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Exxon and Condit prove that honesty is the best PR
© St. Petersburg Times, Good public relations is an art, and pleasing to watch. Bad public relations is insulting and makes things worse. There is a lot more bad PR in the world than good. Look at the way McDonald's Corp. handled the news last week that its giveaway contests since 1995 were rigged. A ring of cheaters had kept the winning tickets. McDonald's acted fast. It shouted out with emergency nationwide advertising: We are sorry and we are embarrassed. The company said, we're going to give away $10-million as a starting point for making it up to you, and not with some drawing a year from now, but right away. Come in next week. You don't have to buy anything. McDonald's did pretty well with an awful situation. This was smart. The all-time, champion example of how to handle bad news came in 1982, after a series of deaths from tampering with Extra-Strength Tylenol. The maker, Johnson & Johnson, recalled millions of bottles, worked hard to publicize the crisis, and revealed every helpful scrap of information to the public. After huge initial losses (the product recall alone cost $100-million), Johnson & Johnson ultimately recovered the public's trust and even increased its market share. The experience also led to a generation of safer, tamper-proof packages. This, too, was smart. It also was entirely contrary to human nature. Human nature, when confronted with bad news, is to deny, to cover up, to stonewall as long as possible. Our company staunchly denies these allegations. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I am not a crook. Just two beers, officer, I swear. After the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, causing one of the worst environmental disasters ever, company officials refused to comment for days. Hiding behind the advice of lawyers, Exxon refused even to admit the extent of the spill. Not only would a jury eventually return a verdict of $5-billion against Exxon for its recklessness, but the company permanently lost business. "Exxon did it," Aviva Diamond, a Los Angeles-based media and speaker consultant, writes in Public Relations Tactics magazine. "Then Dow Corning, Sears, Denny's, Food Lion, Intel -- the list goes on and on. After every crisis, people wonder how yet another company could have made the same, obvious mistakes. And then another crisis comes along, and another company does the same darned thing." Bad public relations also can be the result of arrogance. A lot of people believe they can talk their way out of anything. Implicit in this is the belief they are smarter than the person they are talking to. I do not know what U.S. Rep. Gary Condit, the congressman linked to missing intern Chandra Levy, thought he was accomplishing by going on national television last week -- and then refusing to answer so many of Connie Chung's questions. He was creepy, sitting there like a blow-dried robot. Confronted with questions about affair after alleged affair (did he think she wasn't going to ask?) he sanctimoniously repeated that he wasn't going to invade "my family's privacy." It sounds to me as though he invaded his family's "privacy" a long time before he ever sat down with Connie Chung. Here is the lesson: If you have something to hide, then, by gum, hide it. Don't go on national television and tap-dance, spin, or give half-answers. Don't try to slide away with some puny comment about making "my share of mistakes." No number of half-answers is going to add up to a whole. Otherwise, tell the truth. All of it. Presumably your family already knows it, and everybody else is going to know it sooner or later anyway, so wouldn't it sound better coming from your own mouth? - You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.
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Times columns today Howard Troxler Jan Glidewell Sara Fritz From the Times Metro desk |
