When it comes to the idea that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I’m reminded of WordWrite President Paul Furiga’s equally catchy counterargument:
“Well, they never spelled Enron wrong did they?”
No, they did not, and everyone still remembers how to spell its name, albeit for all the wrong reasons. The C-Suite is filled with cautionary tales such as Enron’s, including many more recent examples of self-inflicted malfeasance that don’t need to be addressed in this space.
So why does this popular notion still exist?
Well, because all clichés are rooted in at least some small kernel of truth.
Good news for the scandal plagued? Only if your publicity and awareness meters are sitting at zero, which isn’t the case for most established corporations or businesses.
Stanford economics professor Alan Sorensen supports this belief in a study examining book reviews that ran in the New York Times. “Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales” found that well-known authors with positive reviews could sell 42 percent more books, but poor reviews caused a 15% drop in purchases. New or unknown authors whose books were reviewed saw their sales increase by 33 percent, regardless of whether the critique was encouraging or not.
Mr. Sorensen extended this logic to businesses, concluding that any type of PR is valuable for smaller organizations, because negative perceptions diminish faster than awareness of the company in general. With established brands, however, bad publicity remains at the forefront much longer – a critical point when it comes to protecting corporate image and making sure your business is telling authentic stories to its stakeholders.
This transparency comes into play not only when it comes to internal company behavior, but also as it relates to whom your company affiliates itself with.
Former financial journalist and current University of Michigan Medical Center School communications professional Melissa Preddy examines the real-time responses of companies dealing with damage caused by affiliations they expected to help, not hurt them, in her piece “From Komen to Limbaugh, what can companies do when affiliations misfire?”
The Susan G. Komen Foundation, Preddy wrote, “put corporate sponsors in an exceedingly awkward position when it yanked support of Planned Parenthood . . .”
The problem here was not a cover-up designed to save face for an internal wrong. The issue was one of hypocrisy, because – fairly or not – outsiders judged its treatment of Planned Parenthood to be inconsistent with the way Komen dealt with other organizations perceived as equally controversial yet still worthy of sponsorship.
Again, this speaks to authenticity (or a lack thereof).
So is it ever acceptable to mislead in the service of positive public relations?
A Harvard Business Review blog by Ron Ashkenas titled “Why We Don’t Always Tell the Truth,” examines why individuals and businesses “shade the truth.” He argues that in a sales culture, “Showing customers or partners what’s truly behind the curtain could undermine credibility and threaten the deal. The wiser course in many cases is to limit the truth and figure out how to ‘deliver’ later.”
With all due respect to Mr. Ashkenas – whose larger piece has many salient points – I would argue overpromising and under delivering is the exact pattern of behavior that gets organizations in trouble in the first place.
We live in the real world and must be pragmatists. However, I’d advise all of our current clients as well as those we might be privileged to work with in the future to not show one face to the public and another in private.
As strategic partners, our role at WordWrite is to assist clients in telling the stories that need to be told. Aspire to build a stronger relationship with your own clients by more closely aligning character to reputation.
To paraphrase the late John Wooden, reputation is what others think of you, but character is who you are when no one is looking.
I’m eager to hear what you have to say. Would businesses be more stable and profitable if character and reputation were viewed as indivisible? Have you ever encountered a situation when getting your name out there outweighed the context of how it was portrayed?
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Jeremy Church is an account supervisor for WordWrite Communications.
He can be reached at jeremy.church@wordwritepr.com and on Twitter@churchjeremy.
