Our Stakeholder Engagement Category
Many years ago, I helped to organize a slogan competition at both the Labour and Conservative party Conferences in Britain. It was fascinating to see what slogans the delegates came up with as they wandered past our stand, representing British advertising. Of course most of the slogans offered on both sides of the political fence were identical and extraordinarily unimaginative, indistinguishable from the official party slogans at the time.
You know the sort of thing: “Forward to a Bright Tomorrow”, “Leading the Future”, “Power to all the People”, “We Make the Tough Decisions”, and so on. I cannot even remember most of them, except one, the one that I decided was the best, as it happens, from a Labour Party Delegate. It was very simple, although it took me a while before my politically overworked and feverish mind could encompass its simplicity:
“Tax is the cost of living in a civilized society”.
How true – and how rarely stated – is this?
The idea behind it is as old and as simple as buttons but the implication is huge, opening up a new line of significance for the assessment of corporate reputation.
Powerful individuals and big firms should be assessed, and their reputation proportionately enhanced, on the overall contribution they make to the communities and the populations in which they operate and from which they benefit. But I am not talking about corporate social responsibility, with its family days, site exhibitions, charitable contributions, patronages and local sponsorships. Important and valuable as these are, they are not the real benchmark of a socially responsible company.
The payment of tax, whether national, regional or local, is the real bottom line of corporate responsibility. Many companies cannot be faulted on their voluntary and well publicized efforts in social responsibility, but the same companies employ lots of effort and people to maximize their tax breaks and minimize their returns and are most unwilling see their profits taxed more than the absolute minimum necessary. Some of the tax bills of leading US corporations are, quite frankly, breathtaking in the complexity of thought and application that led to such a small assessment.
And many large US corporations are on record as insisting that the US should balance its budget and cut social spending so that the national debt can be managed but they also contribute hugely to that debt (of $14.5 trillion) with their extraordinarily and cleverly low tax bills.
A range of potential legislation comes to mind, but perhaps the first necessary regulatory change is that governments should remove tax concessions for all those self-serving charitable donations, sponsorships, scholarships and corporate foundations and simply ask corporations to enter a straight-as-a-die tax return on the basis of its turnover. The bigger the better. The bigger the more responsible. The bigger the contribution, dare I say, the better the reputation. I can certainly see a relatively easy corporate reputation assessment becoming available..
So, to corporations the message is: stop being charitable, stop these tricky and clever negotiations with the tax authorities and just start paying tax, for tax is the cost of living in a civilised society. For everybody. Including companies.
Since its adoption as part of the Rio Declaration in 1998, and its repeated use by the European Commission in various fields, the Precautionary Principle has quickly become lodged in the language of business and consumerism as one of those phrases that everybody pretends to understand but probably cannot precisely define.
The most common definition of the Precautionary Principle is as follows: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation”.
There is a principle in German environmental legislation known as the “Vorsorgeprinzip” (principle of prevention), which is applied to situations where there is a known cause-effect relationship and therefore a clearly defined risk. This is not the same thing. The Precautionary principle does not, as is sometimes implied, mean that industry must provide evidence that a product or process is “risk-free” for it to be accepted or licenced. Such a situation would mean an end to any innovation at all, and the European Commission is well aware of this. But it does suggest that reasonable doubt could be enough to justify the application of the approach. By the same token it should also follow that reasonable evidence should be enough to avoid it, though this happens far less often.
There is a continuing risk that the precautionary principle is becoming a victim of its own rather meticulous application. In this sense a considerable extension of the precautionary principle is happening simply because of instances in which the public demonstrates non-scientific concern about a controversial product.
In supporting the Precautionary Principle, we must be aware that the device should always be, as the European Commission proposes, proportionate, coherent, temporary, non-discriminatory and should always be based on as scientific a risk assessment as possible.
It is a fact of life that there will always be some scientists prepared to suggest that practically anything could constitute a risk to people, consumers or society as a whole. It is not a fact of life that regulators, politicians or other public officials have to believe them.
The Precautionary Principle is a good one and is of considerable benefit to society and consumers. The industry and those who regulate in good faith must continue to co-operate to ensure that the principle remains relevant and appropriate and that it is not used as an excuse for restriction or prohibition. There is certainly no shortage of official and authoritative channels for these options.
What is Public Relations? The PRSA’s recent proposal for a new definition of public relations seems simple and straightforward: “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”
The definition from 1982 was more succinct: “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.” The 1952 definition was: “Public relations is a management function that seeks to identify, build, and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and all of the publics on whom its success or failure depends.”
