Rethinking Reputation: How PR Trumps Marketing and Advertising in the New Media World
By Fraser P. Seitel and John Doorley
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About this ebook
Good public relations is no longer just icing---it's a strategic imperative more important to your competitive success than even advertising or marketing. This is true whether you're a century-old multibillion-dollar corporation or a penniless startup. In Rethinking Reputation, public relations guru Fraser Seitel and John Doorley, founder of the Academy for Communication Excellence and Leadership at Johnson & Johnson, examine a fascinating new set of case studies---including the BP oil spill and the launch of CitySlips---to glean the PR dos and don'ts for the new media world, covering both standard reputation maintenance and crisis management. They also show start-up companies and entrenched organizations how to use the power of word-of-mouth to jump-start business like never before. This is a wake-up call from two industry legends-for public relations professionals as well as entrepreneurs, CEOs, and anyone else tasked with representing their organization to the world.
These new media lessons include:
* Remember that research is cheaper, and more critical, than ever.
* Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good---launch your idea before someone else does.
* Don't get so excited about social media that you forget about traditional media.
* In a crisis, you are never offstage.
* Never lie, never whine, and never try to predict the future!
Fraser P. Seitel
Fraser P. Seitel is a public relations consultant, author, lecturer, columnist, and media commentator, appearing frequently on the Fox News Network and other outlets. He is the author of The Practice of Public Relations, which is used in universities worldwide and has sold over a million copies in 11 editions.
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Rethinking Reputation - Fraser P. Seitel
PRAISE FOR RETHINKING REPUTATION
The authors are good storytellers, with tales of the famous and the obscure. They are especially good at conveying the power of character-based communication.
—Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City
Personal reputations seem in tatters everywhere you look today. This entertaining guide to public relations shows how the world’s ‘second oldest profession’ is the basis of our individual reputations and relationships.
—Helen Ostrowski, retired chairman and CEO, Porter Novelli
"Everyone knows that reputation is a bridge—and an illusion. Rethinking Reputation is a hands-on training book that drives away theoretic cobwebs and teaches you how to use modern PR to a variety of ends. You can give this book to your bosses, boards or other constituents to get buy-in for newthink strategies—while saving you from pulling out your hair!"
—Richard Laermer, CEO RLMpr and author of Full Frontal PR
"In an age of public conversations, reputation maintenance is a daily practice, and your crisis management skills may be needed at any moment. Fraser Seitel and John Doorley’s book Rethinking Reputation doesn’t just shed light on PR best practices; it’s a wakeup call and a must-read for all communications professionals today."
—Deirdre Breakenridge, CEO Pure Performance Communications and author of Social Media and Public Relations
RETHINKING REPUTATION
How PR Trumps Marketing and
Advertising in the New Media World
FRASER P. SEITEL
JOHN DOORLEY
RETHINKING REPUTATION
Copyright © Fraser P. Seitel and John Doorley, 2012.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978-0-230-33833-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Seitel, Fraser P.
Rethinking reputation : how PR trumps marketing and advertising in the new media world / Fraser P. Seitel, John Doorley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-230-33833-3
1. Public relations. 2. Publicity. 3. Internet in public relations. 4. Internet in publicity. 5. Reputation. 6. Corporate image. 7. Social media. I. Doorley, John. II. Title.
HD59.S365 2012
659.2—dc23
2012011583
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre Inc.
First edition: August 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
The Authors
INTRODUCTION It All Started with Moses
PART I
HOW TO BUILD REPUTATION
ONE The Power of Relationships
The Magic Slippers and the Exterminator
TWO The Power of Publicity
Penicillin for the Soul: The Best Publicity Story Ever Told
THREE The Power of Your Personal or Company Brand
P. Roy Vagelos, Maverick—Lessons in Leadership and Communication
FOUR The Power of Planning
Energy Man with a Plan
No Matter the Goal, Every Person and Business Needs One
FIVE The Power of Reputation
How the Pros at J&J Do It, In Good Times and Bad
PART II
HOW TO PROTECT REPUTATION
SIX Control the Agenda
What Kobe Bryant Knew that Weiner, Edwards, Clemens, McGwire and Tiger Didn’t
SEVEN Take Either Road—Just Stick to It
How Hewlett-Packard Went High, Dominique Strauss-Kahn Went Low, and They Both Won
EIGHT Stick to the Script
Crisis Management and Mismanagement How BP Became Battered Petroleum
NINE The Sin of Spin
Renouncing the Clinton Legacy and Embracing the Volcker Rule
TEN Rethinking Reputation
How the Most Unlikely Company Went Straight
to Change Its Image and Recapture Credibility
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
WE WOULD LIKE TO THANK, FIRST, THE VARIOUS INDIVIDUALS, BOTH friend and foe alike, whose reputations we cite in this book. Without their stories, there would have been no Rethinking Reputation.
