It's no surprise that political correctness has become part of what drives the economic engine of corporate America. But as marketplace competition gets stiffer, PR professionals are finding out that managing public perception will become one of the prime responsibilities they will shoulder.
That couldn't be more magnified than the recent media blitz surrounding two companies' controversial advertising symbols - Stoughton, Mass.-based Reebok's [RBK] Incubus shoe and Detroit-headquartered General Motors' [GM] use of supermodel Cindy Crawford in an advertisement for the Cadillac Catera.
Then, on the other hand, let's look at Ford Motor [F] company is receiving glowing public reviews for sponsoring the Feb. 23 broadcast of "Schindler's List" on NBC, thereby allowing the movie to be aired commercial-free. It's proof that public perception still goes a long way.
The Reebok and Cadillac examples point to the need to turn to outside consultants or to invest in research before introducing a product into a global marketplace where differing cultural and societal perceptions abound. If you analyze what these two corporations did, the mistakes are easy to find: In the case of Cadillac, the ad was never tested on a third-party audience; and in the case of Reebok, no one delved into what Incubus means.
In short, the tales unwind like this:
Reebok put its $60 Incubus women's athletic shoe, retailed by Sears [S], on the market about a year ago. Yet several weeks ago, Reebok came under intense media scrutiny after an ABC affiliate in Arizona questioned the choice of the Incubus name and ran a piece about it. Incubus is considered an evil spirit believed to have sexually preyed on women during medieval times.
The ABC piece set off a flurry of press accounts, including stories in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, which resulted in Reebok issuing a public apology and - as of our press time - agreeing to pull the Incubus symbol, according to Dave Fogelson, Reebok's PR director.
During that same week, Cadillac decided to pull its campy Cindy Crawford commercial which aired during the Super Bowl.
The move came after executives, some of them women, questioned whether Crawford - who wears knee-high leather boots and a short skirt in the ad - meshes with the Catera image and its target demographic.
Because of the gender debate, Cadillac reported last week that it was in the process of deciding whether the ad will be permanently pulled, recut or repurposed for other uses, according to Tom Wilkinson, a Cadillac spokesperson at the company's Warren, Mich., site.
"Both of these controversies show that we live in sensitive times and that people are constantly watching what companies are doing - specifically what symbols they use," said Don Bates, president of Sumner Rider & Associates, a New York firm specializing in public perception issues.
"More and more in this day and age, those in the media are inclined to look behind the surface and because of this, corporations need to think through what they're doing. I continue to be shocked by how it is 1997 and there are still advertisements which run that depict all-white families from downhome America," Bates added.
What Bates has found is that corporate executives should never stop questioning how they are perceived by the public and press.
The Role of Responsive PR
Although the Cadillac and Reebok controversies are different, when viewed from a PR perspective, they both point to the same lesson: The images corporations use for brand publicity as well as the spokespeople they select are going to be sized up differently than they were many years ago.
And mega-corporations - unless purposely seeking controversy to generate publicity - should be smart enough in their decision-making to avoid sitting in the hot seat. And when they do, the once-used tactic of painting the press as the bad guy just won't do. While the controversies themselves cast Cadillac and Reebok in a negative light, the PR responses may ultimately redeem their reputations.
In both cases, when the media called, they answered. They explained. They informed. They admitted. And they presented corrective scenarios which could unfold.
In fact, a PR benchmark study (based on an analysis of more than 26,000 articles from June 1995 to June 1996) released last week by The Delahaye Group Inc., Portsmouth, N.H., shows that "on average, coverage is almost twice as likely to be positive and three times as likely to contain a key message if the reporter quotes a spokesperson directly" - meaning a "no comment" is the kind of bad PR that fuels, instead of quells, an issue.
"We also found that media coverage was more neutral than it's been in the six years we've directed the report," said Jill Ury, VP of corporate communications for The Delahaye Group. "But if you get a company spokesperson out there (in the limelight), the story's more likely to be positive."
"We've learned a lesson from this," said Fogelson about the Reebok controversy. "The lesson is we've become more sensitized and we've learned that we have to respond to the media and make sure that our message - in this case that we made a mistake - is articulated and believed." (Reebok, Dave Fogelson, 617/341-7792; Cadillac, Tom Wilkinson, 810/492-4344; SR&A, Don Bates, 212/661-5300; Delahaye Group, Jill Ury, 603/431-0111)