Month: October 2015

PR becomes difficult for a company that has passed its peak in the marketplace and is on a downturn.  Consider GoPro.  A year ago, it was the video camera to have if one is athletic and wanted to record one’s activities.  Now it is struggling to make sales and earnings forecasts. and it is branching out to drones to see if it can reignite growth.  It seems that it mispriced a consumer-level camera introduced earlier in the year, but more than that, the market for athletic cameras might not be as big as the company hoped.  What do you say, what do you do to expand the market?  That is the challenge the company faces.  It has been moving more into video production as a way to support sales, but that clearly isn’t enough.  The PR practitioner is faced with unpleasant choices — flog product that isn’t selling or help develop new markets if they are identified or both.  Either way, the job is more difficult than promoting cameras during their peak sales period.

When an organization doesn’t know what to do, transparency in its actions can harm rather than help.  It becomes clear to observers that the entity is drifting on strange seas.  Such may be the case for the Federal Reserve.  There are claims that it doesn’t know how to handle inflation and is clueless on the progress of the economy.  This is the reason why month after month, the Fed keeps interest rates near zero.  The US economy isn’t reacting to low interest rates as one thinks it should.  More money hasn’t resulted in faster growth, yet unemployment is down to acceptable levels.  The Fed has worked hard to be more transparent in its decisions unlike its mysterious and gnomic declarations in the past, but greater disclosure hasn’t resulted in more light and credibility.  Rather, it is showing the limits to what the Fed can do to spur the economy.

Volkswagen has done wrong and deserves to be punished, but should it have to endure this kind of pain?  The scramble of tort lawyers to find clients has long been disgusting, especially since lawyers stand to gain more from the class action suits than plaintiffs.  There ought to be a better way to get justice for victims than ambulance chasing, which is what the bar is doing.  Tort lawyers offer no apologies for their behavior.  Rather, they defend it as part of the process of getting justice for victims.  Maybe so but they are focused more on their payday than the victim’s remuneration.  These are people who have their own jets to get them around and live in luxury on the percentage of winnings they extract from clients.  Lawyers should be well paid to take on such work, but they should not be obscenely compensated.  Until there is reform in the law, ambulance chasers will flourish.

Character is often revealed in little things, and it is those small items that people look for.  Take, for example, this event.  Being told to move from a quiet car is hardly a piece of news, but the way one went is.  If Christie had apologized and moved to another train car, there wouldn’t have been much to report.  But, apparently according to news accounts, he didn’t.  He barked at his bodyguards and moved less than graciously to another part of the train.  Predictably, the internet lit up with comments, some expanding the incident and others simply reporting it.  The perception of the way Christie departed the quiet car is the issue.  If it smacked of privilege, Christie comes off as arrogant.  If it was an error quickly corrected, the public would give him slack.  Christie’s problem is that he comes off as a bully more often than not, so a good number of the public imagined that he did not go willingly.  Whatever happened, this little thing did not help him.

There are eight days to go before the borrowing authority of the US Treasury runs out.  The Secretary of the Treasury has sounded an alarm, but Congress is busy.  For one, the House has to elect a new Speaker.  There is a good chance that authorization will pass in the nick of time but House radicals want to use it for public relations purposes and to condemn the indebtedness of the country.  There is a time to protest and a time to get along.  This is a time to act rather than holding the country hostage.  What isn’t clear is whether the radicals understand that.  In an attempt to make a statement, House conservatives might be shooting themselves in the public’s perception — an example of negative PR.

I will be away tomorrow and won’t be writing.

Paul Ryan, the future House Speaker if news reports are accurate, has made an unusual effort to be transparent about the job.  He doesn’t want it if it interferes with his weekends with family or if there is any lack of support among Republican House members.   He is determined to overcome the fractiousness that doomed the present Speaker, John Boehner. Ryan’s effort to be clear about what he will do as Speaker is the result of an unusual advantage.  The House desperately wants him and will agree with just about any of his demands.  Most politicians don’t get that kind of leg up on an office, but it would be better if they did.  The credibility of Congress might soar if its members were open about their intentions to the public. Then again, some of them might never get elected in the first place.

Amazon.com is carrying on a public battle of words with The New York Times.  Amazon is outraged over the Time’s expose of working conditions inside the company.  The Times is standing by its lengthy story.  Amazon is breaking the basic rule of never fight with a company that buys ink by the barrel.  It would have been far better for Amazon to have said that it is investigating the working conditions that the Time’s story disclosed and it would act promptly to rectify them.  Instead, Amazon’s spirited battle with the newspaper smacks of arrogance and does little good for the company’s reputation.  Why do companies continue to make this mistake?  It might be that the top of the organization has lost touch with the bottom and doesn’t know what is happening there.  When it is pointed out, the company is stung to the quick and fights back.  Whatever the reason, it is a dubious strategy to pick a fight with the news establishment.

Fox news has removed a so-called expert from its group of regular interviewees because the fellow lied about his background and now is indicted for fraud.  The individual claimed to have worked in the CIA for 27 years, but apparently he didn’t.  He had been a frequent guest on Fox news since 2002.  One wonders why no one bothered to check his background.  That was both a journalistic and PR cock-up.  It wouldn’t have taken many phone calls to learn that the fellow was impersonating a former CIA operative.  My guess is that Fox news fell in love with the guy because he gave good interviews with just the right edge that the news organization was looking for.  So, now Fox News has egg on its face and the news guest is facing jail — a sour outcome for both sides.

Amazon is suing more than a thousand freelancers for their phony reviews of products.  Amazon is concerned that such fakery will harm the credibility of its own review system.  The suit is important, although it won’t stop false statements about products and services.  The web is too wild and free for one lawsuit to make a difference.  It is the epitome of an unregulated marketplace and a reminder to business people that free markets are not free but need basic regulation.  There is no surefire way to control the web.  Hence, the lawsuit.  Capitalists like to talk about open markets until they have to work in one.  Then they call for government control to rid the system of bad actors.  There is an element of hypocrisy that is amusing to the skeptic.