010) ‘Building a mosaic of trust’ (Executive Summary), available at: www.edelman.com/trust/2010/

3. Charles H. Green (2007) ‘Trust and the PR profession’, available at: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/137/Trust-and-the-PR-Profession

4. Edelman Trust (2010) ‘Building a mosaic of trust’ (Executive Summary), p. 4, available at: www.edelman.com/trust/2010/

5. Sandra Macleod (n.d.) ‘CR and sustainability, commit or crunch?’, available at: www.ipra.org/detail.asp?articleid=1446

6. Richard Edelman (2010) ‘A sober and reflective Davos’, Richard Edelman website, 3 February, available at: www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/archives/2010/02/

7. Richard Edelman (2004) ‘Living in color’, Richard Edelman website, 21 December, available at: www.edelman.com/speak_up/blog/archives/2004/12/living_in_color.html

8. Bob Burton (1999) ‘Packaging the beast: A public relations lesson in type casting’, Center for Media and Democracy website, available at: www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q1/beast.html

9. John Kenney (2006) ‘Beyond propaganda’, New York Times, 14 August, available at: www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/opinion/14kenney.html?_r=1

10. Michael Harrison and Andrew Buncombe (2006) ‘BP: Big problems for oil giant’, Independent, 30 August, available at: www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/bp-big-problems-for-oil-giant-413933.html

11. Jim Morris and M. B. Pell (2010) ‘Renegade refiner: OSHA says BP has “systemic safety problem”’, Center for Public Integrity website, 16 May, available at: www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2085/

12. Pierre Thomas, Lisa Jones, Jack Cloherty and Jason Ryan (2010) ‘BP’s dismal safety record’, ABC World News website, 27 May, available at: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/bps-dismal-safety-record/story?id=10763042

13. ‘R.I.P. British Airways’ funky tailfins’, BBC News website, 11 May 2001, available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1325127.stm

14. Paul Marston (2001) ‘BA restores Union flag design to all tailfins’, Daily Telegraph, 11 May, available at : www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1329843/BA-restores-Union-flag-design-to-all-tailfins.html

15. Stefan Simons (2009) ‘French government steps in to stop staff deaths’, Spiegel Online International website, 17 September, available at: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,649715,00.html

16. See ‘Trovan fact sheet’, available at: http://media.pfizer.com/files/news/trovan_fact_sheet_final.pdf

17. http://paulseaman.eu/

18. Mark Tutton (2010) ‘What bosses can learn from India’s business leaders’, CNN International website, 5 March, available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/03/05/india.leadership.lessons

No related pages.

The Economist, for instance, has been quick to trash Edelman’s headline that suggests “Trust Stabilises Globally”. It reports:

“…on closer inspection of the data—garnered by polling members of the “informed public” (college-educated, in the top quarter by earnings for their age and country, etc) in 23 countries—it turns out that, rather than stabilising, in many respects trust is continuing to decline.

It goes on:

“…[the] aggregate picture masks some bad news, especially for the world’s superpower, where the trust Americans have in their government has fallen to a lowly 40%, from 46% last year. Americans’ trust in business has also dropped sharply, from 54% in 2010 to 46%. Trust in business also fell in Britain, from 49% to 44%, though the British feel more trusting towards their government (albeit a hardly ecstatic 43%, up from 38%), perhaps because it is too recently elected to have totally disillusioned them.”

But trust in government in Italy has risen sharply (that must have brought a smile to Berlusconi’s lipstick-smeared lips), though it remains no match for the trust put in Brazil and China’s governments. As The Economist put it:

“Indeed, the level of trust reported in the Chinese government is so high that it makes one wonder if the sort of influential people surveyed by Edelman are reluctant to trust opinion pollsters with their real opinion of their political rulers.”

It is also worth noting that trust in Italy’s media – mostly owned by Mr. Berlusconi – is also up from 38% last year to 45% this year (that compares to the drop in trust in the UK’s media from 31% to 22%). Chinese media is, of course, the most trusted on earth (up from 63% to 80%) . Yeah, right.

What was interesting this year was that Edelman tested how much trust people put in Milton Friedman’s economics and the pursuit of profit as the first duty of business:

“Edelman asked its sample if they agreed with the view traditionally associated with Milton Friedman, the late Nobel Laureate in economics that “the social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits.” The United Arab Emirates proved to be the most Friedmanite, with 84% agreeing, just ahead of Japan, rather unexpectedly given its reputation as a stakeholder-oriented corporate world, with 72%. Sweden, which is also seen abroad as an anti-Friedmanite bastion also scored high, at 60%.

