Change Must Begin Here

Agencies need to make sure their own ethical policies are sound before promoting those of their clients

PRWeek, September 2007 - Download article in PDF format

The PR industry's unique skill lies in building, maintaining, enhancing and often rescuing the reputation of its clients. And corporate responsibility has become seen as one of the most effective tools in supporting these efforts.

Be it an ethical transgression, environmental excess, abuse of employee relations or supply chain scandal, PR professionals increasingly counsel their clients to embrace ever bolder corporate responsibility strategies to build trust with stakeholders. These stakeholders now make up pretty much the entire spectrum of the audience that any company needs to address: investors, NGOs, media, legislators and, of course, customers.

This is the age of the blog, internet activism, a revitalised environmental movement, a risk-averse investor community and a media that salivate at the first hint of corporate malpractice. The rules of the game have changed for good. There is no escape for the corporate laggard.

The case for corporate responsibility and the tireless pursuit of sustainable business practices is now firmly established. Very few companies now believe they can ignore the environmental and social agenda completely, although some embrace it with a good deal more conviction than others. Yet still the role of the PR industry in the CSR world is viewed with suspicion.

Recently, I was at a lunch with three friends, all of whom would (I think) acknowledge that after several years in the environmental NGO community I am not one to puff loudly about clients' achievements when their CSR standards fall short.

Yet as lunch wore on, the usual jokes about my being a 'PR man, spinning my clients' came flooding in. Normally this would not trouble me, but in this case the friends in question numbered two respected CSR journalists and one member of the shadow cabinet. PR and CSR, for them, sit uneasily in the same sentence.

I have some sympathy with this view. Our industry has done a better job promoting clients than it has itself and we have paid scant attention to the reputation of our own profession.

And it's not hard to see why many journalists regard some of the CSR communications that target them with suspicion. The problem with CSR is that it doesn't conform to the traditional PR rulebooks. There are no quick media hits in CSR - those who try the quick-fix approach without having done the hard work behind the scenes end up with worse reputations than when they started. We need to shape cultures, not just headlines.

Increasingly, there seem to be new golden rules emerging about what works and what doesn't when it comes to communicating CSR. The first is to deliver the goods before you communicate. The best example of this is Marks & Spencer and its award winning 'Look behind the Label' campaign.

The second is that to catch the eye in an overcrowded media marketplace already tiring of Al Gore, ethical shopping bags and carbon offsetters, any CSR initiative needs to be big, audacious, bold, iconic and above all, unexpected.

The third is to remember that no matter how well you behave on one issue, if you don't sort out the less exemplary behaviour in other parts of your business, every minute, pound and PR fee spent will be wasted.

And last, but by no means least, never underestimate the ability of a well meant programme to unravel if buy-in and participation has not been secured from that sprawling mass of groups often called 'civil society'. Jargon though the term may be, the frontline NGOs and pressure groups have the power to undo months of work in a day of campaign action. Better to adjust your behaviour to meet their needs than ignoring them because you have plenty of money to spend on PR.

A huge growth industry of CSR consultancies, think-tanks, ratings agencies and sector-specific initiatives has flourished thanks to the widespread acceptance of the notion that 'if you're not at the table, you're on the menu'. So we need to assert our voice at that table, to overcome that undercurrent of cynicism that still surrounds PR's activities. We need to get our own houses in order, and develop a credible point of view on these crucial issues in order to really help our clients transform perceptions and stereotypical misjudgments of their activities. In doing so, we can be leaders, not followers, of the trends we have thus far failed to influence.

Pay the piper but get the right tune

Public relations firms are yet to develop a credible voice for explaining their clients' good work on sustainability says Brendan May

Ethical Corporation, September 2007 - Download article in PDF format

Leonard Bernstein, the celebrated conductor and composer, loved recalling the cynical attitude of his father to his young son's desire to become a musician.

Bernstein Snr had hoped his "Lenny" would be drawn to the safety of the family's beauty parlour supply business and dismissed music as the preserve of Jewish klezmers, a term Leonard Bernstein said meant "something a little bit better than a beggar". Klezmers, he said, were fiddle players who wandered from one bar mitzvah or wedding to the next, picking up a few kopeks here and there. For the young Bernstein's parents, the musical profession lacked nobility.

In the most puritan corporate responsibility circles, the public relations industry is too easily characterized as the klezmer at the wedding.

Wrong as this may be, it is fair to say that the PR world was sluggish to respond to the seismic business changes that came with the advent of corporate responsibility and sustainability in the 1990s.

With some notable exceptions, most communications agencies chose to ignore the changes that were happening around them. In turn, some PR companies themselves became targets, confirming the maxim that "if you're not at the table, you're on the menu". For all the creativity the industry deployed in other disciplines, when it came to corporate responsibility, safe and conservative strategies were chosen instead of bold, iconic gestures.

PR professionals were slow to join the corporate responsibility movement, mistaking it for a bolt-on to add a new angle to a dry story or product. Non-governmental organizations were fodder to lend credibility to unambitious initiatives. And "crisis management" too often obstructed long-term planning, despite the fact that better plans would have meant fewer crises to manage.

As a result, PR firms cast themselves in the role of business friend, leaving criticism to those outside the corporate tent, notably NGOs. A more useful role might have been that of "critical friend", a function many of the more moderate NGOs now perform themselves.

Tough brief

Large multinational PR agencies face many challenges, some easier to overcome than others. Any global agency thinking seriously about corporate responsibility must ask itself tough questions:

Should there be no-go client areas? If we refuse to work on a case where a client's actions are perceived to fall short of ethical expectations, what of the right to a fair hearing for all sides? Would failing to take on controversial cases risk impairing the quality of public debate?

Should a PR firm look beyond its own environmental footprint to account for the footprint of campaigns it devises?

How does the industry adapt to new client conflicts that have emerged around issues such as climate change?

Today's commercial battle lines are no longer drawn simply around which product offers better value than another. Themes like climate change, supply chain ethics and health have placed seemingly unrelated brands on ethical collision courses. With companies racing each other to top environmental rankings and ethical investment indices, a supermarket chain is competing with a mobile phone operator or oil company as much as with its sector peers.

The industry as a whole has not yet developed an overall point of view on these complex challenges. To become a credible voice at the table we must step up our collective response.

We are well down the path of tackling the easy part of the agenda - reducing our carbon footprint, providing our pro bono expertise to the non-profit sector and giving clients the best advice on how to maximise the communications potential of their CSR efforts. Increasingly our clients will demand the same standards from us that they demand from any other supplier - concrete proof that responsibility is as deeply interwoven in our business practices as it is in theirs.

Our industry has huge power. It engages daily with key decision makers and, importantly, budget holders who determine the face of corporate behaviour. They are, sometimes unknowingly, some of the influencers who will determine what our planet will be like in 20 years' time. The challenge for PR firms is to devise, mobilise and activate ever bolder communications strategies that are in keeping with the urgency of global challenges. We must prove the cynics wrong.

The young Bernstein rejected the safety of the family business and chose music, of the noblest kind. The world was a better place for it. I know from personal experience that PR is a noble profession. But as an industry, we need to do much ore to prove it.