Practical Thinking, Panic & The Riots

The marketing industry has been caught out. Young males respond to messages of defiance and individualism but, when they act out the fantasy presented to them on a plate by clothes and shoes manufacturers to sell their products, we suddenly have a 'PR problem'.

But what is a 'PR problem' when it is at home? It would appear to be that point when fantasy becomes reality, when Levi's young male squaring up to riot police actually does square up to riot police.

We are now in the midst of yet another 'moral panic' where analysis of the long term structural causes of a social phenomenon are ignored in favour of a wave of emotion resulting in gut reactions that only store up problems for the future. No one is thinking.

The current response of the marketing community comes down to a question that is at the heart of the political crisis: does it appeal to the emotional instincts of its customer base or respond to the emotional reaction of a herd-like media and political culture in a state of confusion, ignorance and fear?

I think we have the answer: it joins in the panic and suddenly becomes 'socially responsible', meaning, in fact, conservative in the worst sense, part of the problem of suppressing discontent rather than stating firmly that it is merely responding to the mood of the time as sound business.

If people are discontented, it is not because of moral laxity but because they have reasons for discontent - local policing, lack of opportunity, overcrowding, underemployment, generational lack of respect (from the old to the young), the hypocrisy of the rich and the lack of representation by the Left.

Watch this short segment of an articulate employed black telling it like it is to the Mayor of London. This man is bright, talented and on the right side of the law but he is not happy.

He does not have to look far to see a world where others no better than he is are raking in bonuses despite bringing the country to its economic knees.

Now, for balance, watch this tough black lady taking on the rioters. The tragedy here is that small traders and property owners with little capital are being ruined and threatened by people with no capital.

Both sides have been shoved into the position of the soldiery of the competing powers in 1914. Neither side then asked why they should even be in this position and neither side is asking that question today.

Here is where one has to put in the mantra that all this does not justify the riots. The riots, of course, were not political as we generally understand them but closer to 'carnival' - anarchic, criminal and strangely authentic. People really suffered but not perhaps the people who should have done.

The most admirable reaction to the whole business was that of The (Tory) Lord Harris. He did not pontificate or moralise. He did not even try to analyse (the job of others). He dealt like a practical man with a fact and offered material assistance to the victims and called on the Government to provide jobs.

The mantra of moralistic blame from 'commentators' misses the point. The riots were a fact on the ground. They happened because they were ready to happen. It is like expecting to humiliate Germany in 1919 and not expect another war.

Business is now stuck in the middle. The selling process is an emotional process, a manipulative process, of entering into the consciousness of its targets and tweaking it into an action in the interest of the sellers. It is not much different from the classical view of magicians of their craft.

Politicians are also not much different except that they are 'channellers', responding to the emotions of the voters and seeking to manipulate them for their own ends, raising intermediary demons (the media) who, like all raised demons, are untrustworthy tricksters.

In the end, the only authentic behaviour seems to be that of the people themselves at the hard edge of the crisis - the rioters rioting in a context of their own, the police trying to do their job under difficult conditions, the victims of the rioting and those attempting to clean up afterwards.

The magistrates panicked, the politicians panicked, the media panicked and the marketeers panicked - the only people not panicking were the population at large. Listen to conversations around you and the question was always: why did this happen now? 

But this was a question avoided by the panic-stricken Establishment because it was an inconvenient question, partly because nobody knew the answer although everyone had an opinion, an opinion usually cast in terms of morality and 'oughts' rather than what was actually happening on the ground.

It does not really want to answer that question because it raises more serious questions about what the politicians and the media have been doing for the last three or four decades. It certainly raises questions about whether the political and economic system is more broken that we had all thought.

This is not the first time that the Establishment has failed to predict an event of great importance - we might start with the fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of Islamic terror but failures to predict economic collapse and urban mayhem are less forgivable because there is no excuse about lack of data.

Naturally, we should now be asking questions about the riots and how they came to be, but before jumping into bed with authoritarian moralists who wish to re-introduce the strap, conscription, hanging and all forms of social terror to a free young population, most of whom did not riot, we should ask this.

How is it that the persons we hired to govern us failed to structure a society where everyone feels they have opportunity, where perhaps one in five of the population is now on the economic edge and where policy can be made rationally before a crisis instead of irrationally after one?

