Month: June 2017

When Jack Welch ran GE, he was hailed as the CEO of the Century. Now that his successor is stepping down, there are questions about how Welch ran the company and whether he accidentally set up Jeff Immelt to have troubles. The truth is that when Jack ran the business, it was a finance company with manufacturing. When Immelt took over and after the financial markets crashed, he had to turn it back to a manufacturing company that also did financing. It was back to the future for Immelt and GE’s stock suffered. Now the new CEO coming in has said he is going to evaluate all of GE’s units to see which will stay and which will be dumped. It seems he will make GE into a sharply focused manufacturing conglomerate to better compete. Welch was accurate when he said his success would be determined by how Immelt would grow the company in the next 20 years. He couldn’t have foreseen the effects of 9/11 and 2008 and how those events slammed GE. He was realistic enough to know that the future was tenuous. His legacy years later is not what it once was.

This is an interesting take on philanthropic marketing. It seems photos of poor and starving children and adults are not as effective as pictures of success. Expressions of hope are more powerful than images of hopelessness. It seems counterintuitive but data apparently show that people are motivated by the application of money. There seems to be a bit of Missouri in the average giver — “Show me.” People want to see their gifts used for charitable purposes rather than just collected. This is a lesson for nonprofit marketers and one they should be testing. Does it hold true for every charity? Are there exceptions? Should one retool entire marketing campaigns? There is a need to move cautiously because there are thousands of charities in need of help, and they are all competing for the same dollar. If a campaign turns off one’s base of givers, that could be fatal. Nevertheless, ignoring a potentially better way to market is dangerous as well.

When violence descends into an orgy of killing, communication fails. Consider this example. Mexican citizens were slaughtered at the hands of a drug cartel and authorities felt powerless to stop it. When government does nothing and allows renegades to roam, leaving is the only safety — if one can do that. In this case, few could get away. The article pins the blame for the terror on the US Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA gave the telephone pin numbers of the leaders of the drug cartel to Mexican authorities. Predictably, the action was leaked, because Mexican authorities at that time were corrupt from top to bottom. There was no reasonable or persuasive means to get around gang members with weapons. The jackals were rapacious and bloodthirsty. Force is the only means of communication in instances like this and power was lacking.

Can you have consensus when only 23 percent of an electorate has voted? This is the conundrum Puerto Rico faces after a plebiscite on the question of statehood. Although the final tally was greater than 90 percent in favor, anti-statehood voters had boycotted the ballot box. From a communications perspective, the vote was a failure. It hardly shows agreement among Puerto Ricans that they should change their status from a territory to a state. That is only the beginning of the issue. Puerto Rico is broke and swamped with debt. A half-million citizens have fled the island already to the US and those left behind are subject to ruinous taxes to make up for the budget shortfall. Why would Congress accept the territory as a state at this time? The governor of Puerto Rico needs to do some serious PR both in his homeland and in Washington, DC in order to make his case.

I just returned from two weeks in California visiting relatives. What struck me during the sojourn is how jejune the newspapers are there. Even the mighty Los Angeles Times is a shadow of what it was. One wonders how much longer the print medium can sustain itself in the face of the internet. Based on what I read, it can’t be much further into the future. The newspaper industry is in a death spiral. It cuts staff to slow expenses, but in doing so, it cuts news and by slicing content, it continues to lose frustrated readers, and by doing that, major advertisers abandon print. The missing columns of news are an incentive for readers to look elsewhere online and once they have adjusted to reading that way, they don’t come back to “bird-cage” liner. Publishers understand this but they are hamstrung by their big presses and complex distribution. Despite brave pronouncements, such as the Sacramento Bee’s slogan of “160 years of independent journalism,” the newspaper industry is too sick to defend itself. Look for more to abandon daily editions and to move online.