I’ve pointed out before how in Japan a long period of deflation, recession and reality broke the country’s commitment to consensus building. Japan has actually become more enthusiastically capitalistic than ever as it seeks ways to reboot its economy. However, The Economist reports that the public (in this context Europe and America) does not yet see the future the same way Japan does:

“America, supposedly the land of profit maximisation über alles, scored only 56%, and Britain 43%. Less surprisingly, Friedman’s views drew little support in stakeholder-friendly Germany, Italy and Spain, at 35%, 33% and 30%, respectively—ie, less support for profit maximisation than in China, whose nonetheless relatively low score suggests that its public embrace of red-blooded capitalism still has some way to go.”

“Edelman found, there are very high levels of support for the view that firms should be willing to sacrifice some profits to meet their commitments to their various stakeholders. The percentages are startling—91% in Germany, 89% in Britain, Ireland and China. America is only slightly further behind. Even in those countries with the lowest support for this particular view—Brazil, Japan and the United Arab Emirates—there was still a majority who agreed with it.”

The findings no doubt will fuel the argument that says business should work in partnership with NGOs, whose trust levels (up from an average of 57% last year to 61%) remain, on average, significantly below those of the Chinese government. So, if partnering with NGOs is a helpful means of securing a better corporate reputation, one wonders why partnering with the Chinese government would not be even more effective (ask Google, I guess). Of course, China represents the world’s largest and fastest-growing market, so it is an obvious win-win from a business perspective.

But Edelman, you can be sure, will use its results to boost its call to treat all stakeholders as equals. It will use the results to continue advising firms to outsource their reputations to NGOs and to seek ways to “prove” that they are doing well by doing good with the aid of a third party stamp of approval.

The fact that the facts don’t fit Edelman’s narrative – of business and society and shared values – should raise some eyebrows among the rest of us. Perhaps it is time to ditch the do gooding agenda and get back to business?

See also: Edelman’s trust survey interrogated

No related pages.

This essay interrogates the response of leading academics, especially Jim Grunig, as they aimed to build an idea of PR fit for the post-modern, reflexive, inter-active, wisdom-of-crowds, stakeholder society environment they studied.

As the post Second World War euphoria fizzled out into new-age angst, the late 60s and 70s saw optimism turned into scepticism about progress. During that period protest movements arose that questioned the “military-industrial” complex of white-coated experts motivated by profit. Capitalism, it was claimed, was destroying the planet. People became increasingly sceptical about the value and consequences of economic growth. Books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and groups such as Greenpeace fuelled a green backlash that we are still experiencing.

Events such as the core meltdowns of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl spooked the world. They became indelible symbols of man’s folly and served as proof points among anti-corporate anti-technology campaigners. Thirty years or so later, the nuclear industry has barely recovered. Moreover within the nascent environmental movement were the seeds of the new radical politics of the 1990s. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 anti-capitalist sentiment took on different dimensions. Communism, socialism and the peace movement rapidly lost credibility. New forces emerged, consisting of politicised greens aligned with anti-globalisation protesters.

There was a feeling – one shared by protesters and serious thinkers – that major corporations had participated in undermining the sense of community which held society together. The growth of the shopping mall on the city outskirts, for instance, was seemingly responsible for turning town centers into decrepit zones inhabited by criminals. The likes the US’s WalMart and the UK’s Tesco became liberal bête noires. It was said that the corporate and major institutions in society were suffering from a core values crisis and, as a result, a trust deficit (see here how WalMart redefined the debate in the internet age by exposing Potemkin communities).

In the 1990s, from global warming to globalisation, the PR trade’s clients – particularly large multi-national companies – found themselves on the receiving end of a hostile crowd’s anger. The movement’s aims were popularised in books such as Naomi Klein’s NoLogo, a title that struck a blow at brand value, consumerism and globalisation.

The anti-globalisation protest peaked at the Battle of Seattle in 1999. In scenes reminiscent of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s, Seattle’s air was filled with tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets as militant demonstrators clashed with police. As delegates arrived at the conference their way was blocked by groups of demonstrators chained together at street crossings. One group even managed to disrupt the opening ceremony. Elsewhere mobs roamed the city smashing windows, singling out Starbucks’s for special attention. A civil emergency was declared. The National Guard took control and enforced a curfew. More than 600 people were arrested from the 40 000 or so protesters.

