Publicity and Public Relations
I'll bet you've heard the old adage, "There's no such thing as bad press." It is often quoted. It's also ridiculous. Ask Exxon. Ask some of the companies that have been destroyed, and I do mean destroyed, some justly but some unjustly, by TV's pseudonews programs like 20/20 or 60 Minutes. Yes, you can tell it's going to be a bad day when Mike Wallace is waiting for you when you arrive at the office.
The first rule of getting good publicity is to avoid bad publicity.
In an incredibly stupid move, AmericaWest airlines published an article in its company newsletter by one of its preferred-provider doctors in which he called chiropractic "a cult" and compared chiropractic treatment to "a shampoo and a set." The M.D. who wrote this article must have been on another planet when the chiropractic profession won its lawsuit against the AMA, prompted by just such remarks as his. But it is inconceivable that a generally savvily run, large corporation would permit material certain to be offensive to a large constituency to appear in print under its name.
The backlash was fast and big. The Chiropractic Journal, a newspaper with a reach that includes about 10,000 chiropractors in AmericaWest's prime market areas of Arizona, Nevada, and California, devoted not just column inches but pages to savaging the airline. Hundreds of chiropractors called and cancelled flight reservations. Practice-management firms holding meetings urged attending practitioners to fly other airlines. Many Phoenix chiropractors distributed literature to all their patients criticizing the airline.
I can't speculate about what the airline lost as a result of all this. It could have been worse; the airline is fortunate the local news media didn't make a story out of it. But I can tell you they won nothing and lost something. The person at the helm of a business has to carefully scrutinize every advertisement, press release, publication, verbal statement, product name—everything—and ask: is there any way this can blow up in my face?
In the entertainment business, there's a country-and-western singer who has done immeasurable damage to her career by attacking the beef industry. She may think the media attention of the moment is pretty nifty, but over the long haul she'll find sponsors for concerts and TV shows, guest invitations to talk shows, and other important advantages hard to come by.
In the NFL, we watched talented QB Jim McMahon turn himself into a major media star with outrageous and, to many, offensive behavior. For a brief time, it seemed like a good idea. But it also got him bounced from a championship team, the Bears, to the basement-dwelling San Diego Chargers. The San Diego media were waiting for him with a chip on their shoulders; they ate him up and spit him out. As of the writing, he's been relegated to a bench-warming position in Philadelphia and he's lucky to have a job at all.
Morton Downey destroyed himself with similar behavior.
Recently, the media and the public went into such a blood-frenzy when Donald Trump's marital and financial troubles surfaced that the negative publicity scared his bankers half to death and nearly toppled his entire empire. He came within a hair's breadth of destruction and may yet suffer huge losses, fueled by the forces of bad PR.
When you are offensive and get your publicity by offending people, you will generally find the backlash more destructive than the original attention was helpful.
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