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Edition 5 - September 2004

Why Does PR Have Such Bad PR?

Tim Sutton

Tim Sutton, Chairman of Weber Shandwick in Europe, asks how public relations can improve its image.

When I was six years old, our family doctor died suddenly at a relatively young age. This disturbed me greatly, but it was not grief that bothered me: rather the idea that doctors could die at all. After all, didn’t they have a potion or pill for every ill? At that tender age, I had not heard the phrase "physician heal thyself", but it summed up what I was thinking in my six year old brain: “he couldn’t have been much of a doctor!”

There is still a tiny piece of me that has never quite lost the feeling that dying is not a very good advert for your medical skills as a doctor. Likewise, who can resist the schadenfreude when people do things which are the very things they are not supposed to do by virtue of their profession: the judge or policeman who gets sent to jail, or the accountant who goes bankrupt. Or, best of all, PR people who complain that public relations has a bad image.

At the World Public Relations Congress of 1988, one of the founding fathers of today’s public relations industry, Professor Tim Traverse-Healy, said: "To this day the media when it wishes to disparage the practice of public relations labels it propaganda, implying it is a black art. Let’s hope as understanding improves that these days are close to an end."

Sadly, they are not close to an end yet. A recent edition of the respected Sunday Telegraph newspaper in the UK ran as a headline: "Beware the spin of an invisible PR". The feature warned that "with the expansion of the media industry, PR has moved out of the shadows and become a central part of the corporate world." The writer added: "Quite how the black art of PR peddles influence is difficult to determine - but it certainly works."

I suspect that the idea that PR is indeed "a black art", a specialist form of propaganda, aimed at covert influence of the media, would be supported by a good number of his readers. PR is too often associated with ideas of superficiality, shallowness, insincerity, hypocrisy, false representation and triviality.

To describe a company’s action or initiative as being "just a PR exercise" implies that it either lacks good faith; is insincerely motivated; is a stunt to mislead or divert attention; or serves as a "cover up" for some deeper and darker truth.

But does this anti-PR spirit matter? Some in the public relations industry might dismiss it as an understandable, if regrettable, prejudice shared by uninformed critics, and would protest that they are genuinely opposed to misinformation or manipulation in any form; they cite the virtues of openness, honesty, transparency and mutual dialogue which inform their actions; they believe that clear communications by any company or other institution is a crystal clear self evident good - both for the company and for its publics.

They may also seek to prove, with ample evidence, that goodwill in corporate relationships matters hugely and that reputation is tangible and measurable - even financially - which companies lose or weaken at their peril.

Yet, while the media and the public may be uneducated or uninformed, to dismiss their negative views of public relations is a mistake that we would never make when considering the impact of perceptions on our clients’ businesses! There is a basic intuition about PR operating here and intuitions, whether right or wrong, are nearly always revealing.

Note that there is also no explicit mention in the term "public relations" that the primary function of PR is one of "information dissemination": this is part of a successful relationship with its publics, but not its end point. The end point is the maintenance, improvement or repair of the relationship itself.

Sadly some companies often miss this truth, and their PR is almost entirely one way. Information is thrown out to their weary publics, but their ability to learn from the views and ideas coming back is severely limited. There is none of the dialogue essential for a relationship. These companies may also have the view that style can triumph over substance. Stylish and creative PR work can be as strongly evocative of a company’s brand values as its creative advertising, but style alone without substance is empty and hollow.

But while people may greatly mistrust the spin of PR, they are still prepared to put much more trust in editorial than advertising. This is the very rationale of PR as a distinct marketing discipline: that third party endorsement of a company is qualitatively different to the most impactful and creative self promotion.

But the good news for PR ends there. In a survey earlier this year where they were asked to rank the credibility of different information spokespersons, only 7% of Americans and 14% of Europeans thought company PR spokesmen were "either extremely credible" or "very credible". The news for their clients was hardly better. Only 14% of Americans and 28% of European are prepared to believe that company CEOs are "extremely credible" or "very credible".

And it does matter what people think. If reputation is the only currency all companies, of whatever size of type, deal in, then their only earning power in that currency lies in trust: in their ability to attract trust and keep trust.

There are three major points of difference between propaganda and PR. Unlike the propagandist, what companies say about themselves should match our experience of what they do. Secondly, propaganda is one way. Good PR is obsessed with fostering dialogue. Good PR should not be primarily concerned with the dissemination of information: rather it should be a two-way symmetric practice. Companies aim legitimately to persuade and influence their publics, but a smart company will enable its PR model to include and facilitate the possibility of the company being influenced and changed in turn by feedback from its publics.

Thirdly, PR professionals, their employers and clients need to change their view of PR and what it does. PR people should not just be keeping a hostile world at bay during a crisis, or switching on good news for a product announcement, but thinking about their wider duties. Advice to a client should take into account not just what is expedient for the short term but what is right, proper and best practice to keep and maintain public trust in the long term.

Our own experience is that this is now beginning to happen. PR companies and their clients are raising their sights. Not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because in the long term it is the most effective thing to do.

© 2004 Weber Shandwick