Month: September 2014

Amazon.com is choosing to remain silent in its dispute with publisher Hachette.  Its reputation is taking a beating from authors and publishers who are speaking out.  Amazon is becoming a case study for CEOs and PR practitioners in the dangers of failing to make one’s case public.  The company has a history of avoiding the media so its current stance is not new, but previously its decision to remain close-mouthed was not as dangerous as it is now.  What is known about its dispute with Hachette puts Amazon in a pro-consumer light, but one wonders why the company isn’t merchandising its point of view.  Instead, it is letting authors complain publicly about its stubbornness and its decision to stop pushing Hachette books.  The word that comes to mind with this stance is arrogance.  Amazon is so convinced of its position that it doesn’t feel it has to make a public case for it.  If so, the company could not be more wrong.

My colleague, Mike Cargill, sent this story to me for which I thank him.  It is an example of why marketers shouldn’t create content.  The article is a collection of some of the best and worst tweets commemorating 9/11.  The bad ones are terrible and disrespectful.  They push product on a day when commercialism should be at an ebb.  The best ones do a credible job of remembering the day without attempting to sell the reader anything.  How can a marketer use an international, world-changing tragedy as a bench for selling anything?  The answer to that is marketers are trained to ask for the order at any and all times.  “So, thousands were killed, here’s a coupon to buy my product.”  The marketer doesn’t see the offer as tacky and inappropriate.  It is one more opportunity to sell, sell, sell.  On the other hand, the PR practitioner should and usually does consider the feelings of the audience being addressed.  Marketers should leave content creation to professionals, all of whom should have PR training.

The commissioner of the National Football League is living on a razor’s edge.  He was dealing with a crisis of concussions and their effects on players.  Suddenly he is dealing with domestic abuse by a player against the player’s fiance.  In each scandal, the NFL has been perceived to move too slowly to address the underlying problem.  Part of the reason the league has been tardy might be that it isn’t set up to handle scandal quickly.  It might be too busy marketing itself to watch the horizon for incidents and events that can compromise the image and reputation of the teams and the office of the commissioner.  As this second scandal demonstrates, the league has to get better at disciplining players who cross the line.  But that means it must move faster and not wait until video of an ugly incident is made public.  By then, it is too late.

Apple debuted its version of mobile payment on Tuesday.  Already, skeptics are weighing in on the cloudy future for the technology.  The reason for doubts is one that held back other systems from success — conservatism on the part of retailers and consumers.  So far, there hasn’t been a clear advantage to waving the mobile phone near a merchant’s point of sale system and having it record data wirelessly.  Merchants will need to upgrade systems to handle Apple’s technology.  That costs money.  Apple will want a percentage of each transaction as payment for its system.  More money out the door.  Consumers have to adapt to passing their phones near the system and not swiping a card.  That requires a change in behavior.  Consumers also will be concerned about the safety of such systems.  This will take time and intensive communication.  Way back when banks introduced ATMs, they stationed people next to the machine and had them walk consumers through depositing and withdrawing money.  Banks had a vested interest in doing this because they wanted to cut down on tellers and bricks and mortar.  There is no equivalent reason for mobile payment.  Apple has taken on a huge marketing and PR job to make sure its system is a success.  The company is capable of doing it, but there won’t be much progress initially.

Anheuser-Busch is replacing its diesel trucks at its Houston brewery with compressed natural gas rigs. The brewery says it wants to be “green”.  That may be true but left unsaid is that the price of diesel is higher than that of natural gas.  In other words, A-B is doing well by doing good.  There is not only nothing wrong with this, but in the best situations, this should prove true.  The better, faster, cheaper way should also be less expensive in both the short and long run in order to gain the support of business.  Good PR does not have to be costly.  It should not be an add-on that a company should do out of good citizenship, but a line item that contributes to the bottom line even when it seems far afield from what a company does.  Too often, PR activities are “stick-on” actions without reference to the company’s main business.  But, PR is what a company does, not what it says.  It is how a company acts and not how it spins.  So, bravo to A-B for doing the calculations and even though the tonnage of carbon dioxide diminution is modest, it is something to note.

