What was Coca-Cola thinking of when it decided to make Wayne Rooney the face of its Coke Zero advertising campaign for the next couple of years? His track record in the tabloids is legendary. So it is hard to believe its C-suite was really “disgusted” by his latest antics and obliged to cancel his contract. There’s more to this than that.

Coca-Cola’s direct involvement with Wayne Rooney was like sky-diving without a parachute. Coca-Cola’s PRs ought to have known what a risk Rooney was (if they didn’t, they should have been fired).

Unless driven by cynicism, I can’t see why a “families values” brand should even contemplate selecting Wayne Rooney as the embodiment of its reputation. He’s a whore-mongering two-timer whose wife is picking up all the kudos. In his fraternity that’s the aftermath of a me-too night out. But there you go.

Coca-Cola took a punt, pure and simple. But having willingly got into bed with him, it should have been prepared to stick by him through thick and thin. It should have stated all along that it was backing the professional hero in him, not his private conduct. Instead, Coca-Cola endorsed Wayne Rooney’s entire life-style as if it satisfied their own vision. When it came unstuck, it dumped him.

Coke-Cola is guilty of being disingenuous. Praying that he wouldn’t get caught behaving badly, it deluded itself when it attached itself to Wayne Rooney’s profile. Its erratic behaviour exposes that Coca-Cola doesn’t know much, like or care much about football or show much loyalty to its sponsored icons.

Football is one of last great bastions of rugged individualism and authentic competition. It produces rough heroes, but rarely paragons of virtue. Its major players are stalked by tabloid hacks in search of sensations. They know that the game, from club ownership, to managers, players and fans, is a politically incorrect refuge in a wickedly politically correct world.

Coca-Cola can identify itself as rugged and risky, or as clean-living, but not both. Meanwhile, football welcomes its money; the more the merrier. But its many millions of fans are not fooled by the firm’s ‘We all speak football‘ slogan. Fans are aware that the unfaithful Coca-Cola doesn’t do sports sponsorship, or understand where Wayne Rooney fits into the fans’ esteem. It merely promotes its own values and image, not football’s.

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Here’s the essence of Professor Karnani’s case:

“Companies that simply do everything they can to boost profits will end up increasing social welfare. In circumstances in which profits and social welfare are in direct opposition, an appeal to corporate social responsibility will almost always be ineffective, because executives are unlikely to act voluntarily in the public interest and against shareholder interests.”

Here’s the essence of Mr. Edelman’s reply:

“[Edelman's case studies] demonstrate that contrary to Karnani’s assertion, the decision isn’t whether to run an effective, “smart” business or a socially responsible, engaged one. Performance with purpose (a term used by PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi) is not an either/or proposition.”

Now, as it happens, Richard Edelman makes a good point. But he also misses it completely. The core social purpose of a corporation is to provide whatever goods or services it is in business to deliver – be that street cleaning, cigarettes, incubators, medicines, machine guns or bubble gum. Mr Edelman, in contrast, believes that a smart business is an engaged one with a purpose. Engaged in what else other than what it does, I ask.

Mr. Edelman tries to explain it with three examples drawn from his client base:

“Unilever’s Omo Detergent adopted the “Dirt is Good” campaign – aligning with the brand’s business proposition by asserting that “every child has the right” to be a child and get dirty. After fielding new academic research highlighting the importance of outside play for the physical and social development of children and engaging parents, governments and NGOs to take action, the campaign triggered real social change – Vietnamese schools agree to assess national provisions for school recess while the brand commits to build 100 playgrounds over three years.”

He’s shooting himself in the foot. Unilever’s campaign has self-interest at its core. The aim here is to produce more dirty children that will require the use of more of its product to clean up the mess. Moreover, from my experience as a parent, kids don’t need much encouragement to get their clothes dirty or to play outside (try stopping them).

He tells us how the Clorox Brita’s FilterForGood campaign:

“…inspires consumers – and communities – to take a personal pledge and even engage in (planet) healthy competition with others to reduce their bottled-water use, as well as informs them about other environmentally-friendly decisions that each can personally make.”

In essence, he’s positioning his client’s “healthy product” against the bottled water industry’s and mains suppliers’ supposedly environmentally unfriendly or unhealthy alternatives. That is, for as long as Brita remains a client and come the day Edelman represents, say, San Pellegrino, or has to convince us that a utility produces a product fit to drink straight from the tap. This should warn us that the “public interest” Mr. Edelman favours is often just the selfish interests of his clients.

