All businesses are about relationship-building. Butchers, say, depend on it. As in: “I’ve some nice sirloin today. A bone for the dog?” One pitch of modern PR is to say that we manage the relationships other people can’t reach – or don’t spot. And indeed we are right to stress that nowadays, reputational risk is everywhere: your suppliers can let you down as easily as your managers. So, yes, PR is about a clients’ 360-degree reputational risk. We have to look at our clients’ relationship risk and its way upstream, way downstream – and all around. To some extent, we can fix those relationships, or find people who can.

But I think we’re starting to go too far, as though PRs were uniquely suited to giving a sort of therapy, or a laying-on of hands. We are at risk of not spotting that messages and influencing behaviour remain our core business.

Here’s an example from a popular blog and thought leader of the muddle PRs are currently in:

“Communicating (communications departments typically engage in: talking) is not a particularly useful skill. Relating is. Maybe it’s time to reclaim the words “public relations” and, more importantly, the philosophical principles that underpin those words. (Paul Holmes’s blog here)

Of course, I accept that our trade is public relations. But I insist that the essence of that remains preparing and communicating messages. We improve people’s relationships by ensuring they understand the value of developing their messages carefully, getting them out, and living up to them.

That means we are like diplomats, journalists and yes (blimey) philosophers. And we do indeed go further: we remind our clients, over and over, that good messages produce their own weakness and risk; we remind them that they have to walk the talk. A stated aspiration is a hostage to fortune, a challenge to our critics (stakeholders, indeed!).

You can have all the relationships you like with the media, with one’s neighbours, with one’s customers, with the NGOs, and when you don’t deliver the reality you’ve told them to expect, they’ll still all pile in on you with gay abandon and crocodile tears.

So of course, we PRs build relationships. But relationships are no sort of insurance or guarantee. They may not even be the best sort of investment. What you need is good behaviour, solidly communicated.

I’m trying to get it across that winning friends is not the necessary or sufficient condition of influencing people. The relationship of trust (which PRs may well want between themselves and their clients and the rest of the world, that great Other) is not the same as or even like the relationship of, say, friendship or affection. Reputations are about more than relationships.

Perhaps I can put it this way: I often trust people or institutions I don’t know and don’t like. I don’t have a relationship with judges, the police, firefighters, the surgeons in my local hospital, the drivers of Shell’s road tankers. I don’t want one either. I just want to be able to trust them.

By the way, new media don’t change any of this much. The people who twitter and blog may believe they are a new social entity, and PRs may believe that this new sociology requires a new sort of relationship-building. Like Harold Burson here, I doubt it.

Much was made of the new relationship Obama had forged with the American people in the new ether. Yeah, well, maybe. Right now, he seems to have gone on to hack off the floating, middling, uncommitted American centre ground. Will he get the enthused kids back? Has he got an ongoing, er, relationship with them? We’ll see. It looks to me that in important measure, what he surfed was a wave of enthusiasm, and it may have broken on the shore in a trillion sparkling droplets. His vast virtual Rollodex may develop into a relationship, but we can’t know yet because a relationship is a thing which gets a history or it isn’t anything.

Moreover, we’ve always known that the best PR is heard and not seen. That means that PR has mostly an indirect relationship to its target audiences – through the media, through third-party opinion formers and other influencers (advocates) whether that’s online or off, through the media or by other means.

PR’s hand is even more remote when, as Edward Bernays showed us with his “Torches for Freedom”, it manufactures consent by engineering events that help create a new social consensus or climate of opinion.

So I come back to the importance of asking the question, relationships with whom? Of course, most institutions and firms want good relationships with clients, opinion-formers, hacks, enemies, politicians stakeholders, neighbours and everybody else.

But, actually, most of those audiences don’t have time to have a relationship with you. What most audiences require is the right message, at the right moment via the right channel. Most of the people who determine what reputation you acquire (reputations are conferred by others) will respond positively (or dangerously). They won’t do so because they’ve been nurtured directly by PRs.

For advocacy to work, of course, people need to be persuaded to think a certain thing. Hence, it makes sense for PRs to engineer a genuine invitation to accept and meet informed challenge by the target audience – but very often still without engaging directly as the PR team – for anything controversial or requiring consent or acceptance by various stakeholders (new runways, licences to operate etc.).

Of course there are exceptions. Those are strategic and tactical considerations (Ryanair doesn’t talk to PlaneStupid, but many firms talk to Greenpeace, but some won’t talk to either and some talk to both).

