1 How PR works …..but often doesn’t Noel Turnbull Research assistants Cathrine Wahl Kirsty Jean Harris 2 Published by N.S.& J.S.Turnbull Pty Ltd Melbourne, Australia 2010 ISBN: 978-0-646-53625-5 3 For my parents Alice and Jim 4 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 1. AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF PR 9 From Palm Valley to ‘negotiation by riot’ 9 The Evangelicals and the Victorians invent PR 12 The history of Australian PR 14 2. GOOD HEAVENS – WE’RE NOT IN PR 20 The structure of the PR industry 20 Government PR 22 Other PRs 24 How many of them are there? 25 What do they do and who are they? 25 The PRIA – an irrelevancy? 26 The consultancies 28 3. THE PR HOLY GRAIL – FRAMING THE DEBATE 31 Frames of reference 31 Framing theory 32 How does it work? 33 Across the generations 33 Framing at a strategic level 34 How technology has made it easier 36 Tactical framing 37 Bringing it all together – the Israel case study 40 A positive view of framing 41 4. ISSUES MANAGEMENT – KEEPING THE ELEPHANTS AWAY 42 What is issues management? 42 What is an issue? 43 Issues in the private and public sector 46 Identifying issues 47 The issues lifecyle 48 Managing the issues 50 The role of stakeholders 52 The future 55 5. PR AND THE MEDIA – A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP 56 An uneasy relationship 56 PR influence on media content 58 Cui bono? 61 Some lessons from media management 61 Deconstructing the media and PR 64 The Internet 68 5 6. WHAT PR PEOPLE DO – THE UBIQUITY OF PR 70 Inventions, stunts and promotion 70 Fads and fashions 73 Networking and interpersonal communication 77 Showing not telling 82 A myriad of specialisations 82 Corporate communications 83 Public affairs 83 Internal communications 86 Corporate blogging 93 Investor relations 95 Corporate social responsibility 98 Crisis communications 100 Risk communications 102 Litigation PR 103 Community consultation 104 Sport 106 Entertainment 110 Expert positioning 111 Pharmaceuticals 113 Rural and remote 114 How to do it manuals 115 7. PERSUADING PEOPLE TO BE HEALTHY AND GOOD 116 Social marketing 116 Early social marketing campaigns 118 What precisely is it? 120 How effective is it? 122 Some case studies 122 Be alarmed 122 TAC and road safety 123 Immunisation 124 Snake condoms 125 Firearms 125 8. POLITICS – JUST PR? 128 Fiction and reality 128 The power of words 129 Government PR 132 Journalism and politics 136 Business and politics 139 What I learnt 143 9. PR ETHICS – AN OXYMORON? 147 Is PR inherently unethical? 147 PR Codes 149 Philosophical approaches 153 Ethical models 154 What is to be done? 6 10. SOME PR CASE STUDIES 157 The Anzac Myth – commemorating to forget 157 The Gallipoli legend 158 The 1990s PR campaigns 159 Indigenous Australians – persuading people to forget 162 How the debate has been framed 163 The 1967 Referendum 163 Reconciliation 164 Land rights 165 Chutzpah and the nuclear lobby 166 Forests- money can’t buy you love 169 11. WHAT NEXT FOR THE PR INDUSTRY 174 Bibliography 179 About the author 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would not have been possible without the contributions of my colleagues, clients and fellow industry members over some 40 years. There are too many of them to acknowledge personally but it was a pleasure to work with them all, particularly all the alumni of Turnbull Fox Phillips and Turnbull Porter Novelli. I am very grateful for the research assistance of Cathrine Wahl and Kirsty Jean Harris, to Sally Young who helped me find them, and to Joel Becker of the Victorian Writers Centre who provided advice on making sure they all got due recognition. John Spitzer helped me refine many of the ideas over many years and provided me with the information about physicists and spin and the theory that the world would collapse without spin My deepest gratitude is to my wife, Jenny, and my children James and Meredith. I was absent from their lives for long times doing the things which are described in this book. They have been the sternest critics of the PR industry I know and are an important sounding board on what was the right thing to do or not. None of it would have been possible without them. 8 INTRODUCTION – Stumbling into public relations Forty years ago I stumbled, in a pub, into public relations. Back then pubs were pubs, journalists were reporters, reporters were more numerous than PR people, and reporters spent more time in pubs than journalists do today. I was drinking with Lionel Pugh, a reporter on The Australian newspaper. Having dropped out of university, where I had spent more time working on Farrago, the student newspaper, than studying; lurching from a few personal disasters; and trying to survive on freelance work I desperately needed a job. Lionel said a public relations company, Eric White Associates, was looking for consultants and suggested I contact an acquaintance of his there. With almost no knowledge of public relations, beyond the odd contact with someone trying to a place a story in a paper, I got the job