The question in this essay is who should pay for Detroit’s bankruptcy?   Today, the debt overhang rests on the poor because the wealthy and middle class left for the suburbs long ago.  Even if it had been possible that Detroit could have kept its tax base evenly distributed, it wasn’t likely.  This, of course, is true for several cities around the US, urban centers that have been hollowed out and are surrounded by wealthy autonomous towns. To keep the wealthy and middle class, city administrations needed a long-term PR plan that involved taxes and services targeted to the middle and upper classes.  Is this fair?  Not really, but the wealthy and the middle class have the option to move and have done so over the decades as cities became less welcoming, cramped and poorly run.  The reality is that cities have to compete for the wealthy and middle class against suburbs, first by keeping businesses in the inner core and secondly, by holding on to the well-to-do population.  Once either has left, the other will follow.  New York City, as wealthy as it is, nevertheless lost numerous corporate headquarters to the suburbs surrounding it and is in danger of losing more as its power as a financial center has declined.  Mayors need to play a long game but often are constrained by short-term politics.  It isn’t fair that the wealthy and middle class get to leave, but that is the way it is.  Laws won’t change self-interested behavior.

President Obama is admitting that he goofed by playing golf so soon after addressing the beheading of an American journalist.  The optics looked bad. It is good that the President understands this now, but one wonders why he didn’t grasp the gaffe earlier.  Leadership has been a trial for this President since the beginning.  He seems to be more comfortable following the pack rather than standing at the head of it.  Witness his decision to back off on immigration after saying that he would use executive orders to address the problem of tens of thousands of children cross the border from Mexico.  In that case, he spoke before he estimated what might happen to Democratic senators in battleground states.  Were I brash enough to talk directly to the President, I might advise a rudimentary course in PR and the boundaries of leadership.

CVS Health has stopped selling cigarettes in its drugstores.  Walgreen has not.  Its reason for continuing to sell tobacco seems specious at best.  Walgreen maintains that it is the duty of pharmacies to help smokers stop and drug stores are only a tiny percentage of the retail outlets for smoking.  The result of that thinking is “Let us help you stop smoking.  Meanwhile, here is another pack of cancer sticks.”  Aiding and abetting smokers while telling them to stop is curious.  It is not a positioning I would be comfortable taking, and one wonders whether Walgreen’s employees feel the same way.  CVS Health has chosen the high road.  Walgreen has chosen to muddle its message.  It is hard to say whether this will have consumer impact.  (People select drug stores out of convenience.)  But, CVS employees can hold their heads higher, and that in itself is something worth noting.

This publicity stunt is insensitive and dumb, especially on the heels of another journalist beheading in the Middle East.  It comes under the category of “What were they thinking?”   Celebrating Headless Day on Sept. 2?  Puh-leeze.  No wonder journalists took offense.  It is a case of creativity run amok.  One can imagine the brainstorming and the “neat” ideas surrounding the Headless Horseman.  No one bothered to ask whether the ideas fit into the larger consciousness of the public where news of journalist decapitations are fresh and raw.  So they ran with the campaign and to their horror realized they had erred.  Time for an apology.  That won’t help the reputations of the publicists behind the dumb promotion nor will it help the show.  At the least, the stunt backfired.  It is hard to tell what could be worse. 

News that airline passengers are fighting over seat room should not surprise anyone.  Airlines have pushed economics to the limit and so doing, have inconvenienced passengers beyond tolerance. Airlines make no apologies for their actions.  In order for them to make money, they have to fly full planes and the more they can pack in, the better financially it is for them.  At some point, however, regulators and Congress will step in.  Until then, airlines will continue to shrink seating space and cram in yet another row in the steerage part of the cabin.  One would think that if airlines considered public relations, they would set a generous limit on seat distance.  So far, only one or two carriers have moved that way.  The rest are redesigning seats to make them smaller and lighter so they can pack ’em in.  When is the public going to revolt?  Isolated instances of passenger melees might not be enough to make management think twice.  Any way one looks at the outcome, it is bad public relations.