There’s no love in war, competition, public opinion and the media, so why bother to be loved or liked? Being understood and trusted should be enough. That means putting integrity, truthfulness, evidence and authenticity at the heart of communication.

Note: this was first posted in 2009.

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My first instinct was to defend Gordon. My second was to laugh. My third was to sympathise with a man who can’t get his relations with the public right. But we need to remember: Tony Blair was always awkward if caught on the hop and (unlike Brown) brilliant in nearly every encounter. But remember, too, Brown is very good in seminar-like discussion where he comes across as intelligent, responsive and funny.

There are few lessons to learn here, except the counsel of perfection: never say anything remotely interesting to anybody or about anybody, ever, even in private.

But let’s put away the PR rule book and look at what happened. Gordon Brown is a self-righteous man who thinks he is profoundly misunderstood. He has swallowed a 1970s and 1980s PC, anti-prejudice, enlightened rights-mantra, heart and soul. He thinks the rest of the world needs to catch up with this ethic and hasn’t. He meets a working class woman and doesn’t spot that she’s thoughtful and wants him to front up about the deficit and isn’t thrilled by immigration. Clearly, she doesn’t get his deep and enduring value to the economy and the ship of state, and he suspects she’s probably a racist too. Because he knows the media hate him, he’s sure they’ll lap up this old bird. He does what he always does: sees a disaster, especially a personal disaster, and casts around for someone to blame. That would be, in order, the old girl and his own staff. Probably deep down, he’s lacerating himself.

If this had been any other politician, he would have thought the micro gig went quite well (had he stayed silent that’s was how it would have been remembered). End of.

This being GB, he saw a disaster and then compounded it. After that, he did the only thing he could. Grovel, and quick. Otherwise it would all have dragged on interminably. This is also true to his own lights. Like many an old lefty, Gordon sees racism all over the place where it isn’t. By the same token, calling a person a racist is the biggest insult in his canon and calls for self-flagellation when the term is abused.

I do see the logic of saying this is a classic case of overdoing one’s PR response to a small incident (my PR rule book says so, for sure). Certainly, Bigotgate and Mrs Duffy and Gordon’s apology is now the lead story in today’s The Sun. There she condemns him and explains why she no longer plans to vote Labour. His gaffe is now the No. 1 distraction story and embarrassment of yesterday and today and perhaps of the rest of the campaign. That was an example of crisis management of the worst kind.

Actually, though, I think this was not an ordinary PR incident (yes, the PR rule book that I normally draw on in this blog is sometimes totally useless), capable of being handled by ordinary brave tactics and a wry shrug and a respectful public apology etc.

That’s why I can also see the point of and, indeed, I warm to Mathew Parris’s assessment in The Times (his view would normally be mine for anybody but Brown):

“Who did this to him? Who advised him to centre the day’s campaign coverage on Mrs Duffy’s front door? Are the people around Labour’s campaign so shell-shocked, so battle-weary, so insulated from real people by a Maginot line of marketing and communications advice that they have lost confidence in their own assessment of how the public think?”

Though my guess is that his aides did try to stop him spending so much time in conference with Mrs Duffy in her living room; as another article in today’s The Times suggests.

Yet it is my view that this mess was the authentic Gordon Brown. It had to play out as it did given his history of apology avoidance and past arrogance; otherwise a worse climb-down might have been dragged out of him (it’s a moot point).

Oh dear. But I doubt it will determine the outcome of the election. Moreover, he’s got a chance to turn it to his advantage when the other two leaders tease him about the incident tonight in the Election’s final televised debate. He will have been told that his gaffe was factored into the election even before it happened. He can say, “I’m touchy and clunky and short-tempered. I hate prejudice and maybe that’s why, yes, I’m a bit quick off the mark when people criticise immigration (never mind he too wants to hold it back). But I went round to see her straight away and admitted my mistake. Now, can we talk about what these lightweights would have done in the face of a collapse in global capitalism?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What did we expect from him? He’s a footballer, not a saint. He’s not a role model for how we expect our kids to behave either. I particularly take exception to how footballers are allowed to spit on the pitch live on TV. That’s disgusting. But I wouldn’t accept that a child of mine – or a child near me – could spit with impunity because he’s seen it on-field, on telly. Better to tell kids that extraordinary people can get away with dreadful stuff, and maybe when they grow and get to be extraordinary, they can too. But not yet, thank you, not on my watch. (Better keep that rap for your own kids: dishing out advice in public needs to be carefully-judged.)