Then, if those two weak cases weren’t enough, he adds:

“The Pepsi Refresh Project, partnering with NGOs and experts, is directly crowd sourcing ideas from consumers to foster innovation in social good – awarding more than $20 million this year to fund local community initiatives and ideas that refresh the world.”

Regardless of the trendy crowd sourcing, that’s just a classic – old-style – brand marketing and awareness-raising campaign. It is, actually, a very low budget one for a company with $9.4 billion in revenues.

One wonders why Mr. Edelman didn’t mention another esteemed client: Ryan Air. It is one which is likely to accuse Professor Karnani of being soft rather than harsh in his defence of profit. Ryan Air states unambiguously that shareholder value comes before its staff, customers, partners and suppliers. Ryan Air has little time for stakeholder PR or for CSR, except as the butt of jokes. Here’s the brief that Edelman pitched for:

“Wanted: PR firm who is able to LOL at the advertising gags, and doesn’t mind poking fun at expensive airports, rivals, prime ministers … and even popes! No precious, sensitive, politically correct or clock-watching publicists need apply. Long hours, stamina and patience of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travel, are all prequisites.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against corporations acting responsibly or managing their risks properly. I accept Ryan Air is an outlier; though it is one which has moved an entire industry’s behaviour in its direction. It is just that most CSR is shallow dishonest nonsense that sails close to propaganda, as BP’s Beyond Petroleum clearly did.

It is precisely such transparent charades and double-speak that generates the disabling cynicism that undermines public confidence in modern institutions. So there’s something refreshing about Professor Karnani’s bluntness and Ryan Air’s Michael O’Leary’s loud mouth.

Of course, in one sense there’s a bit of voodoo coming from both Mr. Edelman and Professor Karnani. The problem with deciding between profit-first or profit-with-purpose is that they are difficult to separate. Firms live within society and have all kinds of unavoidable obligations to fulfill as they produce profit.

One has to ask some tough questions about Mr. Edelman’s motivation, however. His main concern seems not to be the public good as much as helping firms restore their credibility and by so doing avoid state interference in their affairs. He says:

“We are at a very important moment in the relationship between business and society. The catastrophic economic events of September 2008 undermined the confidence in the private sector’s ability to self-regulate. Bankruptcies of centerpiece companies in the global economy, such as GM, plus reputation issues for leaders in finance (Goldman Sachs), energy (BP) and transport (Toyota) have called into question the values of corporate leaders. In the race for public credibility, it is fortunate for business that its prime regulator, government, is not seen as a worthy replacement as the leader in the dance.”

My beef is not with what Mr. Edelman wants to achieve; a free and mostly self-regulated market place. It is with how he believes that he can win public acceptance for it. I rebel, as do most people who are moderately sceptical of corporate humbug, to his pandering to the more infantile elements of this discussion; you know, the audience who cannot (supposedly) be told the truth because it would destroy their illusions.

So, I’d like to leave you with what I think is an effective demolition of Mr. Edelman’s style of PR, by quoting Professor Karnani’s robust expose of it:

“Executives are hired to maximize profits; that is their responsibility to their company’s shareholders. Even if executives wanted to forgo some profit to benefit society, they could expect to lose their jobs if they tried—and be replaced by managers who would restore profit as the top priority. The movement for corporate social responsibility is in direct opposition, in such cases, to the movement for better corporate governance, which demands that managers fulfill their fiduciary duty to act in the shareholders’ interest or be relieved of their responsibilities. That’s one reason so many companies talk a great deal about social responsibility but do nothing—a tactic known as greenwashing.”

Exactly!

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Tony Blair knew he might as well have kept the money he’s going to earn from his book for all the love giving it away would get him. But he also knew he didn’t need the money; that it was blood money; that he owed it to the soldiers. And, he knew that he needed to de-taint the book if it was going to be read, which is what mattered most to him. With a controversial gift, which in itself attracts readers and interest, he decontaminated the brand, not his, but the book’s.

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As the three companies faced their interrogators, behind sat protesters wearing T-shirts embossed “Energy shouldn’t cost lives”. When the proceedings closed the protesters screamed at the BP spokesman, “Hey, Hey, Lamar MacKay, how many fish did you kill today?” They chanted “Boycott BP”. They seemed to have friends in the Senate. Bob Menendez, the Democratic senator from New Jersey said:

“We were told that the Titanic was so technologically advanced that it couldn’t sink, and we were told that this well was so technologically advanced that it couldn’t spill. Unfortunately both of these technological marvels ended in tragedy.”