There are several others we would single out for special mention.
First, our punctilious Palgrave Macmillan editor Emily Carleton, who did a valiant job enhancing our prose while keeping it grammatical and intact.
Second, our illustrious literary agent Andrew Wylie, who the Wall Street Journal properly identified as the superagent . . . who stands foursquare for literary elitism and good old-fashioned standards.
We do hope this book hasn’t lowered those standards appreciably.
We would also like to recognize Ernie Grigg, a young public relations practitioner and scholar who is a graduate of the New York University program we both teach in, the MS Degree in Public Relations and Corporate Communication. His work as researcher, proofreader, organizer and editorial manager was invaluable.
Many thanks to another graduate of the NYU program, future PR star Aubrey Gooden, who introduced us to T. Boone Pickens, subject of chapter 4. Aubrey helped us with research and drafting that chapter. Mr. Pickens and his head of public affairs, Jay Rosser, were both kind and considerate, and we’re most appreciative.
We also want to thank Aly Rowe, another star graduate of our NYU program, for arranging our introduction to the two young women entrepreneurs featured in chapter 1 and for her research and drafting assistance.
We are equally grateful to our NYU grad Nadia Mostafa for her research assistance with chapter 3.
Ray Jordan, chief communication officer at Johnson & Johnson, has demonstrated great grace under fire, as has his legendary company. Both Fraser and John teach in J&J’s Academy for Communication Excellence & Leadership (ACCEL). Ray trusted us to tell fairly the story of the company’s toughest reputational challenge ever and we are grateful for that.
Autobiographies of P. Roy Vagelos and T. Boone Pickens were most helpful in our research for chapters 3 and 4 respectively: Medicine, Science and Merck by Roy Vagelos and Louis Galambos; and The First Billion Is the Hardest by T. Boone Pickens.
Finally, John thanks his wife, Carole, his son, Jonathan, his daughter, Nanci, and all family and friends for their love and support. Fraser, too, thanks John’s wife and family, as he doesn’t quite understand how such wonderful people can tolerate such a needy individual. Thank you all.
THE AUTHORS
FRASER P. SEITEL IS A PUBLIC RELATIONS CONSULTANT, AUTHOR, teacher, lecturer, columnist and media commentator, appearing frequently on the Fox News network and other outlets. CNN’s Larry King called Seitel the man who practically wrote the book on PR.
The 11th edition of Seitel’s book The Practice of Public Relations, used at 200 US colleges and universities as well as at universities worldwide, was published by Prentice Hall/Pearson in 2010. The book’s foreword was written by prominent banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller, with whom Seitel has worked for four decades. In his writings and comments, Seitel is an outspoken defender of and advocate for the practice of public relations as an honest broker
between management and its publics. As he told National Public Radio’s On the Media in 2007, The cardinal rule of public relations is to never lie.
John Doorley is founding academic director of the Master of Science Degree Program in Public Relations and Corporate Communication at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. It is the world’s largest graduate program in the field and the one named America’s Best Public Relations Education Program in 2009 and 2010. Previously, until 2000, he was head of corporate communication at Merck & Co., Inc., which was named America’s Most Admired Company for seven of his twelve years there (annual Fortune magazine survey). He has been the chief speechwriter for CEOs of major firms, has co-authored one of the most successful texts on reputation (Reputation Management), and has copyrighted a process to help firms measure, analyze, monitor and manage their reputations. He developed and taught the world’s first undergraduate course in reputation management, at Rutgers University in 2002, and the first such graduate course, at NYU in 2012.
Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
—Abraham Lincoln
INTRODUCTION
IT ALL STARTED WITH MOSES
Reputation rěp ū tā tion (noun)
The sum of perceptions that individuals or groups have of a specific individual or organization.
A function of performance, behavior, communication and identity (what the individual or organization stands for).
The reflection of one’s character.
What others think of you.
