So all publicity is good pubicity is it?

I am beginning to get a bit choosy about who I hand business cards out to these days because it seems to result in being on the receiving end of yet another email newsletter. Just recently I received one from a copywriting agency, which I usually take a look at, as sometimes it contains a useful thought or tit-bit of information. But last month's caught my attention for the wrong reason: "Take a tip from Richard Branson; all publicity is good publicity" it said.

Aside from the fact that I haven't found any evidence that Richard Branson said any such thing, whatever possessed the writer to choose such a stupid headline? Apart from tending to devalue what copywriters write and advice that PR people give, there are so many examples which prove the exact opposite.

Take Gerald Ratner, for example. In 1991 he made an off-the-cuff remark during an interview that a cheap sherry decanter sold by his firm was 'crap'. As a direct result he lost his job and £650,000 salary, £500m was wiped off the value of his company and a billion pound turnover was slashed overnight. 18 years later he still feels the pain and 'Doing a Ratner' has entered the English language. There are other examples. When an outbreak of avian 'flu hit a Bernard Matthews turkey farm the avuncular turkey tycoon failed to address public concern and initially responded to media enquiries with a brief 'no comment'. Within two months sales were down 40%. 'Big 5' accountants Arthur Andersen collapsed in the Enron scandal, Jonathan Ross's phone message on Andrew Sachs' answer machine nearly cost him his job and Michael O'Leary's apparent plan to charge passengers £1 for using Ryan Air's on-board toilets must have left competitors rubbing their hands with glee. The list is endless ...

What can one learn from this?

Probably the most important point is to appreciate that a good reputation, which has taken years of time, effort and money to build can be destroyed overnight by a few careless words, the wrong response in a crisis or one major mistake.

If you do find yourself in a crisis there are some simple guidelines to follow:

• Do respond to press enquiries; 'no comment' never works. If you don't say something the press will speculate, make it up or find a disgruntled customer, member of staff or local resident who will talk.
• Tell them the facts and tell them fast.
• Accept responsibility for handling the crisis, but not for causing it.
• Give them all the bad news at once, leaking it out a bit at a time gives journalists more to write about.
• Be honest and don't try to cover things up (you'll get found out).
• The boss should show up in person, it is evidence that you are taking the issue seriously.

Best of all try to hit an issue before it hits you. Do you have a risk register of issues which could damage your reputation? Establishing a risk register will prompt you to address them and to prepare a response for the ones you cannot avoid.

Does your Perception match the Reality?

Most of us are so involved and so familiar with our company, our product or our service that it becomes very easy to assume that how we view it is how others see it too. But anyone who has done a communications audit will know that the reality is always surprising and sometimes shocking.



Some years ago the PR consultancy I then worked for was introduced to a large and well-known publisher of encyclopaedias. We were working with them as subsidiary sponsors of a major sponsorship scheme which we were handling for another client.


Being a lean and hungry consultancy we were keen to land the encyclopaedia publisher as a client, and it was quite clear that they did not use PR at present. We did some very basic research and found that they were widely regarded as being very pushy and employed ’foot-in-the door’ salesmen’ who hard-sell their products which became a burden on the family finances once the complete set had been purchased. When we tackled the company on this they were truly shocked – they hadn’t sold on the doorstep for nearly 20 years! (This was before the days of online and CD-based encyclopaedias)


It turned out that in the 50s and early 60s they had received a bad press for their doorstep selling techniques. So much so that, fearing further bad coverage, they had ‘pulled down the shutters’ and refused to talk to the press for nearly 20 years. So no one knew that the company had changed, no longer sold door-to-door and had produced new products. They had missed the opportunity to point out that it was, and still is, a company highly respected in academic circles for the excellence of its encyclopaedia content.


But just think of the business that must have been lost because of a lack of communication and a lack of engaging with the company’s potential market.


It is of course an extreme example but illustrates how perception can lag behind reality, and how important it is to engage with your market and work hard to sure that perception keeps close to reality.


We never did land the business of course, old habits die hard and they were still afraid to put their heads over the parapet.


Richard Peters

January 2010