Anyhoo. As Max Clifford, whose understanding of sporting reputations is second to none, said yesterday on BBC Breakfast TV, true football fans – that’s millions and millions of Brits – are not bothered by who or how many Terry allegedly bedded.

Sponsors don’t care much either. If Terry’s sponsors wanted to avoid all hint of scandal they would not have sponsored any footballers in the first place. No more than Kate Moss’s sponsors were surprised when their heroin-chic-looking model was exposed as being an authentic serial coke abuser. The sad truth was that the suspicion that she was debauched was what made her attractive in the first place.

However, sponsorship and humbug are inseparable. Kate Moss first lost and then got back her sponsorship deals. Today she earns more than ever from them. I predict that Tiger Woods will do the same – when he gets out of sex-rehab – and so will John Terry.

Even the great West Ham and England legend Bobby Moore got himself arrested in Bogota, Colombia, for stealing a bracelet six days before the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Moore was also a notorious late night boozer, a womaniser (behind his wife’s back) and he was rumoured to have been involved in some dodgy business deals. So what? He’s still Britain’s most famous, most revered footballing hero.

But, and it’s quite a big But. Everyone in the public needs to remember that whilst views on private morality have changed a bit, expectations of honesty have changed a lot. The modern trick seems to be that you do not have to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. You can tell people to mind their own business, for a start. You can stay schtumm, if you do it prettily or wryly, or whatever. But avoid lying. There was a time when people understood hyprocrisy and though they probably still do, really, you’re fair game if you’re caught out.

So here’re a few rules that might come in useful to stars and their PRs managing similar risks to John Terry and the late Booby Moore:

• Don’t let PRs sell the politically-correct narrative of your personal life.

• Don’t use personal virtues as a shield to promote your professional ones.

• Headlines about your personal virtues are hostages to fortune.

• Avoid the temptation to indulge in moral outbursts on any topic.

• Don’t bring your personal life to work or include it in your PR.

• Those who live by the sword die by it

• Don’t lecture anyone (especially not your staff or your adoring fans) about personal morality.

• Always assume that everything always gets into the media in the end.

• The public love sinners and loathe saints.

Once the story’s out – shrug, smile and tell people to mind their own business (and grovel in rehab while the heat’s on if need be).

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Following years at the sharp end of nuclear industry PR (in London and Chernobyl), I am alarmed that the industry seems headed in the wrong direction with its strategy and messaging.

No credit to my own efforts, I suppose, but nuclear more than most industries has a poor record on the communications front, particularly when it comes to arrogance and not being straight with the public. It seems old habits die hard.

In a nutshell, here’s what’s currently wrong.

The industry is boastful and immature. Its trade association promises “unequivocally” to be able to build the next nuclear reactor, the first to be built in the UK in a long time, on time, on budget, without any state support and at “no cost to the public”, in time to cook the Christmas turkey in 2017 (from Hinkley Point, according to EDF).

That’s not credible or politically helpful and here’s why:
(1) it sucks the air out of political attempts to sell the necessity for sufficient state support, support which the industry needs to get going again successfully;
(2) it trivializes discussion on energy matters and sets the industry up for ridicule and humiliation whilst making it all the harder for serious politicians to associate themselves with its reputation.

For instance, one does not need much expertise to discredit the claims. The on-time, on-budget (with no public support) claim is a hostage to fortune (and dishonest) for several reasons.

Such promises have been made before and not kept (see this Newsnight report). Contrary to what the industry asserts, learning from recent experience of new nuclear build overseas is only partially relevant to the UK. That’s because contractors vary, and every national regulatory system is different, and because of politics and other unpredictable factors (inevitable mistakes, events, accidents even) involved in introducing a new design to any country. (I’ve argued elsewhere how this issue should be positioned.)

Now let’s consider the claim about needing no public support (they mean public money and subsidy, not public opinion here). This is not honest. The truth about the entire sector (gas, oil, renewables etc.) is that there’s no energy without cost to the public and without the government rigging the market in some form and at some taxpayer or consumer cost.

As Dieter Helm pointed out in his op-ed in The Times recently:

“Governments want large-scale, long-term, capital-intensive power stations. Investors have to know that there is a good chance customers will pay. They need commitment, and creating long-term contracts is the obvious way forward. To do this, the energy markets must be reformed so that they deliver security of supply, not just short-term energy. What is needed is a longer-term market in energy contracts — in effect a market in the capacity to produce the energy when needed. Markets are means to ends: government must specify the ends.”