Actually, nobody ever said that either accident couldn’t happen. Though the makers of the Titanic and BP both at some point understated the potential risk involved in their respective challenges. That’s all the more reason, I believe, for BP to use this latest incident to set the record straight with the public about the realities of its business.

But right now the White House has vowed to “keep a boot to the throat” of BP. That’s an understandable response while the oil flows unchecked from the seabed. That does not mean that either PRs or BP should see it that way.

However, PR dogma suggests that BP should bite its tongue. The PR rulebook, designed to maintain a licence to operate, opines that if people think BP’s the villain it should act like one. Larry Smith of the Institute for Crisis Management and Timothy Coombs of Eastern Illinois University advocated this viewpoint to Slate:

[It's] literally true: BP owns the oil but not the rig. But it’s a shoddy communications strategy, says Smith. Wherever the fault lies, BP shouldn’t be splitting hairs. Companies should take the fall and work out recriminations behind closed doors, says Coombs. For example, when the chain Taco Johns had an E. coli outbreak, it didn’t publicly blame the lettuce supplier. It took responsibility. And, of course, sued the lettuce supplier later.

Effectively, Coombs is arguing that BP should adopt a cynical strategy in which it says one thing in private and another in public. His logic – and that of most PRs – is that the truth is too nuanced and complex for the public to comprehend. The argument goes that perception is everything. As the WSJ explained, they’ve got a point:

When you consider that analysts’ worst case scenarios put the eventual cost to BP at around $8 billion, yet $30 billion has been wiped off the company’s market capitalization since the crisis began, it becomes clear that this reputational damage has a value.

The problem is that by accepting full responsibility for the accident, BP would promote itself (dishonestly) as incompetent. How would that help maintain its credibility and reputation? Hence, I much prefer BP chief executive Tony Hayward’s strategy of accepting full responsibility for cleaning up the mess caused by its oil, while quietly but firmly disputing that it caused or was responsible for the accident. But Malcolm Gooderham, MD, TLG Communications, dubbed Hayward’s approach a “Miss” in PR Week. He also contrasted Hayward’s stance to that of his predecessor, Lord Browne:

“The virtue of Browne’s tenure was that despite the disasters, he is revered because of his strategic achievements. The challenge for BP today is to define a new thought leadership agenda.”

Browne’s thought leadership led him to re-brand British Petroleum as Beyond Petroleum. It was deceptive positioning and slightly bonkers to boot. To his credit, when Hayward took control of BP, he quietly downgraded the tag-line’s prominence. It now merely serves as “shorthand for what we do”, which is petroleum, and it hardly features at all in BP’s PR. What’s more, the irony of BP’s current plight is that it follows Mr Hayward’s determination to re-oritentate itself on technological competence rather than geo-political flair.

So what’s my advice to BP today?

• BP should concentrate on proving itself committed and competent as it cleans up the mess and reconsiders safety strategies
• BP has to speak with one voice in public and in private, now and in the future
• BP should use this crisis to educate the media, public and political elite about the realities of complex accountability
• BP should seek to lay the blame wherever the facts take them, even if some more of it falls on them
• BP should remind the world that energy is bottled force; BP is as good as any in handling the hazards involved in fueling our world
• BP should state the Browne years of Texas and Alaska lapses are behind them and what happened in the Gulf of Mexico was not caused by the same internal flaws
• BP needs to stress that the oil that’s now being drilled is located in inhospitable conditions and has inescapable risks
• BP should repeat and repeat that whatever lessons can be learned will be learned and that no stone will be left unturned in discovering them.

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As somebody who once was accused of organising a race riot in Handsworth, Birmingham, I know something about definitions.

My first defence was to say that if it was organised, it was not a riot. The police perhaps kindly ignored that challenging thought and moved on to my second line, and accepted it: I was attending a conference in London when it happened.

But I digress. Here’s some examples of some crises.

When Edward VIII abdicated from the British throne in 1936 so that he could marry his American lover Wallis Simpson, it created a crisis. It did so because it threatened the nation’s sense of itself and might even have wobbled the UK’s constitution. The credit crunch was a crisis. It threatened to very severely disrupt capitalism by destroying huge amounts of wealth (especially savings) and confidence. Note: what actually happened was very nasty but has so far fallen well short of what was threatened. So it was a crisis and we seem to have got through it.

