Alex Singleton

Insights from an in-house marketer

Archives for August 2013

What’s wrong with crisis communications training

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I’ve written before about the absurdities that inflict many crisis communications simulations. And today I want to raise another problem. This is the obsession with spending an inordinate amount of time teaching PR people and executives to deal with “doorstepping”. This, in some training is given pride of place, as though it is the most important part of neutralising a crisis.

Doorstepping, of course, is the term for when TV cameras and reporters camp outside someone’s front door, waiting to ask questions and take pictures of someone involved in a scandal.

Now I’ll certainly accept that doorstepping is a problem for celebrities and pantomime FTSE100 villains – Fred Goodwin, for example. But for most executives facing the normal sort of reputational crisis that businesses face, doorstepping is unlikely to happen. Indeed, it tends to affect executives who don’t have crisis communication strategies in place, rather than those that do.

You see, doorstepping might deliver good, tabloid pictures of celebs. I have a friend who used to work as in investigative reporter for a tabloid, which involved lots of sitting in car outside the homes of crooks. But when legitimate business leaders are the subject of media scrutiny, camping outside their homes actually provides poor material. I mean, how useful or cost-effective is it to have journalists standing in front the house of an executive who isn’t saying anything?

Doorstepping for executives occurs to business leaders when their companies clam up in the face of a crisis, not when they make their CEOs or other top executives available for media interviews or provide PR comment. When Tesco found itself engulfed in the horse meat crisis earlier this year (2013), was its CEO doorstepped? Maybe, but I never saw any pictures of this and there would have been little point. That’s because Tesco fielded its technical director to answer media enquiries, including on television. Such interviews are much more revealing and make better television and fodder for newspapers.

Unless a doorstepping simuilation is being done by someone who’s either doorstepped as a journalist or has been on the receiving end of doorstepping as an executive, I do wonder if it is going to be very insightful anyway.

The tragedy of all this is that executives can leave crisis simulations feeling that they are well prepared, when they haven’t actually done the really important jobs in crisis preparation. They have play-acted some clichéd crisis situations, but not drafted their responses to the sort of crises that they are likely to face.

This is compounded by the fact that CEOs and PR leaders routinely fail to be honest with themselves about the skeletons that are inevitably hidden within their company’s pasts. A CEO who has an elevator pitch prepared, and a draft press release on file, about a skeleton will do much better wherever they are confronted by the issue, than someone who has simply done a role-playing game about a generic crisis.

Robert Leaf: PR people just can’t write as well as they used to

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I’m not one for the meme that things always used to be better. But Robert Leaf, in his autobiography, may be right when he talks about the writing skills of PR practitioners:

In those days [the 1950s], the average PR man was a better writer than today… A number of editors have told me or even shown me examples of material they have received… from PR firms and in-house departments that are so bad it was embarrassing.

And then he continues by saying:

And possibly because, back then, PR people had more time than in today’s far more demanding and competitive world, they read much more and so had more factual data on which to base their releases.

That second part is interesting because I’m sure that many PR practitioners do spent their entire lives under massive stress, constantly unable to get everything done. Indeed, a survey has shown that PR is the fifth most stressful job in America.

However, I would suggest that not reading widely or building up a good general knowledge or developing relationships are actually causes of both stress and shortness of time.

A PR practitioner who understands a product and its industry, and who reads the relevant media outlets, will devise a press release about the product extremely quickly. He or she won’t be desperately and depressingly having to “sell in” a story to media outlets that regard the story as worthless.

Reading really does save time.

An ideologue and an expert: two approaches to TV interviews

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https://www.youtube.com/embed/iLQmVW4_vyc

Perhaps I’m just biased against vegans, but in this Canadian television news broadcast about children’s diets, I definitely find the second guest’s interview technique more convincing. The first speaker, Ruby Roth, presents a bizarre case against meat, saying that carnivores in nature “don’t shy away from gore and blood” and eat nails and hair. Which doesn’t seem to be relevant. She also has an unfortunate whinny, high-pitched voice. Not her fault, of course, but it does affect how she comes across.

The second guest, Sally Fallon Morell, is head of the Weston A Price Foundation, which advocates traditional diets. She engages with the interviewer more directly. She has scientific results on hand (“There were studies done on vegan children in Holland…”) which makes her come across as informed. And she wins viewers over by being very moderate in her rhetoric (“Now I understand her concern” about animal welfare, and advocates buying pasture-fed animals from farmers markets etc). Moreover, she has a wonderful soundbite. ”Let’s not sacrifice our children’s health” when worrying about animals.

Regardless of the actual merits of each side, the result of both guests’ interviews is that the viewer is left with the impression that the first guest is an ideologue while the second one is an entirely reasonable person.

What a fat man walking tells us about media relations

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I can still recall the coverage after eight years. Steve Vaught, then a 39-year-old former US marine, was obese. He decided to do something about it and announced his plan to walk from San Diego to New York City.

It was an incredible distance to walk. And the media coverage was phenomenal. His journey was covered by the BBC, CNN, Washington Post, USA Today, The Guardian – and countless other outlets. Indeed, it became a minor internet sensation. The coverage was helped by his blogging of the trip on a site (now defunct) called TheFatManWalking.com.