In short, without a guaranteed return on investment that long-term contracts provide the nuclear industry cannot expect to raise the finance it needs to fund its dreams. Moreover, today’s market is much more risk-adverse than when the nuclear industry embarked on the dodgy strategy of announcing its renaissance in 2001. And here comes why it felt confident to do so.

The industry’s major pitch suggests that when carbon is charged at its proper environmental (global warming) price, nuclear power will romp in as the technology the market loves to invest in and buy (but meanwhile it knows, and so do its opponents, that its economics are not competitive).

Actually, AGW is a double-edged sword for nuclear energy. On the one hand the industry is a low carbon producer. On the other it makes the safety case more problematic with worries over coastal erosion, rising seas, warming cooling water and storms etc.

But my main objection is that the industry needs and does not have a stated rationale which is proof against the likely real future: one in which carbon is taxed at a gesture rate rather than a behaviour-changing one and in which nuclear remains a creature of government.

So here’s the pitch in a nutshell:
Nuclear is a great, reasonably-priced, tolerably safe base-load supplier for a world hungry for electricity and a bit nervous of carbon emissions but even more scared of energy insecurity.

The pitch in some detail:
Carbon will probably never be made very expensive, at least not to the degree that nuclear will look cheap in comparison in the near to medium term. But (to take an example) the UK government has agreed to new coal plant and to subsidise retro-fitted carbon capture sequestration technology by 2025, assuming, of course, it works. (My sense is that our masters don’t much care whether it ever does provided the power stations get ordered and built. The rest will be someone else’s headache.)

It may be that there should and will be a mandate that using coal should be a bit more expensive (in clean-up costs or fines for failing to clean-up).

Oil and gas may not only be insecure (the countries which own it are either unstable now or their ownership of oil will make them so) but a bit more expensive or unattractive in future because of scarcity and carbon taxes.

Renewables may be expensive, unreliable and feeble for a very long time yet. Moreover, wind has a subsidy and a must-buy legislated market protection (it is also more expensive than nuclear).

Conservation may be unattractive after a certain point reached sooner than we think.

These factors might combine to make nuclear a goodish bet, but it won’t be an economic or political walkover. Crucially, it will be operating in a market entirely fixed by government, and dependent on government mandate, as it always has.

The simple AGW argument (and the effect of high carbon taxes to produce a “market” advantage for nukes) is as dependent on government policy (and actually on improbable government policy) as is a better and more sustainable rationale for nuclear which is far more multi-factoral.

In short: the UK and EU are going to need shedloads of electricity and the present non-nuclear sources are likely to get more expensive and unattractive as (variously) a result of insecurity, scarcity, AGW policy (even if it’s feeble) and unreliability.

Moreover, if AGW went away (unlikely), we’d still need nuke and still need government involvement to mandate and guarantee it.

Nuclear looks pretty good as a part of the solution to several (rather than one or two) of those problems. It may even work out really well as a get-out-of-gaol card.

Safety as a deliberate killer:
Nuclear’s enemies use safety to keep nukes off the books. The waste “problem” has remained a problem almost solely because of the perfectionism demanded by the greens and accepted by governments. The greens’ plan is that meeting safety demands should kill nuclear directly or price it out of the market.

If hydro, gas, wind and coal had to meet the same level of safety as nukes, none would get built.

Nuclear energy has an unsurpassed safety record among the major electricity-generating sources. For instance, there have been 0.006 fatalities per GWe.year of nuclear electricity produced compared to 15 times as many fatalities per GWe.year for natural gas; and 1000 times as many fatalities per GWe.year for coal, oil and hydropower.

I agree that telling the truth on this is a PR nightmare. Straight arguments may work better than anythng else, though.

Concluding remarks
Yes, from my bolt-hole on Zurich lakeside I can freely lambaste the UK nuclear industry. I particularly find it embarrassing when it creeps to the current government’s strategy every time the industry says “we don’t need more support other than with planning applications”. Actually, such subservience just reveals how in awe of their real masters the nuclear PRs are. They needn’t and shouldn’t be so timid if they want to be taken seriously.

In future, then, if the nuclear industry wants to win support, it must conduct an adult debate with the public and with the new political administration we all expect to be in power next year.