Those events threatened abrupt or decisive change. They created very real and deep fear. The worst outcomes were seriously in play, and did not materialise.

There are, of course, cases where dramas needlessly become full-blown crises.

For example, there are the cases where people imagine a danger which would be dreadful if it did occur. One was Three Mile Island in 1979. The ironic thing about Three Mile Island was that the worst case scenario core meltdown occurred within the first minutes of the accident. It was such a non-event that nobody noticed, not even the plant’s operators. Meanwhile, the world’s media stood outside the plant for weeks hyping up the “what ifs”. (BTW: Three Mile Island still generates electricity today, just as electricity was generated by Chernobyl’s nuclear reactors until very recently.)

Here’s another twist. Disasters are quite often not crises. That’s to say, a chaos is unleashed, but nothing very much is threatened. When Richard Branson interrupted his holiday to fly to the scene of a Cumbrian train crash in 2007, that was not crisis management, so much as good PR and (for all we know) a compassionate act of a good boss responding to a disaster. Of course, if Branson hadn’t turned up, and was thought callous, that might have produced a drama for Virgin, since one cannot afford nowadays to be invisible at such moments. Even so, it would not have been a crisis.

Interestingly, when it comes to accidents, firms rarely get punished as hard as did Windscale, Value Jet, and Union Carbide, all of which anyway survived their genuine crises. Yet it is at least possible that rebranding a disaster or crisis-hit organisation merely produces a legacy of bad-taste jokes and ill-feeling about slippery PR. That’s to say, there may be a deep understanding among the public that accidents do happen. That understanding can withstand, I maintain, the media approach (and victim reproach) which tend to assume that total safety is available and would have been achieved except for the villainy of firms and governments.

As people speculate about Toyota’s fate, the fact is that there’s never been a major car firm destroyed by a recall or by an accident. Companies destroyed by sudden events are normally in the class of totally corrupt Enron and its grey accomplice Arthur Andersen. In both companies trust collapsed because their skulduggery accurately defined what their brands were about. Their reputations were beyond repair, and quite rightly so.

Then there’s the likes of Ratners. The collapse of that company had more to do with a loss of nerve in response to a gaffe than, arguably, necessity dictated. But Ratners’ experience was another exception that stands out precisely for that reason. If you doubt that, just look at the positive share prices of oil companies today and then review their accident-prone histories.

But let’s stay contemporary here. Toyota’s worldwide recall is not a crisis in the true sense of the term. It is actually a drama focused on a narrow range of issues. The chances are slim that it will become a long-term disaster for Toyota. That’s not to say that slow sales, halted production lines and global recalls of millions of cars is business as usual. It is just to remind us to retain a sense of perspective.

For a start, who’s panicking? Who thinks their Toyota (their car, their share, their job) is really threatened here? Here’s the important thought: we see this storm and we think, “Toyota’s a damn good car-maker and will be an even better one after this”. Maybe a few victims (some half-embarrassed that they panicked instead of finding neutral), with their US lawyers rubbing their hands behind them. But I don’t think anyone seriously believes that Toyota’s existence is threatened by its current problems. Though I imagine that the pressure must be bloody uncomfortable for Toyota’s bosses, and not good for the nerves of Japan’s stock exchange in the midst of recession.

Before we lose our nerve, or tell Toyota to, we should remind ourselves how well Ford survived its tribulations with its “exploding” fuel tanks in the Pinto and Mercury Bobcats (1.5 vehicle recall). It was claimed they killed 27 people. Ford ordered the recall – and did not contest the accusations – because it was more motivated by supposed public perception than by what it knew to be true (The Suicidal Corporation: How Big Business Fails America, by Paul H Weaver, a Touch Stone Book).

So most things labeled as being a crises aren’t any such thing.

We PRs need to consider very carefully whether we should avoid the elephant trap which is laid for us here. We should perhaps develop a determination to avoid reacting to every drama and panic and even disaster as though it were a crisis for our clients. The media, after all, is in the business of making a crisis out of drama, and we all too often risk doing half their work for them.

Heather Yaxley writing on PR Conversations hit the notes well recently. She attacked PR crisis management theorists for their panicky hyper-active overreaction to dramas:

Tell it fast becomes tell it before you know anything.  Tell it all means let the media and its rent-a-quote experts speculate about worst case scenarios.  Be open means unlimited social media engagement (regardless of what the legal or other ramifications may be). Have the CEO (or celebrity if a personal faux pas has occurred) lead communications with mandatory appearances on chatshows, a tour of news stations,  and a YouTube apology.  Mea culpa – the universal panacea: “I’m sorry if…” – anyone resisting the calls is bullied until they comply.  The pound of flesh must be paid.