This was one of many such outbreaks of violence across the world. Similar riots took place outside major international conferences of bodies such as the World Economic Forum, the G8, EU and even the UN conferences on global warming. It was as if no international conference was safe from the mob.

There was a sense that corporations and governments were losing their grip on public opinion because their ethics and morals were not the same as the audience’s. This feeling became more extreme as the world’s economies boomed in the late 20th and for some of the first decade of the 21st century.

The anti-globalisation lobby became more subdued after 9/11 and more still after the global credit crunch turned into a global recession. Yet the interconnected economy, as the WEF savants of Davos now euphemistically dub globalisation, is now more rampant, arguably more in demand, than ever in the developing world.

Nevertheless, green, anti-corporate and anti-growth sentiments remain strong, particularly in the developed West.

In fact, while all these trends characterise something tangible, it would be wrong to accept such a one-sided picture of Western enthusiasm for anti-consumerism. The very fact that global economies boomed mostly from the 1980s onward shows another side to society’s drive that’s diametrically opposed to the campaigners’ viewpoint. The masses of the world embraced globalisation. They adopted new technologies such as mobile phones, IT, internet, CDs, DVDs, GMOs and bought more cheapened old ones such as air travel and cars etc..

It is debatable whether the protesters ever deserved the attention they received. It is also questionable whether they ever really represented the views and instincts of the avaricious consuming masses who expressed their will through their purchasing power. But of the influence of the protesters on academia, the media and on political debate there can be little doubt. This middle class green backlash had clout.

Dead-end search for models

Recognising the challenge in the 1980s and early 1990s were two PR academics, Jim Grunig, Professor Emeritus for the Department of Communication at University of Maryland, and Todd Hunt, Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University School of Communication. They came together with their peers in an attempt to find the key to reconnect corporate America with its public, and on a more ambitious scale the American nation with world opinion. At the same time they sought to address the low esteem PR was held in. They believed PR required a model that would define it as a proper profession and explain its role and behaviour to both the public and clients.

In their view, the absence of a progressive model was holding PR back; a model being a simplified representation of reality. They reasoned that one was required to transform PR into an acknowledged ethical, credible, trustworthy profession. They thought this was required to help head off activist protests and to put public relations professionals (let’s just call them ‘PRs’) at the head of the corporate pyramid with the C-suite.

The intention of Grunig and his supporters was to position public relations beyond advocacy. They felt that self-interest was not the exclusive motivation that PRs should focus on. They said it had to be combined with concern for others and for the impact an organisation’s behaviour had on the environment. In short, they wanted to produce a model of PR that could be used to balance corporate self-interest with the public interest, or with the interest of others.

In their 1984 classic Managing Public Relations, Grunig and Hunt put forward four models of public relations which encompassed its historical and current practice:

The first was a one-way communication model based on media relations, or press agentry, which seeks to get favourable coverage by either ethical or unethical means, depending on the practitioner’s standards.

The second was the public information model which is a one-way communication process where the PR acts as a conduit for distributing the client’s news.

The third was the asymmetrical model, which could be two-way or one-way, which uses persuasion and manipulation, backed by research, to bend the wills of an audience the client’s way in a process.

The fourth (the preferred model) was two-way symmetrical communication in which PRs resolve conflict by promoting mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and their public(s). The objective here, according to Grunig, was to use research and dialogue to bring about symbiotic changes of ideas, attitudes and behaviours of both audiences and organisations.

The two-way symmetrical model was, of course, an idealised model for PR practice that sought to separate it from its persuasive, propaganda and (supposedly) one-sided roots.

The preferred model was, I acknowledge, a very natural and legitimate attempt by PR practitioners to manage their own reputations. It was, though, not just mistaken, but a dangerous corrosive approach to engaging the public.

What’s interesting is how Grunig defined the public, which, he said, “can be identified and classified in the context to which they are aware of the problem and the extent to which they do something about the problem.” That effectively conflates the term public with activists, often militant anti-capitalist ones at that. Hence Grunig’s style of PR accepts the terms of discussion – the symbols and stereotypes – from the activists. It ends up perverting institutions by urging them to develop their narratives in a way that is out of sync with the public opinion of the silent majority.