on Lionel’s recommendation. Forty years on public relations is pervasive in society. PR people are more numerous than journalists and work for governments, companies, charities, environmental groups, trade unions and even the media itself. Since that first job my career has encompassed several stints in consultancies; being an ALP Opposition press secretary; working for the Victorian Environment Protection Authority; various returns to journalism; establishing a consultancy; becoming part of a global PR group; and, being involved in PR education I have witnessed at first hand the expansion and development of an industry which is now integral to everything from persuading you to buy a chocolate bar, through investing your money, to influencing how you vote and where you go to school. This book aims to help people understand how the industry became so pervasive; where the industry came from; how it is structured; who the key players are; and, what PR people actually do in their daily professional lives. It also tries to provide a different perspective from the proliferation of books and articles about the industry. Most of them traditionally fit into one of two categories – apologia or condemnation. The first, written by PR practitioners and academics, are generally descriptive focussing on tactics and campaigns without questioning the legitimacy of the industry and what it does. The second focus on a variety of notorious case studies, question the industry’s legitimacy by portraying it solely as a malign instrument of influence and control, but show little understanding of how PR actually works. This book seeks to bridge the two by challenging the myths of the apologists and the critics through a combination of analysis, reflection and memoir. It does not reveal everything about all the projects and campaigns undertaken over those 40 years, as many of them were covered by explicit or implicit confidentiality agreements, but it does try to explain how the PR world works and interacts with the wider world. There are problems in trying to define PR. The PR industry associations and academics have developed various definitions starting with the broadest concept – that PR is about establishing relationships with publics, that is, using various techniques to reach out to specific target groups or publics. For instance, the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA), the body which represents a proportion of Australian PR practitioners, defines 9 PR as “the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organisation (or individual) and its (or their) publics.” These definitions are less than useful, particularly when there is even little agreement on what to call this pervasive function. In 2003 the Australian Centre for Corporate Public Affairs undertook a survey of the State of Australian Public Affairs. It found that the function was covered by titles such as public relations, external relations, external affairs, corporate relations, communication, corporate communication, public affairs and corporate affairs. When respondents to the survey were asked to list what sort of things they did the list included legal and general counsel, investor relations, consumer affairs, regulatory affairs, environmental affairs, change management, cultural change, intranet management, website management, corporate citizenship, industry association liaison, corporate giving, brand management and brand image, corporate sponsorships, employee communications, stakeholder relations, issues management, crisis management, community relations, government relations, public relations, external communications and media relations. For the purposes of this book, therefore, public relations is used as convenient and comprehensive shorthand to describe all these various activities while catch-all definitions are avoided as unnecessary, unhelpful and potentially misleading. “Spin’ is also absent from the list even though physicists say that spin, and statistical theories about spin, are a deep explanation of what keeps the world going and stops it from collapsing. This is not because ‘spin’ is pejorative – after all the term PR has become pretty pejorative itself – but rather because the field is richer and more interesting than either the spinners or the journalists who write about them ever imagine. The book also tries to come to terms with the central paradoxes of PR practice. Whatever any PR practitioner – whether working for a multinational company or an environmental group - says about ethics, responsibility and the rationale for their actions, the reality is that PR people are paid to change how people think and behave. Given this, it is impossible to avoid the perception that there is an inherent tendency to manipulation. Equally paradoxical is that, while critics focus on multinational consultancies and corporations as users of PR to achieve social control, influence policy and hide unacceptable behaviour, the most successful practitioners of PR techniques are often NGOs and community groups.