Public Relations pŭb lĭc rē lā tions (noun)
The art of communicating on behalf of an individual, company or other organization, mainly through unpaid channels (earned media
) and often with the goal of gaining third-party support.
The art of managing communication and relationships.
The poor man’s alternative to advertising. The smart man’s alternative to advertising.
The best communication strategy for managing reputation.
PUBLIC RELATIONS IS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL FORCES IN modern society. Neither marketing nor its subset, advertising, can deliver what public relations can for the large organization, the small one or the individual. It used to be that marketing and advertising were king, with public relations the vassal. Now, total expenditures for PR and word of mouth in the United States and other countries are increasing while total expenditures for advertising are steadily decreasing. And public relations is, let’s face it, a heck of a lot cheaper. In more and more companies today, essentially for the first time, marketing reports to public relations.
That is not to say that marketing and advertising are not important in reputation management. In fact, the best communication campaigns, by large or small organizations, or by individuals, often incorporate public relations, marketing and advertising. What we are saying is: public relations trumps marketing and advertising.
Public relations has made many people rich. It has elected presidents and prime ministers and created mega-million-dollar success for plenty of individuals and businesses that could not afford advertising. It has helped convince millions of people to support ideas they first thought off-putting, or even contrary to their beliefs, has rallied millions to war and has even been responsible for the birth—and death—of nations. Think Arab Spring!
PR also has ruined people and organizations. Its misapplication has turned victory into defeat, success into failure and stardom into ignominy for countless politicians, celebrities, athletes and once high-flying CEOs and companies, all of whom have paid the price for their arrogance, hubris and failure to recognize the will of the people.
In the 1956 movie The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Tom Rath, played by Gregory Peck, returns a hero from World War II to a job that does not pay enough. A friend suggests a job in public relations, but Peck demurs: But I don’t know anything about public relations.
The friend replies, What do you need to know? You got a clean shirt, and you bathe every day. That’s all there is to it.
And back then, it was often true. More often than not, PR was fluff, eyewash, meaningless hyperbole. Today, the public relations profession is thriving. There are 320,000 PR professionals in the United States and about 700,000 in Europe. The US government alone employs tens of thousands of PR professionals, including some 7,000 at the Pentagon. The president of the United States considers his spokesperson among his closest counselors. PR has become a validated social science, with hundreds of universities offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in public relations. All over the world, PR practice and study are booming.
The twenty-first century promises to be the Golden Age of Public Relations. Today, more and more, PR is replacing advertising as the go-to promotional strategy for individuals and organizations throughout the world. In more and more corporations, including the mammoth IBM, the marketing and advertising departments now report to public relations; not long ago, it was the other way around. In fact, in most companies today, public relations encompasses a wide swath of promotional and reputation management functions—media relations, employee communication, executive communication or speechwriting, corporate social responsibility, lobbying, crisis communication, shareholder communication, issues management and social media with its free-for-all blogosphere.
In this book, we tell stories of how people successfully used PR to accomplish remarkable things—or, just as often, immolated themselves, often needlessly. Most of these stories are contemporary, some focusing on the famous and others on the obscure. All have crucial lessons to offer.
PR itself is an ancient art form. It ain’t rocket science, but it has a grounding theory and a long history that folks today, no matter what they want to accomplish, ignore at their peril.
It all started with Moses. Born about 1,200 years before Christ, he was raised as one of Egypt’s royal family, with all the trappings and privileges. But it turned out that he had been adopted as an infant by the pharaoh’s daughter, who had come upon him after his mother had placed him in a basket among the reeds at the edge of the river. And it also turned out that he was a Hebrew, a member of one of Egypt’s enslaved races. Though the pharaoh and his daughter had discovered that, they embraced him as one of their own, so he clearly had a sweet life ahead of him. Until, that is, he decided on what the neighbors at the time thought a very dumb career move—he came to the defense of a Hebrew slave being assaulted by an Egyptian.
Moses was a reluctant hero. Yet he gave up all he had to flee his home, become an outcast shepherd and wander the desert. And then, one day, God appeared to him in a burning bush and commanded him to free the Hebrew slaves and then unite their 12 tribes. To accomplish those things, he would have to become the Hebrews’ commander as well as their community organizer and legislator.