The two-way symmetrical model of PR rests on a number of assumptions that require interrogation. It positions PRs as mediators between their clients and their publics. Rather grandly it supposes that PRs are the moral keepers of their organisations. With this model PR gives the target audience equal status to the paymaster. The objective is to ensure that no side dominates the communication process and all sides’ views are treated on level terms. To ensure fairness it assumes that both sides agree to abide by a set of rules which can be audited transparently to ensure compliance.

Its proponents claim that this approach is ethical because it empowers PRs to organise how the dialogue is conducted, or at least to negotiate the terms of engagement. Jim Grunig sums it up thus:

“To be successful, however, they [PRs] must be able to convince their client organizations and publics that a symmetrical approach will enhance their self-interests more than will an asymmetrical approach and, at the same time, that it will enhance their reputations as ethical, socially responsible organizations and publics.”

[Two-way Symmetrical Public Relations, Past. Present and Future, Jim Grunig, page 18 in Public Relations Handbook.]

For the model to work, rigorous research of their target audiences’ views is required. This information is then used by PRs. Ironically, knowledge is power and the more money one has the more research becomes possible. This fact clearly undermined Grunig’s proposition that PRs could mediate effectively between their clients and their publics in an objective and neutral manner. It scuppered the stated intent that neither side should control the perception of the other side’s ideas and viewpoints.

Hence Grunig has since been forced to revise his model representation of reality. To his credit, he accepted that his idealistic social perspective of PRs role in society took no account of the PR’s motives (PR is paid for by only one side of the relationship). In response, he put forward a compromise that acknowledged mixed motive communication.

Professor Grunig re-cast his theory by arguing that two-way symmetry is a process not an outcome. He said it was not so much about reaching a consensus with activists as about collaboration and conducting a dialogue. He defined the new take as a discourse designed to balance the private and public interest. Commenting on how the re-jigged models aligned, he wrote:

“Rather than placing the two-way asymmetrical model at one end of a continuum and the two-way symmetrical model at the other end….. A public relations strategy at either end would favor the interests of either the organization or the public to the exclusion of the other…..The middle of the continuum contains a symmetrical win-win zone where organizations and publics engage in mixed-motive communication.

“With this new model of combined two-way public relations, the difference between mixed motive and two-way symmetrical models disappears. In fact, describing the symmetrical model as a mixed motive games resolves the criticism that the symmetrical model forces the organization to sacrifice its interests to those of the public.” [Ibid, page 25]

Mixed motive communication then becomes a collaborative advocacy (the cooperative dance as Sandra Macleod likes to say) that defines what Grunig describes as a cooperative antagonism (which he accepts involves two-way asymmetrical communication as being inherent to the process).

Grunig’s philosophical pretensions

The idea Grunig posits as being practical and ethical is that all the players retain their uniqueness and self-interest in the process of negotiation. In support of this notion, Grunig calls for help from a leading Marxist semiotics and structuralist theoretician by the name of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. He maintained that the essential quality of a dialogue is the simultaneous fusion or unity of multiple voices. However each voice retains its uniqueness and there’s an ongoing dynamic tension with and differentiation from the Other. It is from this understanding that Jim Grunig comes to redefine what public relations is about, thus:

“Simultaneous fusion with the Other while retaining the uniqueness of one’s self-interest seems to describe well the challenge of symmetrical public relations.” [Ibid, p28.]

This approach to PR supposedly draws on Kantian philosophy. This reminds us, in the tradition of humanism, that stakeholders (any humans, actually, rather than just those PRs define as being relevant to their purpose) are ends-in-themselves, rather than a means to an end. The views of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas are also cited in an attempt to give the model bottom. Habermas maintains that dialogue and not monologue is essential to mutual human understanding.

Grunig, in common with many PR thinkers, mistakenly believes that PR is about establishing mutual understanding between publics and their clients. Actually, PR is about advocacy on behalf of clients and achieving client objectives, something that achieving mutual understanding may or may not help. It isn’t necessarily necessary, for instance, that firms understand campaigners or campaigners understand firms. PR’s customers usually hope that – one way or another – their activities come to be accepted. They are dealing with real life challenges; not in a seminar. Nor is it all that obvious that a self-improving firm, anxious to be a good world citizen, should assume that it only has to get into an understanding with its critics to achieve its goal.

