 That ship we know as public relations is taking on water, and it is time to toss the dead weight over the side so we can maintain ballast and sail through the coming storm toward credibility.
First, let's begin with nomenclature associated with the field generally known as PR. Overboard as chum for the sharks should be perception management, reputation management, perception is reality, and any variation of spin, such as spin doctor.
While we're at it, let's heave the term "image" because too many people in the PR business these days believe this is what the profession is all about. It is not. It is about creating good and credible relations for products, people, and, on occasion, ideas.
In other words, products and people have attributes, which we often call messages. By effectively communicating these messages we help increase value. This is all about reality, and not about perception.
As I have noted in numerous talks on university campuses in Ukraine and Russia, image is the magician's abracadabra. It gave us Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, Vivendi and dozens of other high-flyers whose CEOs were featured in glossy business magazines as the best and the brightest.
Now many are in jail and others appear headed that way. Perception and reality were severely out of whack.
When I first joined an international public relations company in 1993 after owning my own agency for a decade, I was presented within weeks the elixir known as "perception management". It was to be the differentiating methodology between us and all of the Brand X's in PR land.
To the journalistic ear, alarm bells went off. I shouldn't have worried so much, for it was merely a repackaging of the process most all of us in the business go through on our better days. As a former newsman, though, it sounded strange, almost corrupting. It was not a moniker with which I wished to be associated.
I voiced my objections, as did a few others in the company. When I got around to writing an autobiographical book, "The Flack", I noted my aversion to the term, which by that time had actually been applied as a descriptor after the name of the company.
However, in the scheme of things, these names are merely fads with the half-life of a fruit fly. By the time the book came out, the president of the company - to whom I had dutifully sent galley proofs prior to publication-called to say the company was no longer stressing perception management.
Reputation management is merely a shading of perception management. In some ways it harkens back to publicity agentry that is at the roots of the public relations business. In such context, it lacks the hucksterism of perception management.
I find most inventive marketing terms in the PR and advertising business rather useless except in the narrow context of a company's self-promotion.
They represent near desperate acts of differentiation. It would take a rather shallow client not to realize that "360-degree branding" or "the whole egg concept" are merely interchangeable terms for bringing various marketing resources to bear on behalf of the client's product.
The problem, of course, is not with specific terms, but with a certain religiosity that perception in some way is reality.
It wasn't when an ad writer for Rolling Stone Magazine came out with the "perception is reality" slogan 30-odd years ago, and it is not now.
In the final analysis, reality is reality, and it generally sinks in sooner than later. Hence, as PR counselors our first responsibility is to fix the problem, and not to whitewash the fence already riddled with termites.
A man not necessarily associated with public relations perhaps put it best:
"You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time."
- Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the United States.
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