Yes, a massive nuclear build programme could well be achievable, but not unless the industry learns to be respectful, honest, modest, authentic, serious and trusted. Am I alone in thinking like this? Or do others share my passion and criticism?

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At the moment we a have a theatrical clash of positions. It goes something like this. The Finnish reactor currently being built – which is an example of the type the UK hopes to build – is already three years behind schedule and 3bn euros (£2.71bn) over budget. So what hope a UK nuclear programme being timely or affordable? Ah, responds the UK’s Nuclear Industry Association (NIA):

“The industry is confident that we can have the first new stations operating in the UK by the end of 2017. The UK’s innovative approach of full design assessment prior to any construction means that we will avoid many of the delays which can be seen elsewhere in the world”.

Then up pops the British regulator, Kevin Allars of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII),  to say he’s every bit as tough as his colleagues in Finland (not that he’s saying regulatory success equals delay) and, just to prove his point, agrees there’s never been a reactor built to time or budget in the UK.

The truth is that neither the regulator nor the industry has a helpful position. Neither does anything to enhance the reputation of the industry or to advance its case in the public domain. Rather they do much to knock the industry’s credibility and to bewilder the public. So how do we move things along?

The real debate should begin with why we need nuclear energy in the first place. At the top of nearly everyone’s list right now is fighting global warming (see UK Energy Secretary’s Ed Miliband’s recent national policy review statement). I fear this is the argument grabbed by industry’s PRs. It’s a dead end.

That’s not because global warming isn’t happening. It is not even because those most worried about AGW (anthropogenic global warming) are often those most opposed to to nuclear power. Nor is it because all ten sites identified in the UK face worries about GW-driven coastal erosion, rising seas, warming cooling water and storms. No, it runs deeper than that.

The trouble is that if dealing with climate change is ever taken seriously enough to panic, the major response is likely to be to aim seriously to reduce electricity demand. Bang would go the major benefit of nuclear energy. It is, after all, a virtually limitless secure energy supply source which boosts output and satisfies demand.

If AGW is taken seriously, the argument for an expensive and tricky source of energy would be commensurately somewhere between very weak and politically unfeasible.

Nukes don’t fit well into a no-growth-to-low energy low carbon unambitious world. But that’s what the EU is committed to right now (European Commission, Energy Policy for Europe, 10 January 2007, p5). It is an outlook that fits quite well with Greenpeace’s view:

“Gordon Brown very recently committed the UK to generating around 40 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020. If he means it, Britain could become a world leader in clean energy and his case for nuclear evaporates.”

So it does. Moreover, Greenpeace also rightly points out that nuclear power can only deliver a 4 per cent cut in carbon emissions some time after 2025 (though I’d hope by 2021). That said, it begs the question why Greenpeace gets het-up over building a few new coal plants today, which must be equally as insignificant in percentage terms (a case of one smart argument undermining a dumb one, I think).

Then there’s the energy gap argument. There certainly is a real threat that the UK’s lights could go out at sometime in the not-so distant future. But is virtually impossible to say when, or under what circumstances this would happen. There are too many variables for that.

For instance, old conventional plant can be made to worker longer than its original planned life. There’s an emerging world network of gas pipelines (and no it is not all about Russia), not to mention liquefied natural gas. Then there are renewables coming on stream, and there’s innovation. And when push comes to shove, as demand exceeds supply, rises in price could be used to dampen demand.

I don’t know what carbon price would seriously dent demand, but I suspect it would dent demand somewhat before it would encourage nuclear power.

Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College, has captured well how events continually alter the energy landscape in unexpected ways:

“Though the recession has brought a breathing space on the demand side of the equation, it has markedly worsened investment on the supply side. The credit crisis has made it harder and more expensive to finance investment; just when the investment is needed, finance has dried up.”

So how do I size up the debate and advise the nuclear industry to position itself? Well I think its case might go something like this. Britain is in recession, the world is in recession. The Far East is currently getting the edge on the West and it is doing so by not skimping on energy growth when it comes to coal or nuclear power.

The Tories might talk about a new age of austerity but if they want to hold out hope or hold on to power they had better have something more upbeat to offer. That can only be the prospect of economic growth – that requires investment in energy infrastructure and generation on an increasing scale. That supply will need to be secure, on tap on demand (unlike wind) and at a predictable price.

That all speaks to nuclear power strengths. In short, nuclear’s future may be rosy because AGW is not taken seriously, electricity demand is not seriously limited, and there are fears of a serious energy gap especially if it’s decided that AGW matters, but not enough to drive serious (demand-denting) policy.