Conscious that many fine minds have come together to prepare and debate this definition, which is proposed as the start of a debate rather than the conclusion, I still find it extraordinary that these definitions are so close together across a total period of 60 years. But never mind 1952, in communications terms even 1982 is a several planets away from 2012..
The literal difference is in the use of the two new words ‘strategic’ and ‘process’. It is already significant that neither word is free of careless use within and around the profession.
‘Strategic’ signifies that PR is not just a press clippings and media coverage notification service for an organization but a valuable advisory function that contributes ideas, intelligence and direction to communications planning.
No organization can achieve its goals without developing good and effective relationships with those groups with which it needs to interact (its publics), hence PR must be considered as strategic advice. As such it is the cousin of public affairs practice. However, it is not good or realistic PR to insist that all such activities must be part of a strategy. This is because reactive, unplanned and spontaneous PR occupies much more of our time as practitioners and even more in-house than we all admit.
The other word ‘process’ is also a reasonable addition. Connected to its advisory function, PR can be seen as a continuous series of related events, incorporating the creation and planning of activities that are inter-related and thematically aligned. But here again, beware of denying the often crucial roles of reaction, intuition and spontaneity in PR. These words are always unwelcome to process enthusiasts (but the elephants always stay for tea).
Some have expressed their fear in excellent discussions on these boards that the definition will become irrelevant in a few years since ‘strategic’ has unfortunately become a cliche and is steadily changing its meaning through overuse.
The phrase “mutually beneficial relationships” is where the heart of the ensuing debate has been located. And here lies the reason why the definition may soon need to be changed in a way that better reflects the astonishing changes now taking place in the media and communications.
Firstly, the conventional financial and market model of PR agencies, especially of the biggest ones, is no longer working properly. The myth of ‘mutully beneficial” has helped to sustain a legend that PR created its own function of career hoppers and marketing intellectuals. With the impending loss of a dependent media the word beneficial will probably be the first to go.
Changes are necessary to reflect what the more progressive PR practitioners have known for some time. The cleverer and more imaginative clients are demanding more focused and better quality work, and a realistic recognition of the new tools and platforms becoming available. Newer PR agencies that get this point are operating from a different and more effective business model.
The term PR itself is being made less relevant by the new media, in which the consumer-producer relation is changing: push is being replaced by pull, and consumers are revising company brands.
The place in which reputation and profile are primarily assessed and judged is no longer the business pages of the newspapers or the fashion pages of women’s journals, but the millions of opportunities for access and contact being provided by social media networks at all times of the day and in most parts of the world.
Networks incorporating news, views, comment, music, photos and videos are gradually but certainly becoming the main currency of modern public relations activity. And most important of all, they are being taken, not offered, just as brands are being mixed together with shapes, forms, profiles and impressions by the customer to create a public relations environment in which customers perform the mediation that is crucial to communications impact, sometimes without even knowing it.
Anyway, here is my suggestion. “Public Relations is advice that gives access, context and meaning to media, generating value from the resulting relationships and communications between companies and their stakeholders.”
April 13th, 2012
Regressing in agriculture and technology: the new conservatives
For some people, agriculture has always had an uneasy relationship with technology. Not with farmers, but with the general public and politicians, especially those who live in urban and suburban areas.
Most farmers have had no trouble over many years understanding and trying new technologies, but all too often they have been prevented from applying them, surprisingly, by some of the most conservative force of public opinion.
Generations ago, many opposed and regretted the replacement of horses with mechanized tractors, and before then, the replacement of “night soil” with chemical and artificial fertilizers. Today’s anti-technologists are probably even more conservative than in the past, since a selectivity has developed in the modern conservative taste.
There is one policy when shouting at regulators, politicians and scientific companies; there is another when pushing a cart or trolley around in the supermarket. At once deploring Monsanto, Bayer and agribusiness in general they will take care to buy themselves the cleanest and best looking vegetables in expensive supermarkets.
Some anti-technologists, of course, do not suffer from any hypocrisy on this score. They prefer fallen fruit and will pick out the most mis-shapen vegetables and the dirtiest greens from organic markets. They put the conserve into conservatism. Good luck to them.
Understanding and employing new technology has always proved crucial not only for some farmers to continue to meet growing food, feed and fuel demands but also for other less fortunate farmers to move from subsistency to profitability and this is no less true now that the world population is accelerating upwards.
But modern conservative anti-technologist opinion cannot bring itself to relate to the economic development arguments for the application of technologies in agriculture (the only safe path out of poverty). The anti-technologist claims that you have to sort out the unfairness of modern global food distribution flows before the short term and, in their view, the lesser problem of people starving right now in empty marketplaces.