What made this a story was not actually that a fat person was walking, which happens all the time. A year earlier Dave Drass set up a website with a similar name, FatManWalking.com. The only media coverage I’ve seen was on CNET, which said: “Since Vaught began his journey, Drass has been getting between 20 and 50 misaddressed e-mails a week from people offering Vaught a place to stay, kudos and inspiring tales”.

So what made Steve Vaught interesting? Two main things. Steve Vaught weighed over 28 and a half stone at the start of his journey. The makes the whole journey seem an incredible and extreme undertaking. And it is extreme examples that make something newsworthy. The world’s largest Victoria Sponge, the size of a football field, is more interesting than a big Victoria Sponge.

Vaught was also very good at telling his personal story, which was full of emotion. “I feel that am looked down upon by people even when they are not doing so maliciously,” he said. Emotion is a tool sometimes forgotten about by PR practitioners, outside the charity and public affairs worlds. But it is just as relevant to consumer and B2B PR. Just think about the David and Goliath stories the successful entrepreneurs tell: James Dyson struggling to get acceptance for his vacuum clear or Richard Branson taking on British Airways. Their companies make an emotional connect with the public.

Mondelēz is killing Cadbury’s reputation. What should it do?

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Cadbury is stuck in a media narrative from which it seems incapable of escaping. The story goes like this. A wonderful, British-controlled, Quaker-inspired, employee-loving chocolate maker was bought by money-grabbing corporate raiders from America. These evil Yanks have ruined the flavours of its products, sacked workers, moved a factory to Poland and generally ruined the company.

Cadbury, now part of Mondelēz, is getting a lousy press, even when it claims the criticism is unfounded. For example, it has been denounced for changing the flavour of Milk Tray, but it claims it has done no such thing.

It could learn a lot from studying Nestle. The Swiss food company bought Britain’s Rowntree Mackintosh in 1998. Just as with Cadbury, there were significant concerns about the foreign takeover. But, according to a 1993 Management Today article, the “Swiss multinational’s general sensitivity” was deployed “as it set about absorbing and refashioning what had, for over a century, been the dominant corporate enterprise in the ancient city of York”. It more than doubled Rowntree’s capital expenditure in York. It invested heavily in Rowntree’s research and development. The article says:

Some £14 million went into general-purpose cocoa-processing. Another £15 million replaced the 90-year-old building where Polo mints have been made since their 1948 launch, and expanded capacity to a nice round one million an hour. This year will see a new Aero line (£7 million) and an £18-million milk chocolate factory.

The head of the trade union was quoted approving of Nestle’s actions. And the article says that staff benefits actually increased:

The famous profit-sharing arrangement, which Joseph Rowntree introduced back in the 1920s, has not only been maintained but extended to embrace the whole of Nestle UK. Similarly the already generous company pension arrangements have been further improved under the new regime

Now Nestle is a money-making business just like Mondelēz, but there seems to be an important difference. Nestle has always been long-termist in its view. Anyone can make chocolate. You can make it in your kitchen. The value the Swiss food producer saw in Rowntree was the value of the Yorkshire company’s brands. And it is surely common sense that brand owners should protect their long-term value, rather than make a quick buck by annoying everyone.

Mondelēz’s ownership seems motivated by short-term thinking. The company (then known as Kraft Foods) pledged to keep open Cadbury’s factory in in Somerdale near Bristol before buying it, only to welsh on its promise weeks after the purchase was agreed. Of course, moving production to Poland saved the firm some money, but it was reckless approach to public relations. And given that Cadbury was making money, it was an unnecessary u-turn which reflected badly on the ethics of the buyer.

I won’t list all of the criticism that the British media have poured over Cadbury and its new owners, but only this week the company has been under fire for cancelling future Christmas presents (chocolate) to retired employees. From a PR point of view, the decision has been made at the wrong point.

I hate to sound like a Leftie, but cancelling presents looks mean and involves a relatively small amount of money. Given that the old Cadbury was always seen as a good employer, former staff members are probably enthusiasts for the brand and give away a lot of Cadbury’s chocolate at Christmas and Easter anyway. A more imaginative brand owner would work out ways to harness their enthusiasm for good use and to get some good publicity. Why not involve them in a major Christmas project to help feed those who are going hungry in the poorest countries?

Anyway, it strikes me that Mondelēz needs to make a number of striking announcements to reverse the deluge of bad publicity being inflicted on Cadbury. One would be to accredit all the chocolate the company produces with Fairtrade (Dairy Milk became Fairtrade prior to the takeover). Now, I’m a skeptic of the Fairtrade scheme, but I do see the PR benefits of using it. The decision would dramatically conflict with the media narrative that Cadbury is run by greedy capitalists.

And making announcements that strikingly conflict against the media narrative are the only the way Cadbury can get its reputation back. Now you may be saying that such striking announcements will cost some money. That is true. But public relations starts with action. No company can build and maintain a reputation using spin. The benefit is that a strong brand enables companies to charge more and make higher profits. And if Cadbury wants to have a strong brand in the future, it needs to start with actions that the public can support.