The best PR professionals no longer help build illusions – they build credibility
Geoffrey Rowan is partner, managing director, at Ketchum Public Relations Canada
Any parent of a teenager has seen the death of illusion and, often, its replacement with cynicism. This is what is happening on a grand scale, across every human endeavor, as technology and demographics conspire to make it impossible to maintain an illusory façade that does not match reality.
Geoffrey Rowan
When kids are little, they believe in mom and dad. Parents have the illusion of omniscience, of omnipotence. But then teenage years arrive and suddenly everything mom or dad says is met with the exaggerated eye roll. You cursed, smoked, drank, cut classes, did drugs, had sex, broke curfew and you survived. Who are you to preach? No credibility. They mock you. At worst, they dismiss you as irrelevant.
Today that death of illusion applies to any institution or organization. The only meaningful response is to accept it as the new reality and make sure your words and actions match. Close the say-do gap. You will be found out and punished if you don’t.
In today’s era of intense scrutiny, always-on-the-hunt media and always-on social media, it is next to impossible to maintain an illusion of righteousness. Not for politicians, businesses, religions, charities or any organization. Not outside the organization or inside the organization. If there’s a gap between what you say and do, you’ve blown your credibility. If you don’t move quickly to align words and deeds, you invite cynicism, mockery and hostility.
Everywhere in the world, social technologies are accelerating the shift in power from institutions to individuals. In this new age of the empowered individual, we’re all in for a lot of enforced radical transparency. Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are the celebrity faces of enforced transparency. But social media enables any individual – whether battling oppressive state authorities, religious hypocrisy or lousy customer service – to be an eyewitness reporter. There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from truth.
For the public relations industry, that means there has never been a more important time to be a communication professional. It is now our duty, as post-illusionists, to help organizations and individual leaders live credibly in the real world. The best PR professional no longer helps build illusions. Today the best PR professional helps build credibility and fend off cynicism by communicating an authentic reality, whatever the realm.
Governments have relied on the power of illusion to control and convince the masses for as long as there have been governments. Ancient Japan and China maintained their supreme leaders were literally gods with super powers. In Europe, there was the Divine Right of Kings. The Monarch was answerable to no one but God. In the modern era, it’s challenging to maintain the illusion you have a personal relationship with the Almighty when your cellphone gets hacked and your pornographic messages to your mistress are made front-page news.
In the U.S., it is no longer possible to build the kind of Camelot illusion the Kennedy Administration had with a complicit news media in the 1960s. As hard as many American politicians try to create the family-values illusion, it’s tough to do when you’re tweeting pictures of your junk around the world.
President Obama swept into office in 2008 on the illusion of a new Camelot. “Yes we can” was mesmerizing theatre. “Yes we can, America. We can be great. We can get over all the petty infighting. We can fix things.”
President Obama created a powerful illusion. Unfortunately he has been unable to turn the illusion into reality. The gap between what he made us believe, and what reality proved to be, is going to be his legacy. Whether it’s his fault or not.
In Toronto, the political illusion playing out is more pedestrian. Rob Ford, the chief magistrate of North America’s fourth largest city, was elected as a populist – a man of the people. An anti-tax crusader.
Despite being from a very wealthy family, Mayor Ford was elected on a simple, one-plank platform. Stop the gravy train. All evil in the city of Toronto, he said, came from elitist left-wing politicians abusing taxpayers.
The stop-the-gravy-train campaign was a very effective message. A plain spoken truth from a conservative man of the people, digging out waste and holding people accountable. Unfortunately for Mayor Ford, with cameras everywhere, he has proved to be a man of excesses, untruths, half-truths and illusory misdirection.
In fact, according to Ketchum research around the world, the level of disappointment in our political leaders in striking. In our 2013 survey, just 21% overall said political leaders are effective. In Canada that number was only 14%. In France it was just 9%. You’d think you could poll higher than 9% just from relatives of politicians alone.
We wonder why voter turnout is so low in so many democracies. The answer is clear. A large percentage of the population thinks democracy is an illusion. “Hah, you fooled us. We thought voting actually meant something.”
Another amazing thing the research showed was that people will accept a harsh, or even unpleasant truth. This has always been the foundational principle of issues management. Bad stuff will happen. People accept that. They judge you based on what you do when the bad stuff happens. They punish you for claiming one thing and doing another.
Many religions have faced the same death of illusion, with the resulting drop off in membership. A UN human rights committee said the Vatican “systematically” adopted policies that allowed priests to rape and molest tens of thousands of children over decades. The Church response to the UN report was, that was then and this is now. In an age of radical, enforced transparency, that response may not be good enough.
The behaviour of businesses has been just as illusory, professing one value, and then acting in a contradictory manner. They say: “Proudly Canadian,” and outsource their jobs to India. They donate to children’s charities in one market and employ child labourers in another. They claim environmental responsibility as a fundamental value, and blithely pollute in pursuit of profits.
The thing is, not only do they get caught out today, but their disillusioned consumers punish them where it hurts – sales. Our research found that overwhelmingly, consumers who are unhappy with an organization’s leadership will buy less from that organization or will boycott it all together. There is a concrete, bottom-line consequence from saying one thing and doing another.
As organizations become increasingly social – embrace the tools and culture of social media to enable and promote collaboration – they are increasingly at risk of being found to be disingenuous. People entering the workforce today live transparently online. They know no other way to behave.
Organizations will either allow the age of illusion to walk toward the light, to die a natural death, either they will align what they say and do, or they will invite cynical distrust. All the world will roll eyes heavenward at anything they say and walk away.
