Quarterly newsletter, Volume 2 - July 2007
Thinkers’ Corner
“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good. Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…”, pleaded the Animals back when R&B meant worlds more than ‘pimped rides’ and hyped divas.
I’ve often thought this lament should become an unofficial anthem for our much maligned profession. PR is so often the whipping boy, the scapegoat for a whole range of corporate, political and management ills. It has allowed itself to become synonymous with evasiveness and equivocation.
I cite an example from a book called Unspeak by Stephen Poole. Ostensibly Mr Poole’s work is an attempt to unmask that old deceiver, Language, and quite right too. However, his wholly laudable theory is too often shipwrecked by the sirens beckoning him to vilify the British Left. And being a journalist, Mr Poole can’t resist launching a kick at the prone body of PR too:
“Moreover”, he says, describing biotech food industries, “the term ‘genetically modified’ is usually shortened in PR and the media to ‘GM’, so that any potentially worrying implications of science in the term are compressed out of existence. After all, GM can also denote General Motors, or a Grand Master in chess.”
The book goes on to use PR liberally as an interchangeable term for various shades of untruth, all the while forgetting that the term, rather like GM, is just convenient shorthand that can also mean ‘Proportional Representation’. In the right context, people are very unlikely to confuse the two. But the point is made: PR is the enemy of truth. PR is a form of language devised with intent to deceive.
And so I come back to being misunderstood. PR, at least not in the terms I understand it, is not some form of encoded language aimed at deceiving the wider world. PR is what it says it is: relations with the public. Those relations are based not just on language, or indeed communications, but also on behaviour – and the sum of the two produces ‘reputation’, i.e. the way others think of you.
This, to me, encapsulates the innate value of PR. Not just as a means of communicating a message – be it personal, political or corporate – but also in shaping behaviour which ensures that message bears examination. So few people seem to grasp this.
In politics, take Jose Manuel Barosso, head of the European Commission. Having said that tackling climate change “must be a defining mission of the European Union for the future”, he went on to declare: “This is an opportunity for European leaders to match intentions with deeds, to turn words into actions.“
Indeed so, and the message is clear, but Mr Barosso’s ownership of a VW Touareg 4X4 suggests that his behaviour is unlikely to enhance his reputation. Worse still is his justification: “I never see myself as an example. A moralistic approach is not mine. We are setting public targets and should avoid giving certificates of good behaviour to individuals.”
So, having exhorted the public to alter their lifestyle in a way which will help the EU reach its carbon emission targets, what Mr Barosso apparently means is that we, the population of the EU, should do as he says and not as he does.
And here’s the point, surely. This is bad public relations not because it was conceived by an adviser as a deliberate attempt to deceive (as Stephen Poole might have it), but because the two sides of the behaviour and communication equation are unbalanced. The result being that his reputation for political leadership is torpedoed.
And here’s the point about PR: good PR – PR that adds value – is not, and never has been, about deceit. It is about solid, consultative advice that suggests reputation is contingent on two key factors that simply must stand up to scrutiny. It is about inspiring the right action as well as the right communication.
PR’s own behaviour has contributed to its reputation problems. Too often it has allowed itself to be used as a means simply to mouth what its master believes should be heard; irrespective of what that master has been doing. To have a future where its worth is recognised, PR needs to assert its true role.
Patrick Barrow, Managing Director PRCA UK