So who cares if the first couple of UK new nuclear power stations are a little late, over budget and more difficult to build than predicted? That’s life when it comes to making visions come true when it comes to major infrastructure investment. It’s no big deal. For sure, as we build nuclear plants en masse the economies of scale will accrue.

But there’ll be no nuclear revival of significance or true merit so long as the debate remains stuck where it is. It is time to ramp up the nuclear message and link it to economic growth, security, prosperity and hope (a point made well by the authors of Energise! here). It is time to assume that we want a great deal of electricity and at moderate prices (prices only slightly ramped up by carbon taxes) and preferably with an acceptable carbon footprint.

This argument would be gung-ho, cynical, sceptical, realistic. It would be upbeat. Oh dear, what a tough authentic sell.

For the record, I spent almost ten years working in the nuclear industry in the UK, Ukraine and Switzerland, including for the Nuclear Industry Association.

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First off, here’s the essence of the message or warning Buffett, according to Gaines-Ross, emails his staff every year:

“We can afford to lose money – even a lot of money. We cannot afford to lose reputation – even a shred of reputation. Let’s be sure that everything we do in business can be reported on the front page of a national newspaper in an article written by an unfriendly but intelligent reporter. In many areas, including acquisitions, Berkshire’s results have benefitted from its reputation, and we don’t want to do anything that in any way can tarnish it. Berkshire is ranked by Fortune as the second-most admired company in the world. It took us 43 years to get there, but we could lose it in 43 minutes.”

My first insight is that quotes don’t speak for themselves because they are open to interpretation. So here’s what I think Buffett is saying.

Buffett seeks a reputation which disciplines his profit-seeking. He seeks a reputation which has the effect of being a proxy for his share value but also imposes a professionally disciplined nuance to his profit-making. The distinction I am drawing is between profiteering and professionalism. Profiteering is the pursuit of profit without discipline (think about the worst excesses of the last boom).

Not all profit is worth having (just as PR agencies like to pick and choose their clients). Not all disciplines are good.

So the point is, has Buffett defined the kind of discipline which usefully mitigates and polices his profit-making? I rather think that the world’s richest man and most successful investor has done so. I’m certain that that clarity is the secret of his success.

In short, I think he has found the right approach to reputation. He knows how to get the right sort of reputation to do the good work only reputation can do, because he knows that reputation is everything.

But, and it is a big one: one only wants to care about being thought well-of by people who matter. That is, preferably by people who matter because they are intelligent, rigorous, involved, serious, as well as valuable. Hence, Buffett in his quote implicitly qualifies his remarks regarding journalists by using the word “intelligent”, as if the vast majority don’t qualify.

I recognise, however, the danger of comparing chalk with cheese. Reputations are multi-faceted, multi-audience constructions, and client-directed in terms of what we want to achieve for them.

So what, I asked myself, do they (Buffett and O’Leary) have in common?

I think the commonality is in the risk factor. Both fear that stupid people, or third parties with competing agendas, could hold the fate of their reputations in their hands.

Ryanair has gone for pre-emptive PR by setting low expectations. While Buffett has gone for the high ground at the other end of the spectrum. Both have sought to make whatever they do consistent, robust and authentic. Hence, worrying about good or bad headlines in the abstract need hardly bother either party at all.

However, both fear losing their reputations, because that is what both companies – like most others - are built and sustained on.

But therein lies a difference. Buffett needs to be thought a good thing by a very few people who can be assumed to be savvy and serious and not likely to be deflected by mob opinion. In a rather small world, it helps Buffett to be thought easy or at least reliable to deal with.

Ryanair needs to appeal to more people, but in slightly different terms. Ryanair know that their customers know that for the most important thing – arriving safely – Ryanair is regulated by regulators not by reputation. Or rather: Ryanair has a reputation for being a loud-mouthed and stroppy player in a highly-regulated environment; while old-fashioned City values of my word is my bond still outweighs regulation in Buffett’s world.

Buffett is in a position at once more robust, nuanced and remote. Buffett’s numbers are kind of obvious, aren’t they? Indeed, it is easier to assess Buffett’s performance than Ryanair’s. But Buffett really might regret acquiring a reputation for being profitable but difficult to deal with. Buffett might find it profitable to have a reputation for being tough but fair. Ryanair, on the other hand, doesn’t mind being thought a pain in the arse, provided the basics are in place.