Anyway, Grunig has proposed that PRs, their clients and their opponents, retain a get out of jail card. He says that if after dialogue one side cannot accommodate the other it can disengage ethically from the symmetrical process. Of course, failure and the perception of the other side’s willingness to cooperate is a subjective matter. This joker in Grunig’s pack rather suggests that persuasion and getting one’s own way lie at the heart of his game-plan; at the end of the day by any means possible (within the law, of course). Indeed, Grunig tries to make a “virtue” of this motivation:

“…we have stated consistently that the symmetrical model serves the self-interest of the organization better than an asymmetrical model because ‘organizations get more of what they want when they give up some of what they want.’” [Ibid]

However where there’s a clash of seemingly irreconcilable forces over issues, such as pro- versus anti-abortionist, ditto nuclear power, ditto GMOs, and so on, Grunig’s symmetry runs aground. That’s because there really are fundamental differences in the opposing cases: these are existential and can’t be moderated away. Hence Grunig accepts that two-way PR becomes virtually impossible (except at the margins) when negotiating between two publics with diametrically opposed moral viewpoints. This is so with pro and anti-abortionists, for instance, or when anti-trust laws prevent collusion. So it is unfair to say that he is totally idealistic.

It is in the murky space where deals can be made that Grunig’s approach to PR becomes risky. Even when compromises can be reached, the obsession with engaging activists in a cooperative dance has very often eaten away at the values, self-confidence, self-belief, integrity and identity of organisations; as it did when BP said it had gone Beyond Petroleum (a change which was both skin-deep and corrosive).

Grunig, rightly in my view, says that persuasion is indeed what PRs do but that the persuasion of PRs cuts two ways:

“If persuasion occurs, the public should be just as likely to persuade the organization management to change attitudes or behavior as the organization is likely to change the public’s attitude of behavior.” [Ibid]

Sure, we can all agree that compromise is part of life. Compromise is necessary, and perfectly normal, regardless of the form or model of communication an organisation chooses to adopt. But allowing protesters or activist publics to set agendas risks persuading an organisation to give up something that is perfectly legitimate. Arguably this happened when Shell was persuaded to abandon dumping its Brent Spar oil platform deep at sea: the upshot was a less ecologically-sound solution. The regulator and the corporation had had the right idea in the first place and trust in both was eroded – not bolstered – by their giving in to emotionalism.

Contrary to what Grunig’s supporters say, the asymmetrical models of PR are not awful, if they are good descriptions of how different sorts of PR actually work. But they are a rather clumsy way of arriving at one idea (or ideal) of what PR excellence might be like: a symmetrical two-way process in which power is equal between the two parties, and so is the flow of argument and respect.

This begs many questions. It is indeed often wise for negotiators (which is what PRs are in the symmetrical two way process) to assume that the other party’s case is real and serious at least to the party which holds it. But that way lies relativism. It may be intellectually dishonest and dangerous in other ways too (for instance, assuming your opponent is rational and sincere may not be wise when she or he is idiotic, lying and or prone to terrorism). Such relativism, from left-wing critics of Grunig, led some PR academics to make excuses for terrorism, as if supposedly hegemonic asymmetrical PR were to blame:

“Yet we would also argue, in agreement with Deetz (1992) and Philo and Miller (2001), that Western corporate capitalism has succeeded in dominating the range of discourses, and indeed our material practices to such an extent that it is difficult for alternative discourses and practices to rise to any level of ascendancy without violence – as the 9/11 attack on the World trade Center demonstrated. Those attacks can be understood as an attempt to make America and Europe by attention to accumulated Muslim resentments against a history of western prejudice, exploitation, and anti-Muslim foreign policy in the Middle East”

[Source: "From propaganda to discourse", by Weaver, Motion and Roper in Critical perspectives in public relations; International Thomson Business Press, London, 2006]

The assumption here is that the “other side’s” claims are legitimate. It is also worth noting that no rational explanation has been given for 9/11 and that those that have been provided have been totally contradictory. Terrorism is nihilistic. It is not prone to rational explanation or interpretation. Blaming the West for 9/11 says more about the views of the PRs who make such comments than it does about the motivation of the terrorists.