I fear she rightly roughs me up a little for my recent piece Where was Mr Toyoda yesterday? She certainly compellingly argues that every so-called crisis is different. She adds that too many PRs try to impose commoditized crisis management plans onto unique situations:

It’s a comfort blanket of how to…, what not to do…, common mistakes and miracle cures.

I would add that PRs often corrupt the everyday management of risk in business. The sensible cry from PRs for clients to stay ahead of the game risks turning the commonsense desire to spot problems before they occur into crisis management paranoia.

The result is the creation of a risk-adverse culture which inhibits innovation. That’s a point that is well argued in Paul H. Weaver’s The Suicidal Corporation. It is why I’m recommending people read it. The creation of a risk-adverse culture helps spread indecision and insecurity. During media hurricanes it becomes a sort of PR own goal. In other words, making decisions under under pressure calls for risk-taking, but risk-taking like winning and losing is habit forming.

The truth is that people admire and respect risk-takers and they make allowances for their failures. Moreover, unpopularity in the media is just as temporary and superficial as popularity. Bad headlines don’t destroy good reputations, no more than positive ones make them. Good reputations are based on innovation, delivery on promises and a certain arrogance based on success. They are sustained by people’s experience of the brand  (El Buli, Ryanair, Apple, Toyota and much more).

Hence, rather than becoming hyper-active advocates of risk-aversion, PRs should instead do more to inspire courage and balls into the mindset of their clients. PRs could do much more to push back on media and other agendas and to help their clients ride out the storms they face with their integrity intact.

The reassuring lesson from most Toyota-type troubles is that consumers are as quick to forgive as they are to condemn. So I’ll risk a prediction. There’s every chance, as Insigna’s Jonathan Hemus says here in The Guardian, that Toyota will come out of its storm with its reputation enhanced (though his advice is too skewed toward institutionalized risk aversion for my liking).

So a crisis is a crisis when it threatens the viability of something or other. Otherwise it doesn’t qualify. The job of PRs is to make sure situations never do qualify or to clear up the mess if the you know what hits the fan.

Oh, I never did advocate that people riot, dread the thought. But I do own up to having been a revolutionary, which is something completely different.

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They died in August 2009. This weekend Toyota will start work on 2.3 million recalled cars in the US by inserting a stainless steel bar under the accelerator pedal to stop it sticking (though the cars in that recall do not include the type the family was driving). However, the company will also recall millions more cars in which there’s a threat that the mat could trap the accelerator.

Many people – including some accident investigators and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple - doubt that Toyota is addressing the real problem. They claim that it lies in the car’s software governing the electronic throttle control rather than with the pedals and mats.

There’s been 26 reported incidences in Europe. But news that Toyota first dismissed cases of accelerators sticking as a quality rather than a safety issue has damaged trust here. Meanwhile, the US media and the internet are full of stories of cars driving over cliffs. It’s a PR nightmare.

We know from experience that perception and fear are not easy forces to combat. Especially when at least four lives have been lost and customers are fearful for their own safety (Toyota used the adjective “rare” carefully to keep the level of risk in perspective).

But it is no wonder that the fallout from this episode has hit Toyota’s sales hard. Some Toyota owners are now too scared to drive their cars. Lawsuits are stacking up.

So Toyota had no alternative but to put the full weight of its brand’s reputation behind fixing the safety and the perception problem.

To its credit, in October 2009 the company’s president Mr Toyoda — grandson of the company’s founder — expressed his sorrow over the deaths and he apologised for the company’s performance in the US. He candidly admitted that Toyota was shamefully unprepared for the global economic crisis that has devastated the auto industry, and is a step away from “capitulation to irrelevance or death.”

However, yesterday, the same Mr Toyoda did not lead Toyota’s press conference in Japan which was called to set out the company’s global recall policy. That was a mistake. His absence was an embarrassing PR distraction, as highlighted in The Times today.

Therefore, it is difficult to challenge the view, expressed in the same article, of Ed Merner, president of Atlantis Investment Research in Tokyo:

“The whole thing has been very badly done. They hid from the problem for a long time. They didn’t attack it with full energy and they didn’t react with full energy. It’s crazy that they spend so much on advertising and now they are letting all the goodwill get washed away.”