Conclusion
It is obvious that reputation is what PRs do. It’s important then that when I argue for no-frills reputations, or rock-solid but authentic reputations, I remind you (and myself) that reputations come in all shapes and sizes. You may know that Ryanair’s loud-mouth git PR appeals to a strand of my thinking and prejudices. But so too does Buffett’s low-key persona.

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First off, Steve Hartman of Creativille, Inc., explained how his Harvard Executive Education course discussed Rynair as a case study in branding success. Toni Falconi Muzi wrote to say that when senior public officials in Italy were asked, “which organisation, in your view, is more aware of and uses with most intelligence the power of conscious public relationships”, Ryanair came out in the first three choices.

David Brain commented that it’s difficult to argue with success, but wondered how many lost slots, delays and loss of partners were caused by people disliking Michael O’Leary’s approach. Then Heather Yaxley posted an incisive comment (see both here). I’m now answering their points:

(1) Ryanair does care about its customers and reputation, up to a point Lord Copper. The carrier cares to get the customers’ business (good routes, good fares). It cares and needs to get the customers’ repeat business: Ryanair stresses repeatedly its relative reliability (a feature you need in order to lure people on a second time).

(2) Ryanair is playing several PR and brand-defining games. The airline invites its fans to be “in” on the secret of being a beneficiary of its service. It shares a complicity with its fans that they know how to game its offer. It invites its fans to relish the way namby-pambies aren’t up to gaming or enjoying Ryanair’s offer.

Ryanair has indulged its customers’ instinctive contempt for a class of passenger weened on a level of schmooze most people could never afford. It’s a bit like The Sun implying that the broadsheet readers are snobbish about The Sun because they don’t get the joke.

Ryanair does not offer a PR presence to produce a virtual brand. That is, it is not manufacturing a corporate image as an umbrella that’s not directly linked to the service the airline provides.

Hence, Heather Yaxley is correct: Ryanair’s brand is a marketing machine and performance is the brand promise.

I would add that the value of any particular brand is measured by the extent to which the promise it symbolizes is trusted. And in Ryanair’s case, a certain level of distrust, or a health warning, comes as part of the bargain.

Ryanair understands that the key to brand management lies in setting realistic expectations and in being consistent (that’s a text book strategy, well executed).

Michael O’Leary’s PR strategy, and we should note here how PR is his trump card, is to shoot the opponents’ fox. “Customer: ‘You’re brutal’. Ryanair: ‘We’ve always said as much!’”.

Meanwhile, the more BA and the other airlines struggle to play a higher moral game (call it with-frills and added values) the more they set themselves up to be exposed as untrustworthy.

(3) It isn’t obvious that Ryanair has a bad complaints policy merely because it makes people go to the trouble of faxing or mailing a letter. Point being, Ryanair gets to hear about those complaints from customers who go to some bother to make them. Of course, Ryanair may be awful in its response to complaints, though I imagine there’s some regulation surrounding just how awful it can be.

(4) It is unclear to me the degree to which Ryanair can afford to be casual because it has a monopoly on some routes. That is, I don’t know if Ryanair has a monopoly, or how that would play if it had (perhaps somebody with more knowledge of the airline business could answer this point).

(5) It is not my impression that Ryanair is any worse than any other airline, or even that it is necessarily the cheapest. My impression is that its behaviour is quite similar to that of other similar airlines in its class, but that it has an aggressive, loud-mouthed boss and great PR. If he was less loud, and left less rows and havoc in his wake, would Ryanair’s behaviour – even the Ryanair effect – be all that different?

So when I make point (2) (that its pre-emptive PR keeps the firm safe) I may be overstating things. It is possible and likable that Ryanair’s PR is as it is because that is how the boss likes it.

In short, perhaps we have to like Ryanair’s PR because it is authentic.

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Last week the BBC’s flagship investigative news programme Panorama hilariously shot itself in the foot when it tried to apply a corporate social responsibility critique to Ryanair. Rather than trash the company’s reputation The Times reports Panorama had the opposite effect.

A Times Online Travel poll at the start of the show found that 88 per cent of respondents were on the hate spectrum of the love/hate Ryanair relationship (although 63 per cent of people fly with the carrier anyway), while only 12 per cent attested to “loving” the airline.

A second poll at the end of the show found Ryanair’s fortunes had reversed, with the BBC considered the “baddie”. Ho ho.