Grunig is not the problem

I’m almost sorry to focus on Grunig. He is capable of nuance and anyway was not the instigator of the problem he is part of. Rather, he is the clearest in laying out his premises and arguments. His map of the PR dilemmas is the best we have. The kind of ideas which he outlines are indeed the kind which have become all too popular. The view that partisan PR – paid for by bosses of any sort – is unethical is widespread. Even critics of Grunig’s theories such as L’Etang share his distaste for positioning PRs as advocates:

“Only if practitioners engage with such [ethical and political] issues can they avoid the charges of superficiality and cynical exploitation of target audiences. The role of public relations itself is shown to be necessarily partisan and, furthermore, by operating on behalf of certain interests, intrinsically undemocratic…”

[L'Etang, J.  "Corporate responsibility and public relations ethics", in J. L'Etang and M. Pieczka, eds., Critical Perspectives in Public Relations; International Thomson Business Press, London, 1996, pages 82–105]

This quote and stance from L’Etang highlights the major problem within PR circles. It displays an intrinsic dislike of what PR is about: advocacy on behalf of clients. It also reveals a complete failure to grasp what democracy is about and where PR fits in. Democracy is all about the pursuit of self-interest on the part of certain interest groups. Democracy is merely the form and framework within which conflicts and different interests pursue their interests: it sets down the limits to how conflicts are fought and the means for resolving them legally and constitutionally, when persuasion does not settle the matter of its own accord etc..

None of the above should be taken as an inducement to firms to be anything other than morally alert. Contrariwise: my point is that firm should be more alert, not less. That’s why I put such a high value on truth-telling. The Financial Times‘s Martin Sandbu summed it up well in his recent piece (Aristotle – the banker’s best friend):

….moral philosophers have granted impunity to lazy thinking. And the result is a debate soaked in such inanities as “giving back to society” or putting “people before profit.” Fine phrases, but they mean little and in practice will achieve even less. Most attacks on business immorality conjure up villains in corporate boardrooms plotting their next evil deed. The real problem is harder. Most business people are like most people everywhere: wanting to do the right thing but confused about what the right thing is in a complex world.”

He goes on:

“… one may question whether corporate conduct must be justified by its social usefulness. Is business really responsible for the common good? Or is it enough to respect the rights of others while pursuing profits? To ask that question – surely a fundamental one – is to enter a big philosophical debate midstream, for which reading John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant is better preparation than any number of management books.”

Setting higher expectations

The real problem is, in my view, that PRs have struggled to talk sense about the world. They have endorsed many of Grunig’s premises, even when rejecting his theories. That’s because they share many of the protesters’ criticisms of modern society. Much of the Grunig and L’Etang take on the world has shifted subtly and resurfaced as stakeholder doctrine, CSR and sustainability mantras. One can read the narrative in Edelman’s Trust Barometer conclusions, and in initiatives such as the Stockholm Accords (see here here here here and here). It is an outlook which pretends that all stakeholders are equal. It is an arm of PR which claims organisations don’t serve their owners or founders or exist to fulfill their core purpose first and foremost.

My point is that PRs need to get beyond recommending to their clients that they outsource their reputations for NGO imprimatur. PRs should also stop advocating that firms and institutions redefine their social purpose to comply with NGO agendas (read soft-left, liberal and often anti-corporate activists). PRs should be helping firms and modern institutions establish their integrity and reputations based on their own merits. Instead of advising the likes of BP to rebrand themselves Beyond Petroleum, they should help them stand for something they really believe in, that reflects their core purpose, such as Better Petroleum.

I say PR’s paymasters should ask some tough questions. They should demand more from their highly-paid advocates. It is my argument that PRs have helped create the climate of cynicism and lack of confidence that so bedevils Western society. They have helped put it at a disadvantage to the BRICs by their failure to speak robustly and honestly to their publics. The PR industry’s leading academics have in a sense deprived the industry of what it really needs to be taken seriously as a profession: self-esteem and self-respect for its own contribution and that of its clients.

For instance, it has hardly been remarked upon by PRs that supposedly, according to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, China has the most trusted government on earth, its businesses are more trusted than the US’s and that Russian businesses are supposedly more trusted than France’s and Germany’s, or that the Russian government is as trusted as the UK’s (2010 findings) etc..

It is time Western PR got real. It is time it got beyond trying to construct trite idealised models. PRs should become less defensive and apologetic about managing the messy perceptions and realities that resound in our modern democracies. It is time that PR became part of the solution. It is time our trade grew up.

Note: this essay was inspired by a review of the best of 2010 PR books by Richard Bailey on his useful PR Studies blog.

Anybody wanting to know about my views on the issues above can read A Sorry State: Self-denigration in British Culture, edited by Peter Whittle, foreword by the historian Michael Burleigh, published by The New Culture Forum, November 2010. My essay there is entitled, “How public relations sells western firms short” (available from Amazon online).

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