Toyota better have some clear answers when they come to Washington later this month for their Congressional hearings into the crisis. And Mr Toyoda would be well advised to come in person to face the grilling.

Nevertheless, I rate the chances as high that done right Toyota can fix, reform and move on from this dual crisis of recalls and recession just as many other carmakers have done in the past.

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In the past footballers, like most employees, were not allowed to issue press releases, but Twitter and Facebook can easily amount to doing just that. Their bosses are nervous, and rightly so. Footballers are, after all, mostly only of interest because of their association with the game and a particular club. So every public utterance they make and the way they behave becomes of concern to the football companies.

The same goes for the likes of Kate Moss, Tiger Woods as representatives of their sponsors - just as it does for Jonathan Ross and John Humphrys as voices of their employer, the BBC. (With Ross the thing is complicated by his being not merely a freelance, but also a corporate sub-contractor.)

However, there’s distinction between Tweeting as an individual and Tweeting as someone who is clearly identified with an entity. The question is maybe this: should entities allow their members to Tweet about the entity but not about the wider world. Or is it, weirdly, vice versa?

Well, one wonders whether the wannabe editor of The Independent Rod Liddle now regrets writing on Millwall Online fan site that it was:

“Fcking outrageous that you can’t smoke in Auschwitz. I had to sneak round the back of the gas chambers for a crafty snout. Also, I wasn’t convinced by the newish Auschwitz Burger Bar and Grill.”

I’m sure that Amanda Knox wishes she’d never been described as Foxy Knoxy on a social media site, and then gone on to build on that reputation, if only for fun.

Perhaps that explains why one of the fastest-growing social media services is www.suicidemachine.org, which allows you to watch as your online history and friendships are shredded.

The reality is dawning, I believe, that the web is not a place to abandon inhibition. It is a place that should be engaged with confidence, but with the knowledge that everything is public, transparent and potentially damaging. Indeed, the new media have not overthrown (actually they have reinforced) old wisdom about reserve and caution.

Firms need to be able to say that they have a right to expect loyalty, up to a point. Individuals have a right to assert that they have a right to “voice”, up to a point. How can we get too cross when we find even footballers want to be articulate?

Well, one moderating influence might be for organisations to caution their staff that they’ll have to live with what they say: Tweets are horribly permanent. Best to be sensible, then.

Frankly, I suspect that organisations and their PRs will approach these issues very variously.

The best hope may be not to control what your people say so much as to get them to make it clear when they are speaking as individuals and when as representatives of the corporation. Indeed, an organisation should at least insist that their employees make it clear when they are not being “official”.

That’s one reason why, in contrast to the likes of Neville Hobson, I argue that corporate utterance is collegiate, not personal. If anyone wants the corporate view, they’ll need to log-in and get the official line or stick in the SM world but listen to people licensed and badged as corporate. The individual can say “I”, but only the PR or the manager can say “we”.

It’s easy – perhaps too easy – for some organisations to claim security is a problem. For instance, the US Marine Corps has banned all social media usage on its networks for security reasons, while allowing soldiers to continue to use them at home. I can’t judge the merit of the decision of the brass, but I recognise that firms are often paranoid about criticism and may attempt to silence their employees under a cloak of commercial confidentiality. The tension here is natural and sometimes healthy, as it was with Pfizer’s whistle-blowing saga.

An assessment of risk should determine the degree to which individuals are left free to exercise their judgment when it comes to using social media, or whether they will be restrained by bans on this or that topic or using this or that channel.

The case for corporate censorship is particularly strong in instances in which the distinction between “we” and “I” is difficult to separate in the public mind, and when the “I” helps calibrate the brand’s value. But censorship, whether corporate or self, will often make sense.

There are some big general points to make.

1. Companies never really could control what people said about them, and certainly can’t now. But for as long as they’re being talked about (bigged-up, dissed, or whatever) at least they are the subject of interest, and what they say is of interest. They’ve just got to be better and better at their end.

2. But to do so they need to be more strategic and approach messages from an evidence-based, grown-up, real-world position to win or retain credibility. They need to tie communication to business goals online and offline, and that requires a strong strategy backed by clear tactics in the face of chaos.

3. So with social media just like old media, if you are not proactive you let someone else define your brand, which was always the case, but only more so with SM etc.