Now here’s why I love Ryanair’s messaging:

1. Ryanair’s no-frills offer is cheap and authentic but not chic, more like chav.

2. Ryanair does not negotiate with campaigners, enter into dialogue with them even, or pretend to care what they think (tough luck for Plane Stupid).

3. Liberals – including I guess liberal PRs – hate Ryanair’s audacity, not least because it runs against the grain of what the latter advise most of their clients to behave like .

4. Ryanair’s boss Michael O’Leary does not do Mr Nice Guy. He pulls no punches:

“We will double our emissions in the next five years because we are doubling our traffic. But if preserving the environment means stopping poor people flying so only the rich can fly, then screw it.”

That may not be a nice, intelligent, constructive or savvy remark. It may not even be in Mr O’Leary’s interests to make it. But it is what he thinks and its authenticity is worth a shed-load of focus-group tested schmoozing.

5. Ryanair knows what makes British and Irish culture tick: “binge-flying” and binge-drinking (though it won’t tolerate drunks onboard its flights and quite right too)

6. Ryanair stands up for the poor – slags, lads and chavs out on the razz – who want to see the world but can’t afford to fly British Airways. It is very much in the spirit of Thomas Cook and the railways that brought the seaside to the masses, and yobs to Southwold, back in the 19th and early 20th century.

7. Ryanair does not pretend to love its staff the way British Airways once famously did when it put cabin crew at the centre of its PR. The unions cleverly twisted the slogan and held the company’s reputation to ransom when the staff went on strike and slagged off the airline big time (ho ho for corporate slime)

8. Ryanair is contemptuous of interfering moralistic regulators who think they are the defenders of the public interest.

Michael O’Leary once famously denounced the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Britain’s regulator of advertising and marketing, for being a “bunch of unelected, self-appointed dimwits”. (See #4.)

9. Ryanair puts profit and customers – as in cheap no frills flights – unashamedly at the center of everything it does. Ryanair is unashamedly capitalist. It makes money where it can and not always attractively (as in charging for credit card payment by customer not transaction). It’s almost a challenge. Tacitly, Ryanair is saying: “We’ve weighed up who and what we’ll lose by this charging system, and we’ll take the hit. Got a better idea? Get over yourself.” (See 11)

10. Ryanair is not on the Web to do dialogue and have a chat (what tosh about it’s all about conversation now) it is there to do business, and it will punish you hard if you don’t book and book-in online.

11. Here’s the cavil. Ryanair isn’t quite as bold as it ought to be. Its communication director has defended its charge for credit card payment (which is levied per passenger and flight, not per transaction) on the basis that it is possible (just possible, he might have added) to circumvent it. Why not say: “Come on guys, we’ve got to make money somewhere and we reckon this hacks people off less than any other similar ramp”?

Conclusion
So the bliss of the thing is that Ryanair is not just no-frills, it is anti-frills. It rips veils, conceits, devices, cons, prettinesses and even decencies away. It is a pretty competent airline in the sense that it’s pretty reliable. It’s mouthy and quite grasping. You have to be on your toes when you deal with it. I wouldn’t buy a holiday home based on its route map.  All that said, why bother to hate it? It has distinctly lovable dimensions.

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You can’t take the Scottish out of Harris Tweed any more than you can take the Cuban out of Cuban cigars (don’t mention Castro) or the German out of Porsche (don’t mention the Nazis) or the French out of French wine (don’t mention Iraq) or the British out of British Airways (somebody once tried and they had to put it back) or the petroleum out of BP. 

People buy Harris Tweed because of its rugged Scottish Highlander and mystical far-flung isles image. Without those unique, compelling qualities this niche brand looks inauthentic (as it would for bagpipes and premium Scotch whiskies; Johnnie Walker being a global exception, but still Scotch).

Moreover, Harris Tweed’s slimy sidestep could link the Lockerbie bomber to Harris Tweed forever in the US public eye.

I had a similar experience in the 1990s every time I was interviewed as a nuclear industry spokesman. After a fire at a chimney stack at Windscale in 1957 spread radiation around Cumbria, some bright spark thought it a good idea to rename the plant Sellafield. The aim was to distance the plant from its past.

It did not work. It became instead a chronic sore. Whenever the name Sellafield was mentioned, the story of how it got its new identity was retold (ok, I’m being a little harsh on Tweed jackets by comparing them to nuclear plants, but..)

It remains to be seen if Harris Tweed survives being de-Scottified here, Scottified there, and underestimating consumer intelligence everywhere.

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