Author: Jim Horton

If you read the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, there is no crisis in the stock markets there.  There is no denial in print.  Rather, there is nothing at all.  This is hiding in public.  A few dictatorships and oligarchies can get away with this kind of sham but it is impossible in democratic countries with press freedom.  The cost of silence is damage to reputation.  Incidents like this can turn the public against the government and create long-term problems from strikes to rioting to a fall in leadership.  The Chinese government understands this.  The mystery is why it persists in silence.  It might be that it doesn’t know what to say, and it is trying to fix the problem before speaking.  The problem with this approach is that it might take a long time for the equities markets to stabilize.  Meanwhile, millions are watching their life savings disappear.  It would be better if the government made some public gesture other than an interest rate cut.

How do you do PR for a business left to die?  This is the conundrum facing Quicken, the personal finance software, that Intuit is selling off.  Quicken was once the face of the company, but with the rise of cloud-based software, it no longer belongs in Intuit’s portfolio.  The question is whether it belongs to anyone else, and if so, how should it be marketed?  Apparently as a declining brand, there isn’t much in the way of income to be derived from selling the software.  PR might be along the lines of “We’re not dead yet.”  But that, of course, is a hollow statement for a tool that people rely on for years.  Whoever buys the software, if a buyer is found, will need to ponder next moves carefully.

I’ll be away Tuesday and won’t post until Wednesday.

Resurrecting a by-gone brand is a tough PR job and none is more difficult than this effort.  Cadillac was long known as the car for the demographic of 65 to dead, and it has had a tough time shaking that reputation.  Today’s models compare well to BMW and Mercedes but younger, affluent buyers would rather have the foreign mark.  It is unclear whether moving the head offices of Cadillac to New York City is going to make much difference, especially with design and manufacturing remaining in Detroit.  GM is willing to give anything a try to save the brand, and it has a proven leader in place who insists on Manhattan.  So, it is off to the East Coast.  One wonders why he didn’t choose Los Angeles, which is the mecca for auto brands, but he has his reasons and time will prove him right or wrong.

What could be a worse scenario for a struggling restaurant chain than to lose its principal spokesperson over child pornography charges?  That is what happened to Subway, the sandwich shop franchiser.  Subway had used Jared for 15 years in every part of its marketing.  He was the face of Subway and its home-grown celebrity.  It is a lesson not to depend on any one individual too much because one can never know what might happen. It should be axiomatic in publicity and marketing that if something can go wrong, it will.  With spokespersons, one should always have a backup or a plan for proceeding without the individual in case a nightmare scenario happens.  Think, for example, if Jared had died young from heart disease or clogged arteries.  That would belie Subway’s health claims for its sandwiches.  Subway is not alone.  Other brands have suffered similar meltdowns, some more serious.  Marlboro cigarettes used a cowboy for its image for decades until one dying of cancer came out against smoking.  Nike used Tiger Woods as its face in golf, but Woods went through a period of scandal, a high-profile divorce and an injury that has left him a back-marker in the game.  One who lives by celebrity can die by it.

How do you rein in a wildly popular consumer machine?  For example, a drone.  Irresponsible operators have been flying them at airports near landing aircraft.  Other users have flown them over private homes and back yards where they spy on the activity of neighbors.  Still others have flown them over popular venues like Times Square.  The Federal Aviation Administration by law can’t control their use, so they must find ways to stop illegal activity without direct regulation.  One way to proceed is to mount a PR campaign on proper and improper drone use.  That will reach users who are unaware of the limitations.  It won’t stop those who flagrantly violate the law, but it might reduce incidents of casual users violating air space.  The FAA will still have to find anti-drone systems to catch deliberate misuse of quadro-copters.  Better communications will help and at this point, PR appears to be the only way to control drone use.

This article is worth reading.  It analyzes the editing and entry-building process at Wikipedia. PR practitioners should have an idea of the iterative procedure used to develop then expand an entry, especially if a practitioner wants to influence the progress of the piece.  There is a growing concern at Wikipedia over the “intrusions” of PR people in the editing process.  Even slight word changes can influence the accuracy of an article.  Having developed an entry myself, I can say that editors want primary sources for nearly everything in an entry.  This means print publications, such as newspapers and magazines.

So, The New York Times does an expose on your company after interviewing more than 100 current and former employees.  The article is brutal and a take-down of everything you say you stand for.  What is your adequate defense?  If you are Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, it is a letter to employees saying it isn’t so.  That is hardly enough.  So far, there have been no employee groups rising in defense of their boss, no internal stirring of support.  The silence is deafening and should be a warning to Bezos that his managerial methods need examination.  Perhaps the intense nature of the work at Amazon has gone overboard.  One way to find out is to look at employee turnover.  If it is high, something is wrong.  Either initial recruiting was defective or there is too much pressure in the jobs themselves.  Bezos doesn’t have to run a company in which everyone is kept happy all of the time, but he needs a company that functions with a minimum amount of friction.  Grinding work day and night is not the way to achieve that.

Donald Trump is off the campaign trail for a day serving jury duty.  He has proclaimed himself ready to participate.  I’m sure Republicans are hoping he gets a 6-month trial, but, of course, he won’t.  Republican candidates are gasping for air after the first debate with Trump bloviating to his advantage.  He is a demagogue but it is easy to forget that demagogues are successful at attracting a following, especially when people are not faring well.  The demagogue promises easy answers and a vision that will lift the burden on the populace.  They are easy to spot.  History is full of them.  There isn’t much to be done about them other than to make sure they don’t get power.  In other words, the thinking citizen will understand what he sees and will vote against him.  The Republican party understands Trump only too well but despite its frantic efforts, Trump is making headway in the polls.  Hillary Clinton couldn’t be happier, even with her ongoing troubles.  Trump makes her look good.

Hillary Clinton has been running as a woman of the people, a friend of common citizens standing up against nabobs of Wall Street.  While this is good spin, it isn’t true according to a zip code analysis of her campaign contributions.  It shows that she is raising funds from the 30 wealthiest zip codes in the country.  There is nothing wrong with that.  One goes where the money is, but it belies her campaign themes.  Imagine if her fund raising was spread more widely with smaller donations coming in from across the 50 states.  She would have plenty to boast about.  Instead, the fund raising effort appears to be kept apart from the campaign trail. In not so bygone days before election laws, a few wealthy sponsors would put up the cash a candidate needed.  Money was not an issue because few knew or talked about where it came from.  Now with financial reporting, there is opportunity for public interest and opposition research to delve into campaign funding and to parse contributions.  And, that is exactly what they are doing.