The refractions, perceptions, versions and channels through which the world perceives you are as various as there are people looking and talking about you, and are growing all the time. Whilst you – the entity – can’t be static and rock-like, you should at least aim to be considered, serious, adult and stable. That’s surely the best way to earn respect and see off  – or even gradually respond to – the gales of opinion and gossip swirling around.

The trick for PRs is to anchor our communication in a solid reality and to get the message out to wherever audiences are. (But that shouldn’t stop us being adult just because we’re speaking with young people on our employer’s behalf.)

Everything else will come out in the wash.

Hence, the less we as PRs can control the perceptions of employees or customers on SM, or anywhere else, the more we’d better be good at managing and communicating the underlying realities to a wider audience. As ever, our messages need to be heard by as many of the disinterested or the uninterested as possible. All the people who aren’t talking (or even thinking) about our employers or clients matter as much as the tiny number who are making their life bloody.

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The union didn’t really want the 12-day strike (no matter what some of their members desired). The union was stuck between a rock and a hard place. With more than 90% of the BA cabin crew voting for industrial action over Xmas, war had been declared. But for the union this was a sign that things had got out of control.

First there was the preening of two competing general secretaries – Derek Simpson and Tony Woodley – both trying to outdo the other by wooing members to support their faction’s sole leadership bid. Then there was the membership, genuinely angry and out for BA’s blood. That’s a dangerous combination that nearly blew up in the union’s face.

Here’s an insider’s insight. I used to work for a trade union as a PR back in the 1980s. We held numerous ballots for many different types of industrial action. But I was often asked to tone down the rhetoric. Once a union official accused me of stirring things up: “you’re trying too hard to get a yes vote,” he said. What he meant was that any vote over 55% for action was not helpful. The logic went like this.

The ballot was not for action, which would have exposed the union’s weakness, but to strengthen the union’s bargaining position. A small majority for action was enough to give the union moral authority in negotiations, but a good excuse to keep the militants under control too (45% of your mates voted no). If the ballot helped secure a better compromise than would otherwise been had, the union then sought to recruit new members on the back of that success – not least from less militant staff associations. It was deemed a win-win.

Today’s industrial relations landscape is much less favourable for taking successful strike action than it was in my day. The union leaders know this. They were not blind to the PR disaster and company-ruining nature of a costly Xmas strike by cabin crew. But the Unite leaders representing BA cabin crew had become snared in a vice of their own making. The courts – regardless of the motivation – provided the union with a credible way out without them losing face in front of their members.

Now the union leaders have a lifeline. The backlash from the public against the audacious 12-day Xmas strike proposal (way over the top and a tactical mistake) will most likely sink in on the BA cabin crew. It will most likely temper the militancy when the next ballot is taken. It will most likely lead to diminished expectations and less harmful industrial action, if any: we’ll see.

But if the anger stays the same – this is going to end in tears for the union’s members. BA is in no position to compromise overmuch (for reasons which should be clear to readers of this blog). If there’s a full-on power struggle between management and union, either both sides will lose, or the union will be smashed.

BA management hardly shines in all this. It deserves a bad reputation for its historic incompetence. Chief among these is that it has arguably done more to inflame BA cabin crew and to turn them into militant hotheads than the union has.

After all, it was BA management that promoted its cabin crew as the centre piece – heart and soul – of the world’s favourite airline. BA used a fashionable – I would argue misguided – PR technique designed to turn one’s staff into brand ambassadors.

The problem was that BA cabin crew believed their own PR and sought the rewards and bargaining position that went with it. The hot and cold attitude of BA toward their staff (BA thought they could run a premium brand, with so-called premium staff, in a commoditized market and discovered that they couldn’t) just confused and demoralized them. It eventually led to uncontrollable anger among cabin crew staff as they sensed they’d been “betrayed”.

The lesson? The next time a trendy internal communications or PR brand guru says let’s use our staff as brand ambassadors – tell them about what happened at BA.

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One person who thinks she knows the difference is Echo Research’s Group CEO, Sandra MacLeod, who asserts In PRWeek:

“Where marketing loves command and control, PR thrives on influence and relationships. The concepts of customer, employer and global citizen brands are merging. This, if ever there was one, is surely PR’s time.”

I think Ms MacLeod is wrong to say that the difference between the two disciplines is one of approach. I disparage her tacit implication that marketing is a blunter, more clumsy instrument than the deliciously professional and nuanced, human, PR. Her view reflects a popular misconception that needs dispelling. So here goes.

