Month: January 2017

Americans were supposed to be freed of intrusions on their privacy from unwanted and unsolicited phone calls.  It turns out that the DO NOT CALL list doesn’t work well. An operator can get a fine but no one has gone to prison.  Why do companies persist in making these calls when most recipients are angry about getting them?  It is poor PR.  But, consider what they are doing.  They send out tens of thousands of calls for dollars and they get a dozen or so live customers whose patronage pays for the effort.  It is bottom-feeding, plowing the mud for clams.  These kinds of companies care less whether one is upset over an unsolicited call.  That person isn’t a customer anyway.  So, the individual hangs up with a few choice words to go with it.  That is no loss to the companies.  Meanwhile, they skate on the edge of the law and pay their fine when the FCC acts.  The government needs to jail robo-callers to get them to stop, but it doesn’t seem willing to act.

How careful would you be in working with a company whose chairman is a convicted felon and who has with him two other convicted felons?  Yes, everyone deserves a second, even a third chance, but one should still take care to verify business dealings with the firm.  This is the situation with the Kushner Companies, whose CEO, the son of the felon, is now advising the Trump administration.  Reputation matters in a case like this.  How has the former convict acted in the past and how might he operate in the future?  The case that sent him to prison was particularly noxious and indicated an individual who would stop at nothing to get his way.  Has he mellowed and found a new sense of morality or is he skating close to the limits of the law?  Only time will tell, but meanwhile he is conducting the business of his companies while his son counsels President Trump.

After 50 years and billions spent to wean Americans from tobacco, a recent study shows that 1 in 4 citizens still use some form of the plant.  Cigarette smoking has declined, but the use of e-cigarettes has skyrocketed.  This shows the limits of PR.  People can be persuaded to go only so far before they confront addiction and behavior — a most difficult thing to do.  Persuasion can’t change habits.  It can provide strong reasons for doing so, but it cannot substitute for willpower.  That comes from the individual.  I can recall many years ago while working on a psychiatric ward an incident that proved the case.  A man dying of emphysema, caused by smoking, was placed in the locked section so he could not get access to cigarettes.  Although he was wheezing and barely alive, he still wanted another one.  He was content with smoking himself to death.  No amount of persuasion can change a situation like this.  Ultimately, PR belongs to the individual and whether he or she chooses to believe an argument and then act on it.  PR can never force a conclusion.

How do you build an audience in America for a sport loved the world over but not in the US.  No, we are not writing about soccer but Formula 1 racing.  So far, the only successful motorsport circuit has been NASCAR.  There are single races that rise to national attention — e.g., the Indianapolis 500 — but sustained awareness for any other auto race is lacking.  This makes for a tough PR challenge for the owners of the Formula 1 franchise.  So far, there is one circuit in Austin, TX, but they want to expand it to several US cities.  That will take time, millions in preparation and hundreds of permits to put the open-wheel machines on city streets.  It will also require cultivation of a fan base to ensure turnout and a healthy TV audience.  The prospect for that to happen is not bright.  Soccer is still not a mainstream sport in the US after decades of trying.  The rarified world of Formula 1 has strikes against it.

Here is an opinion piece that PR practitioners should read.  It posits a fact that one cannot outdo President Trump with invective without lowering oneself to his standards and giving him fodder for reprisal.  Rather, critics should remain civil and rebut his assertions with reasonable discourse.  There is no satisfaction in calling him a liar, but one should point out his lies and rebut them as they arise.  Invective is a distraction from the reality at hand.  One should be reporting closely on what Trump is doing in order to educate the public that sent him to the White House.  Name-calling does no one any good.  Even though one feels rage about the situation, it is better to contain it and with icy calm to bore in on his errors and make them public.  Is it hard to do when one is foaming with anger?  Yes.  But it is necessary.

California is having a wet year after five years of drought.  Reservoirs are full. The snow pack in the high Sierras is 10 feet deep.  Rivers are flowing again.  There is a temptation among its citizens to go back to watering their lawns, taking long showers and otherwise wasting the resource.  Now is the time for PR to remind people that the drought is not over and perhaps never will be over with climate change.  One good year out of five is not enough to replenish aquifers nor is it enough to satisfy the water demands of farmers and urban dwellers.  State and local governments need to train citizens in water conservation for the long haul, and it will be difficult after a year of flooding and relentless rain.  Staying the course is never easy, especially when it looks like one has reached the goal.

In the finance world, banks might be “too big to fail.”  In the electronics market, the opposite might be the case.  At least that might be the situation in which Samsung finds itself.  Its top-down and harsh culture was part of the spectacular failure of its mobile phone, the Galaxy Note 7.  Its mobile chief detailed the problems with the battery that caused fires and explosions and took the responsibility for the defect, but that doesn’t change the driven environment in which its employees work.  Samsung might be setting itself up for more failures in the future unless it overhauls internal relations with employees.  It is one thing for the CEO to demonstrate inclusiveness.  It is another to change the behavior of managers below the CEO who were raised in a rigid top-down culture and don’t know any other style of management.  Retraining might take years and Samsung doesn’t have that kind of time in the cutthroat marketplace for consumer electronics.  One failure might be all that it takes to throw a company behind.  The Galaxy Note 7 fiasco could spell the end of competitiveness for Samsung phones.

Those who are hoping Donald Trump will become a different, more inclusive President are likely to be disappointed, according to behavioral research.  The article states the situation clearly:

“Power reveals individuals’ true intentions and leads to them being less willing to take others’ perspectives.”

If Trump is close minded now, he is likely to remain that way for his four years.  His combativeness is likely to remain and become worse.  His self-referential ego is unlikely to change.  It will be interesting to hear his inauguration speech.  What can he say to wipe out the negative feelings of almost half of America?  Can he control himself in the face of protesters?  Trump is shaping up to be a PR case study in disastrous communications and action.  The ironic part is that he isn’t aware of it, as far as anyone can tell.  He knows he is right and that is all that matters.

This is worth reading in its entirety.  The author defines six modes of shareholder value that a company can take.  The first, corporate fundamentalists want to boost profits and share price immediately.  Nothing can sway them from the goal.  The second are corporate toilers who want to boost share price but are more patient about it.  The third group, corporate oracles want to boost share price but do so in light of societal/legal changes that will be coming down the road.  The example is becoming a green company before it is mandated.  The fourth, corporate kings, are so successful in creating shareholder value that they can ignore it for awhile and still succeed.  The fifth are corporate socialists who believe shareholder value is not as important as the needs of society.  The sixth and final group are corporate apostates who ignore shareholder value completely and use the money they make for other purposes.  Companies can move from one category to another based on their leadership’s views.  The article is a nice summary and worth noting because it shows how communications should shift based on a company’s concern for shareholder value.

Three D movies and broadcasting always seems to be a future technology.  The industry tried again last year to sell 3D TV sets but once again failed in the attempt.  Although some movies are coming out in 3D, the movie industry has not adopted it on a major scale.  There are reasons why.  People don’t like to wear glasses when watching a movie.  3D is often used gratuitously rather than advancing a plot.  Some movies don’t lend themselves to 3D.  The technology is not new.  It has been around in various forms since the 1950s, but it failed to sell then too.  It seems 3D is a medium of a future that never quite comes.  The same thing happened to the picture phone.  AT&T introduced the concept in the early 1960s, but it didn’t sell then or anytime in the next 30 years.  It wasn’t until the internet was firmly established that people began “face-timing” one another and then they weren’t using a landline phone but their computers and later, mobile phones.  It is a mystery that some technologies fail to impress even when they have proven benefits.