PR Resource

When an organization has bad luck, it sometimes can’t get away from negative reports.  United, still reeling from pulling a passenger off one of its planes, now has to deal with killing a giant rabbit on one of its flights.  Ordinarily a story like that would barely get a mention, but United is in the penalty box and subject to scrutiny.  And, it’s not just United, the airline industry as a whole is being looked at.  Delta just got pilloried for removing a passenger from one of its planes for going to the bathroom.  Airlines have been struggling with poor PR and a bad reputation for some time.  They treat economy customers like cattle and squeeze them into the back of planes with no amenities and charges for everything.  In defense of the airlines, one has to realize the industry made no money for decades, and it has at last reached stable profitability.  Still, ticking off customers is a hard way to run an organization.  They can do so because they have an oligopoly and there is nowhere else for customers to go.

Google’s Waymo is finally offering test rides in a real world environment — Phoenix, AZ.  It is taking applications from citizens now for travel in its self-driving vans (that will still have an attendant sitting by the steering wheel.)  The experiment is both a final step before the technology hits the road for everyday use and a PR exercise to demonstrate the validity of the system.  If there is any one company that deserves to be successful in its endeavor to invent the future, Google would seem to be it.  The company has put three million miles into test driving its technology and thus far, it has passed every goal with few hiccups.  Other companies are in hot pursuit of the same objective as Google so Waymo dare not stand still.  With 600 minivans on the roads of the Valley of the Sun, millions will get the chance to see self-driving vehicles and more importantly, drive along side them.

CEOs have a PR problem and it stems from their compensation. Even if they fail in their jobs, they are rewarded, sometimes excessively.  Consider these wages of failure.  For being unable to turn a company around, the CEO walks away with $186 million.  Compensation consultants will argue that the amount includes her stock holdings, but how did she own so much equity?  The board endowed her with huge holdings on the premise that she would make good and save the company.  Instead, she sold it for a tidy amount.  There are reasons why average citizens are cynical when it comes to executive pay.  It seems to be a heads-I-win, tails-I-win game.  Boards have been struggling with the compensation issue for decades and they seem no nearer to a solution.  In defense of Yahoo’s CEO, one can state that shareholders were served by the sale and that is all that matters.  Is it though?

This is a cute event — racing nano-vehicles under the gaze of a scanning tunneling microscope.  Who says science can’t be fun and educational?  The molecular “cars” will be pushed along a gold track by pulses of electricity and eventually, one molecule will win.  That the size of the things is less than one thousandth of the width of a human hair and the chamber for the race has to be cooled to -450 degrees fahrenheit only makes the contest more interesting.  What is amazing is that humans can build machines at an atomic scale that actually work.  There is no known practical use for them yet, but it is early in their development.  This publicity event is designed to make the work better known — and have fun in the process.  I’m sure there will be betting on the outcome.

It has been a long-standing truism that what people don’t see, they don’t care about.  That is especially true of most of the features of first-world culture.  One of those is the cell phone that comes from mammoth factories in China where workers are treated like mindless robots.  One can only imagine the boredom of the worker who puts in one screw in hundreds of cell phones daily while bosses shout at them to move faster.  It would justify a strike in the US, which is one reason why those factories aren’t here.  Adding to the demeaning labor is the small wage factory workers receive.  The average citizen goes to the store, buys a phone and gives not the least thought to the human machinery behind it.  Yet if he did, would he be any less motivated to own one?  We assume others are there to answer our beck and call.  We get upset only when an item is not available.  Then we ask why.

No one wants a review like this one.  The reporter goes out of her way to reach for the most toxic terms she can find to damn Starbucks’ Unicorn Frappuccino.  There is nothing PR can do in a case like this.  It is hunker down and let it pass.  Starbucks’ revenge will be to sell out of the product before it takes it off the market, since it is only a short-time offering.  There is something titillating about reviews like this.  One continues to read to see what she will say next.  And say she does.  The company is cut down in every possible way for daring to offer a drink “made with ‘rainbows.”  If other reviews are as bad as this one, Starbucks might think twice before it attempts another sugar-filled drink.

After the dramatic White House announcement that the US was sending a carrier to the coast of North Korea, we learned that the Carl Vinson was steaming off Australia, thousands of miles from its supposed destination.  This was apparently not the Trump Administration’s fault.  There were bungles in the military chain of command.  Still it gives Trump and his advisors a reputation of a gang who can’t shoot straight.  Another administration might live down the embarrassment but there have been so many gaffes already in the Trump White House that this adds to a perception of chaos and ineffectiveness.  It is hard to break the string of missteps once the media gets used to reporting them.  The White House can protest that it is being treated unfairly, but it will do little good.  The only solution is to get the news right from now on.

One tradition in the media is regrettable, and that is the habit of tarring individuals after they have experienced a loss.  Here is an example.  Hillary Clinton lost the election, and now a book proclaims it was all her fault.  There might have been culpability on her part, but did the authors need to kick her while she is down?  It is a destructive approach to reporting and only partly true.  Would the reporters have written the same book had she won?  Individuals and organizations have to steel themselves for Monday quarterbacking once they have experienced a major loss or failure.  People want to know what happened. The temptation to heighten the drama by reporting the worst aspects of the situation is too much for some journalists.  They stoop to the juiciest details and fail to maintain a balance.  There isn’t much an individual or organization can do but to ride it out and try to rebuild one’s reputation later.

It turns out that against all advice and counsel a huge percentage of people use their cell phones while driving.  Despite warnings against distracted driving, they continue to dial and chat.  The urge to communicate has overpowered common sense even among those who know better.  This is a PR challenge of major proportions.  It is akin to the campaign to stop people from smoking.  So far, the campaign has been a failure.  Even laws on the books have not been enough to stop drivers from punching buttons.  What will it take to stop this habit?  Constant messaging is not enough.  Education has not been sufficient.  A multitude of voices delivering the message has not worked.  The urge to communicate is more powerful than PR methods being used.  One possibility is to declare failure and to live with the outcome, but more than 3,000 lives are lost a year due to distracted driving and using one’s mobile phone frequently means both hands are off the wheel for a time.  A second possibility is to amplify the warnings so one can’t avoid the message, especially while driving.  This will cost more.  A third possibility is to keep hammering away at the present level. although this hasn’t worked to date.  There might be no good answer, but giving up is not an option that anyone wants to take at the moment.

Some of the toughest PR problems occur when a company has not been transparent.  Consider this case.  St. Jude Medical did not reveal that battery failures affected some of its defibrillators and had caused at least one death.  The company hid the fact from its medical advisory board and from medical management as well.  St. Jude did eventually recall the device, but the Food and Drug Administration sent a warning letter as a result.  There is no good defense in a situation like this.  The company can’t say it didn’t know.  It did.  It can’t say no one was hurt.  One patient died and others were affected. It can’t even blame the battery maker who accepted that batteries were a problem.  Perhaps it is a good thing that St. Jude was bought out by Abbott Laboratories.  Abbott has inherited the problem but is handling it better than St. Jude.  About the only thing PR can say in situations like this is “I’m sorry, and it won’t happen again.”  Meanwhile, tort lawyers hover.