It so happens that I read her thoughts while midway through re-reading Greater Good: How good marketing makes for better democracy, by John A. Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz (Harvard Business Press, 2007). So let me review its wisdom a little.

At the core of Greater Good is how marketing not only exists to sell goods and communicate ideas (just as PR does), but also mediates between consumers and suppliers to ensure the market gets – from feedback – what it desires. Or as the book puts it on page 3, the economic function of marketing “is the interface between supply and demand”.

Hence, two-way engagement, interaction, dialogue and feedback are the essence of good marketing practice (just as it is the essence of good sales practice). As the book says:

“Consumers are engaged and involved with marketing and the consumer marketplace. They relish expressing their identity, being part of community, and exercising their creativity – not through every purchase decision they make but through those in which they have chosen to be involved.”

Moreover, a marketing-led company such as Apple, which is closely bonded to its customers, is a command and control-led body at the level of management. The two concepts are not contradictory, as anybody can testify who has studied Professor Theodore Levitt’s – of Harvard Business School – explanation of Henry Ford’s innovative use of production line techniques.

The authors of Greater Good also interestingly point out that a testimony to the power of marketing to forge relationships with consumers is how many of today’s top brands have their origins in the 1800s: Johnson & Johnson, Kodak, H.J. Heinz, Ivory Soap, Coca-Cola, Cadbury’s, Nestlé, Unilever, Siemens and many more.

Perhaps one should also remember that a successful brand is as much in the hands of consumers as of its shareholders; let’s never forget what happened to New Coke.

BTW: I intend to review Greater Good in more detail at another time. There’s much to be said about what politics and marketing have in common and what differentiates them. There’s much good insight in Greater Good, but I shall make the case that the authors overstate the synergies between marketing and democracy, because politics is about power first and foremost, and marketing is not.

But, meanwhile, I recommend Greater Good to anybody in the PR industry who wishes to read a contemporary account of what marketing does and how it is responding to new technology and societal challenges.

Now it is back to today’s subject matter: the relationship in future between PR and marketing. Here’s what Lord Bell said when he echoed earlier remarks from Lord Chadlington:

Integration is the new buzz word, but it is not about lowest common denominators: it is about being channel-neutral, it is about ensuring the whole is stronger than the sum of the parts.

For the PR industry, it is not about the old battle for a share of advertising dollars, but how to work collectively, with all the other disciplines, to a common strategy so that wherever the message appears, it contributes to the overall reputation objectives. Everything must be complementary, not contradictory. There also looms an obsession with new compliance procedures and new regulation across the world, an inevitable but wrong reaction to a collapse of trust.

Coordination, integration and alignment of messages and objectives, then, is the aim of the “new” game. But, of course, it has always been the case that much PR has been marketing – selling - by other means, rather than developing reputational strategy. PR is at its unique, necessary, useful and amusing best in that latter role. But it always did wide work. Edward Bernays, for instance, pioneered issues management as a tool to flog more product whether he was running soap competitions or inspiring women to light Torches For Freedom.

We know that advertising is having to adopt what were once thought to be PR strategies. That’s because firms are having to be more and more clever in hunting down their audience members, and catching their attention.

Moreover, the recession has resulted in a much stricter regime of cost control and increasing demands for return on investment. And, as Lord Bell points out, there’s an obsession with new compliance procedures and new regulation across the world.

Doing away with silos and antiquated departmental demarcations that often produce contradictory messaging makes sense. It is a price both marketing and PR are going to have to pay as we all move on in the post-Credit Crunch environment.

I believe that PR is going to do well where it can prove (or convince) that it can do better than marketing and, in particular, advertising. To what degree advertising is going to become more expensive per eyeball, or less persuasive per dollar on social and mainstream media, I wouldn’t like to say. But I acknowledge that advertising has a proven track record and role that are hard to dismiss, which explains why its budgets far exceed those allocated to PR.

But overall, we might well see PR emerging (or merging) as a major vehicle of marketing: an innovative way of selling stuff and ideas in the digitally networked world. But we will also see plenty of PR professionals still engaged in their traditional roles as advocates in the courts of public opinion and as burnishers of reputations.

So yes, PR and marketing functions will increasingly integrate. Moreover, I maintain that just as PR can do marketing, marketing can do PR, but only up to a point. While neither discipline is inherently superior, there will always be a difference – although not always a clear one – between defending, say, a political policy or corporate reputation and licence to operate, and marketing, say, a chocolate bar.

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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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