We could learn a great deal from Lord Harris' humane, practical approach to the business of recovery and it strikes me as no surprise that an experienced businessman should put the rest of the panicking and hysterical elite to shame.

While We Have Been Away ...

If you followed our frequent blog postings in the past, you may have noticed that postings stopped in December 2010 with what amounted to an advertisement for the website of our sister company PendryWhite. We have let this stand for some eight months.

The truth is that we have become far more critical of the value of blogs unless they are integrated into social media so we diverted our energies - or rather the energy left over from dealing with our growing client list - into understanding and using other forms of internet-based media.

The blog was not killed off, merely preserved in aspic until the right moment. The right moment to revive it fully has not yet arrived but we will try to put in a few postings that seem relevant to our old readership in the coming months until our communications policy is in place.

But for those who are interested in how we are thinking about the internet as communications tool, these are some highlights of the last twelve months and some thoughts on where we go next ...

Internet Reputation Defence

We have been heavily involved in internet reputation defence working with legal counsel in multiple jurisdictions to make judgements on when it is resource-efficient to use the law and on when to engage in direct negotiation to deal with falsehoods or in positive PR through direct internet communication.

The process of monitoring the internet, evaluating threat, co-ordinating with other advisers, ensuring that negative elements do not drive client budgets and that client funds are invested wisely has been instructive. We hope, if the rules of client confidentiality permit, to say more on this in due course.

Online Media - Project Management

We have also been working on a project that has gone on for some four years but which only took flight at the beginning of the year.

This is at the other end of the scale of internet reputation defence and involves the project management of the business side and eventually promotion (with our sister company) of a ground-breaking attempt to use the internet to build an evidence-based subscription investigative operation.

Internet Marketing

The third area of interest is largely the territory of our sister company but we collaborate closely on intellectual capital, building shared alliances with service providers who can provide both the sophisticated security tools required by TPPR and the promotional flexibility required by PendryWhite.

This area is the effective integration of corporate messages with new social media platforms, a process that presents challenges in terms of internal understanding and risk (especially in areas of compliance). PendryWhite has been advising on techniques and work-arounds.

The New Identity Paradigm

The fourth area of engagement is more of an intellectual exercise than a commercial proposition but we feel it may come to be the most productive of all. This is our sustained study, using the social media as tools, of the changing nature of identity and what it means for reputation.

Our tentative opinion (with Google+ experimenting in precisely this area) is that the positive construction of personal brands will come to be integrated with a greater personal assertion of 'who one is' that will revolutionise 'corporate culture' and productive enterprise.

What Next?

These four zones of engagement are all works in progress and the next six months will see us:-

• integrate our experience of internet reputation management into a model that we can make available beyond our traditional client base
• oversee the launch of a challenging online media operation over whose actual content we will have no control (an exciting risk in its own right)
• integrate our defensive reputation management capability more effectively with our proven digital marketing support offer to create a rounded service for the new generation of wealth creators
• experiment with new and radical modes of identity that (we believe) will assist in promoting creativity and innovation at every level of society and allow challenge to old ways of doing things.

For Further Information: TPPR or PendryWhite 

New PendryWhite Website

PendryWhite's website launched today makes traditional public relations a less important part of its business. Yes, it still does media relations and it has an excellent side line in press and web office management for the HNWI clients of TPPR.

But the vast bulk of its work is now strategic reputation-based marketing that makes full use of the new media that are replacing print newspapers - these latter seem to be hovering between market breakdown and hiding behind exclusive online paywalls.

The new website is simple and it draws you into a dialogue. Using its blog Whiteboard and Twitter, it becomes an intellectual resource which you can return to periodically. The RSS tool keeps you up to date with opinions and Twitter with news.

This blog posting won’t puff up what you can read very quickly for yourself on the site but simply draws your attention to its existence and to its Clients - whose quality speaks for itself.

It is difficult for any corporation or firm to steer their way between the Scylla of over-enthusiasm and of uncritical engagement in the new media world and the Charybdis of fearful refusal to innovate.

This is why PendryWhite has spent three years building a proposition to act as guide between these monsters. The new web positioning expresses this change.

If you need strategic, marketing, new media or international support to deal with rapid market changes and its approach appeals to you, please do not hesitate to call PendryWhite on +44 (0) 20 7549 1672 and ask to speak to Roger White, Managing Director, or Jenina Bas, Director of Client Services.