PR Resource

Gatorade, the sports drink, was fined $300,000 for telling kids to avoid water. The company created a video game — Bolt! — in which the player feeds Gatorade to Usain Bolt to maximize his performance. If the player gives him water instead, his fuel level goes down. It was a creative marketing ploy but it wasn’t accurate and the medical community stresses that water is preferred for young athletes.engaged in “routine activity.” From a PR perspective, Gatorade failed for its lack of factual statement. The first rule of public relations is accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. I’m sure that the marketing people congratulated themselves on developing such a good and subtle way to sell the drink and were upset when the State of California faulted them. But, it was their own mistake for trying to persuade youth to shun water. Marketers can bend facts: PR shouldn’t.

President Trump has an effect on others, and it is not positive — for him, anyway. After complaining publicly about NFL players kneeling during the Star Spangled Banner, players linked arms and took a knee throughout the leagues yesterday. If that doesn’t demonstrate Trump has a PR problem, nothing will. He hasn’t finished his first year in office and people wonder why he was elected. Many dread the thought that we must endure four years of him. His popularity ratings have tanked and he seems to be making little effort to buoy them except through campaign-like rallies of the small band of followers he still has. He seems to feast on adulation and remains incapable of hearing or taking criticism to heart. He gets into trouble because he is a loose cannon in speech and Tweeting. And, if he loses a fight, he quickly blames someone else then contrives to show his role was a victory. It is hard to believe he has people working to burnish his image. They have made a deal with the netherworld.

Amazon is learning the hard way that computer algorithms are not perfect and can create problems. Consider here and here. In the first instance, its algorithms suggested bomb-making paraphernalia when one searched for an ingredient. In the second instance, it assumed thousands of women were pregnant and in the market for baby things. Amazon has apologized in both cases and adjusted its formula, but there will be others because no algorithm is correct all of the time without human intervention. Facebook is learning the same lesson with the discovery that it was allowing “Jew Haters” to advertise on its site. Facebook is putting people in charge to catch future attempts by neo-Nazis and others who rail against Jews. The challenge both companies face is that the bigger they get, the harder it is to monitor their systems. We haven’t seen the last of this.

A perfect PR challenge for the world’s companies is to combat slavery. More than 40 million people are held in bondage, most of them women and children. Companies can make headway in stamping out this crime by ensuring that none of their vendors use enslaved workers. From there, they can lobby for change in countries where slavery is present. Since money talks, threatening to abandon nations that do not proscribe and enforce anti-slavery laws is one way to approach the situation. There is no justification for modern slavery except greed. Workers held in bondage are paid a pittance so owners can reap profits. There are as well household slaves in many Asian countries — women held with little or no pay to perform chores around homes. Companies should make sure that none of their employees practice domestic slavery. Intrusion into personal affairs is merited. In any legal way possible, slavery should be annihilated.

It is a blow to reputation when a security company needs protection because malware has compromised its software. That is what happened to Avast. Its CCCleaner for Windows software was harmed when hackers installed a backdoor in it. More than two million users downloaded the affected program before Avast caught on. The company patched the hole but now it needs to reach the users with the update. The lesson here is that no one is safe and one must stay on alert all of the time. Hackers are a fact of life on the internet and they will never go away. Companies can make it harder for them to succeed but they cannot guarantee a program is tamper-proof. Security companies, especially, need vigilance because they have set themselves up as protectors.

Credibility is everything to an auditing firm, and that is why KPMG cleaned house in South Africa as a result of a scandal. An auditing firm cannot afford to fight regulators or to work through one with headlines detailing progress or lack of it. Is it unfair to partners if they were not involved? Yes, it is. KPMG could have reassigned them pending the outcome of an investigation, but that might look like it was hiding something. It was good for the senior partner to take responsibility since he was in charge, but that doesn’t assuage the cost to reputation from the misdeeds themselves. There is no merciful way to handle a situation like this. Public perception demands action even if the blade cuts deeply.

If there is one commonalty of the Trump administration, it would be tone deafness. Here is one more case of failure to understand the perceptions of what one is doing. The result is another ding to the reputation of Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. What makes it worse is that he is independently wealthy, and he could easily afford first class travel on the airline of his choosing. An airplane is a perk of the President and no one below him. Even the President is criticized for using Air Force 1 when he is clearly campaigning and not attending to official business. Mnuchin might have brought the attitude with him from the business world that CEOs and the wealthy deserve their own private jets. One hopes he and his wife are quick studies and don’t put themselves into the spotlight again.

Philip Morris International has pledged nearly $1 billion to fight smoking, but its critics don’t believe it. After all, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes spent billions fighting anti-tobacco activists for decades. Why should anyone believe them now? The company has a strong economic interest in non-smoking tobacco, also known as vaping, which is growing rapidly. It isn’t getting out of business but changing focus. Still, it bears watching as it pushes smoke-free alternatives. The company has little or no credibility when it comes to tobacco. One way or another, PMI comes off as self-interested.

It is not often a PR firm closes because of its misdeeds. This UK firm has just shut down after being kicked out of the UK PR association for running a racist campaign in South Africa. Aside from the standard question, “What were they thinking?”, it is a reminder that all a PR firm has is its credibility. Once it sacrifices that, it is useless. That is what Bell Pottinger did in undertaking a job it should have avoided at all costs. The firm was greedy and amoral, a dangerous combination, and its stance caught up with it. It will not be late and lamented. It stands as an object lesson to other PR firms. There is only so far one should go before turning down a client.

This shows the power of positive publicity. So far as I know, Amazon did not advertise its price cuts at Whole Foods the day it took over. It simply made them and let the media discover with their market basket approach the slashes to the price of food. The company has garnered miles of free ink and video and store traffic has climbed. In addition, it has shipped more groceries than before to Amazon customers. The question facing Amazon now is whether it can keep prices low in its Whole Food stores and make up for the smaller margin on traffic. The company is a formidable competitor so it is likely that it will. Jeff Bezos is out to conquer the retail world and he just might do it.