But Moses had a big problem: he was a stammerer (thus the expression slow as Moses
) and therefore not a confident communicator. This speech impediment was a serious obstacle for the man entrusted with the Ten Commandments, history’s first values statement, which had to be promoted to the people. And Moses was smart enough, like King George VI of the United Kingdom three millennia later, to realize that great leadership requires great speech. So Moses turned to his more loquacious and personable older brother, Aaron, to be his—and, by extension, God’s (not to mention history’s) first—nabi, or spokesperson.
Aaron was raised differently from Moses. When his brother was off receiving formal education at the royal court of Egypt, Aaron was back in the rural tribal land of Goshen, mixing with the common folk. Aaron gained a reputation for eloquence and persuasiveness. He was a natural to speak to the people and to deal with the Egyptian royal court, both on behalf of his brother. As such, Aaron became history’s first public relations representative. And Moses became the first great leader in history to see the potential value and wisdom of retaining a professional communicator to help achieve important goals.
Thus was born the modern-day practice of public relations.
About 800 years after Moses came Aristotle, who by then had a lot of PR history to draw on. To this day, he remains one of the best communicators ever. Pupil of Plato and mentor to Alexander the Great, Aristotle was also, not coincidentally, the father of rhetoric, the art of persuasion through the use of written or spoken language. He believed strongly in promoting the social good (the equivalent of today’s corporate social responsibility). He recruited highly literate Greeks, dubbed rhetors,
or rhetoricians, to travel throughout Athens persuading the people that to work for the good of the city-state was in their own best interest. He divided persuasive appeals into three categories, a taxonomy that is even more useful today: first, ethos, appeal through a spokesperson who is highly ethical or credible; second, pathos, appeal through emotion; and third, logos, appeal through logic, which was Aristotle’s favorite approach. PR professionals and anyone looking to PR for a career boost will be well served by knowledge of how Aristotle reasoned and acted to promote his ideas and philosophies. Aristotle was not shy about promoting himself and, of course, he had the substance to back it up.
Some 300 years later came along history’s greatest public relations practitioner, Jesus, the prophet whom billions have believed to be the Son of God, a figure so influential in history that he actually split it in two.
Of course the miracles did not hurt, but whether you’re Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, agnostic or atheist, the influence Jesus had as persuader, as rhetor, as crusader, cannot be denied. No one in history, before or since, could match his skill as a storyteller, a critical skill for public relations practitioners. In building his church Jesus staunchly followed certain principles, including attentiveness to others, empathy, authenticity and a clear definition of success—in PR jargon, the objective. If you just love thy neighbor,
he said, then you will be happy. Now that’s irrefutable PR advice!
While wondrous things have been done in the name of God, horrible things have been perpetrated as well. In the Middle Ages, perfectly honed arguments, based on ethos, pathos and logos, were used to rally millions of Christians and Muslims to wars that lasted about 200 years and cost millions of lives. The Crusades, in fact, are a prime example of wartime public relations, propaganda that persuaded men to battle when they really had no idea whom or why they were fighting. Such is the approach today of Islamic extremists who incite terror against the West. In fact, many of today’s public relations challenges are the same as they were in the Middle Ages—most notably, how to fight blind hatred through communication and education.
Words have always been the coin of the realm in public relations. (Indeed, a company’s PR person is often referred to as the wordsmith.
) So it comes as no surprise that one of the best PR pros ever was William Shakespeare himself, who accomplished one of the most remarkable feats ever in entertainment public relations, with the unwitting help of King James I (of England, not Cleveland or Miami). The crowning of the first Scottish king of England in 1603 inspired the bard’s famous tragedy Macbeth. While the play is theoretically nonfiction, Shakespeare manipulated several details to flatter and entertain the new king and invited the king to attend its first performance. (We’re guessing he did not have to pay.) Not only did King James enjoy the play, he made Shakespeare’s group the preferred theater company of the crown, requiring several royal productions a year. What the king liked, the people liked, so Shakespeare almost instantly became a box office superstar. By using his talents to target an influential audience, Shakespeare enjoyed wealth and prosperity, paving the way for today’s $1,000-per-hour image consultants.
The American Revolution is perhaps the greatest example of Aristotelean appeals: through emotion (Give me liberty or give me death
); ethical persuasion (the leaders, from Washington to Jefferson to Adams, were seen as highly ethical and credible); and logic (no taxation without representation
and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense). Indeed, those founders were classically educated and often quoted Aristotle. They motivated the colonists to fight for independence at all costs. PR tactics included pamphleteering, public speaking and lots