Remember the Pepsi tampering scandal of the early 1990s? As
David L. Shank of Shank Public Relations Counselors helped the soda
maker with its Midwest PR efforts at the time, he faced the
challenge of laying to rest the nasty rumors about the soda king
when an Indianapolis couple claimed to have found a foreign object
in their Pepsi can.
To allay fears, Shank relied heavily on the testimony of the
Food & Drug Administration's local spokesman, who expressed
complete confidence in Pepsi's bottling processes.
"The FDA spokespeople at that time wore a kind of quasi-military
uniform, and that carried a great deal of symbolic meaning for
people, along with the message itself," Shank recalls. "In our
conversations with reporters, we constantly referred to what the
FDA was saying. It certainly leant credibility to what the [Pepsi]
plant manager was saying. That manager could say, 'The FDA is
working with us on this, the FDA knows how things work here and it
is not a problem with them, so it should not be a problem with
consumers.'"
There is nothing like a third-party endorsement to lend weight
and substance to a PR effort. From the health benefits of orange
juice to racial equality in the automotive industry, PR
practitioners have found ways to incorporate outside approval into
their messages to craft winning campaigns.
When General Motors came under fire, for example, Lonnie Soury
of Soury Communications relied on third-party endorsements to carry
the day. The crisis involved GM's minority- owned car dealerships,
which a few years back were claiming that the world's biggest
carmaker had failed to give them adequate corporate support. They
mounted lawsuits. The Rev. Jesse Jackson took up the cause. The
Congressional Black Caucus launched a review.
The carmaker responded by hiring an independent consultant to
review its Minority Dealer Program from top to bottom. The review
formed the basis of Soury's communications efforts. He put together
a media package that included a 300-page report including the
reviewer's 215 recommendations (of which GM said it would adopt 213
changes). The package also carried profiles of successful
minority-owned dealerships along with detailed information on how
the independent review was conducted.
Soury took that package to all the major media, and about 100
civil-rights and community organizations across the country that
would have an interest in the issues. Soury also made the lead
investigator readily available to reporters. "Here is a guy who had
taken a hard look at the company and was willing to talk to the
press about it," he says. "We had gotten so much bad news and here
was our chance to get out there and be proactive. From a public
relations point, [the third-party review] was invaluable."
Not that a crisis is required to demonstrate the value of an
independent endorsement. For many PR practitioners, outside
approval is a staple of their daily diet. Take orange juice, for
example, a staple at America's breakfast table. At the Florida
Department of Citrus, PR Manager Eric Boomhower maintains ongoing
alliances with the American Cancer Society, American Heart
Association and March of Dimes, among other groups. "Could we go
out there and tell people to drink orange juice every day to reduce
these risks? Yes we probably could," he says. "But that message
gets added weight and credibility, and gets added exposure, when we
partner with an organizing who mission is already to carry similar
messages out into the population."
Whenever a major study finds a new health virtue in citrus,
Boomhower will try to squeeze some "juice" out of the endorsement
in some way. Most recently, for example, the Harvard School of
Public Health found that a glass of orange juice every day could
reduce stroke risk by 25%. Adding weight to the Harvard name was
the fact that the study appeared in the Journal of the American
Medical Association. Here was a hefty endorsement, and Boomhower
moved to make use of it.
He crafted a video news release that scored eight national
placements, including the Today Show, CNN and MSNBC. A print
release helped generate articles in USA Today and Time, as well as
ABC Radio and NPR.
Of course, there is a dangerous flip side to all of this. What
happens what an outside reviewer comes into a situation and finds
against you, issuing not an endorsement but a biting critique? You
can choose to bite back, but make sure you first sharpen your
teeth.
"You have to take a very careful look at the criteria to make
that evaluation, try to get as much of the original data as you
can, and then dig into those criteria," says Shank. "If you can see
some issues with the data, then you have something to honestly and
legitimately challenge. But you cannot just come out and blast the
research without some credible basis for mounting that
challenge."
Janet Murguia has a different sort of problem when it comes to
outside endorsements. As executive vice chancellor for university
relations, it is her job to promote the University of Kansas. In
that light she will put out a press release for every sort of
endorsement visited upon the school. She keeps an "Accolades" page
on the university's web site, touting everything from the school's
ranking among to the top 10 schools for National Merit scholars, to
its listing among the 100 best college buys, to its receipt of the
Truman Foundation Honor Institution Award.
"It is quite effective when you can point to another outside
party that supports a claim being made by your institution," she
says. Trouble is, the media don't always direct their gaze toward
the appropriate virtues. "Some media want to focus on those
distinctions that you might not feel are the best attributes," she
says. "We can be announcing a Rhodes scholar, and they will be
talking about our listing as a top-10 party school. Now, we have a
healthy social life here, but I like to think that there is more to
us than just that."
Did those third-party endorsements ultimately help her to make
the case? You bet. When a former student won the Nobel Prize in
economics, she says, the media certainly put aside its interest in
the party-school rankings. For a while, anyway.
Landing Endorsements
To be of use to a PR practitioner, the source of a third-party
endorsement must be seen as someone who is a credible authority on
the issue, as well as being entirely independent in his or her
judgment. Where to find such sources, and how to secure their
endorsements? Likely sources for third-party review include:
- Government agencies with oversight authority
- Professional associations, which may conduct surveys or issue
certifications - Universities or independent research labs
- Independent financial auditing firms
Contacts: Eric Boomhower, 863.499.2500, [email protected];
Janet Murguia, 785.864.7100, [email protected]; Lonnie Soury,
212.414.5857, [email protected];
Greg Stangel, 800.229.8701, [email protected]