If there is any genuine concern about current and future hunger in the world, then we must allow modern science and technology to help with food production, whether this be to breed improved varieties of food plants with higher and better yields, or to generate new and more cost-effective production methods, or develop yet more effective fertilizers and pesticides.
Genetic modification can be used to achieve disease resistance or herbicide tolerance or other traits in the future that may be of even more direct benefit to people. But biotechnology is not the only issue in the overall debate about technology in agriculture. It is one technology among many, but it attracts much of the opprobrium.
In many respects the most crucial debate in agricultural technology really concerns the threats to ban products that currently work well in assisting food production, not those that face innumerable obstacles to getting approved for sale and use for the first time.
For the conservative anti-technology activist it is all the same, but many developed countries, especially in Europe, having helped to ensure that GMOs will never be approved, have now turned their attention to an even more conservative task, that of rolling back the years and banning technologies that had already been approved, licensed and successfully used, sometimes for several generations, and which are still vital to farmers in countries with low levels of food security. How sustainable is that?
These are not just conservatives, these are the policies of reactionaries, hypocrites and bigots. The agricultural and rural communities know this, but lots of clever people don’t.
Do governments need to have a good reputation? Reputation surveys are two a penny these days, but according to most such surveys on occupations in the USA or in Europe and probably elsewhere, politicians and government officials rank lower than used car salesmen.
This is not quite the same as saying that governments have a bad reputation, but clearly an appreciation of the reputation of government in general terms can be gained from some assessment of the politicians who aspire to government and the civil servants who work for it.
There is little to indicate that people have a consistent definition of what constitutes a good reputation. So, if a government is looking for a good reputation, what exactly should it be doing? My own first reaction would be to ensure that its hands are clean, that there is no corruption and no instances of unethical behavior in the actions of civil servants or their political masters. To be unfair about it, this has probably never happened in the entire history of the world.
But who actually cares if a government has a bad reputation if it is doing a good job for those who elected it (or even if they didn’t elect it?)
And where are we supposed to measure this reputation? If for example a government’s reputation is bad at international level among other governments, and if that same government is very popular at home, or if its actions and policies and approaches are approved of by its own people but not by those of other countries, then what is the reputation call?
And maybe the government wants to fulfill an international promise it made, for example at Rio 20 years ago. These actions may not go down well at home but they will be received well abroad. What is the reputation call on that?
For congressmen or other elected parliamentarians, it is always going to be difficult, because reputation is not well-defined as a quality, and is easily confused with popularity.
I think the answer may be that reputation is an irrelevant consideration for government, because the business of the government is not about reputation.
Government has a mandate, or in undemocratic countries at least a disputed claim, to govern the country and reputation has almost nothing to do with it when you consider the important requirements of legitimacy, transparency, popularity, and especially stakeholder selectivity.
In other words reputation means nothing until you clarify for whom the reputation assessment is necessary.
For government it is an entirely conditional word. Could it also be so for companies?
At the beginning of the AGM season here is a pertinent question.
How do you deal with people who hate your company? There are some organizations and even more individuals who dislike companies so much that their dislike can seem to border on an obsessive hatred, an inability to think rationally or with moderation. Or, at least, this is how it can appear to companies who are being challenged or even threatened.
Every company has them. They can be lonely losers, self-obsessed, wielding specific and narrowly targeted influence way beyond the real circumstances of their actual situation. They can be embittered ex-employees with a burning grievance or sense of having been swindled or unfairly dismissed. They can be powerful, influential, rich and externally obsessed, like Ralph Nader, millionaire, Lebanon-born American king of NGOs, six-time candidate for President of the United States, and hero of the campaign against the US car industry and General Motors in the 1960s and 1970s.
Admittedly most companies hardly ever bother with the first two categories, but the third category is a recognized problem, posing a real and running threat to corporate reputation. General Motors was certainly obsessed with Nader. It hired private detectives to tap his phones, check his bins and exhaustively investigate his past. It also hired prostitutes to trap him in compromising situations (unsuccessfully). It is far too long ago for him to be accused of being a secret Muslim.
Nader sued the company for invasion of privacy and settled the case early for $425,000, a very large amount in the 1960s, equivalent to nearly $10 million today.
Nader’s lawsuit against GM was ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals, whose opinion in the case expanded tort law to cover “overzealous surveillance.” Nader used the proceeds from the lawsuit to start the pro-consumer Center for Study of Responsive Law and funding his own substantial additional projects. The car industry’s own goal was complete. Indeed it was a hat-trick.
Nonetheless, forty and fifty years on, companies still try to counter-spy, to uncover private facts and more about individuals who appear to display a hostile approach to them. They still try to smear those they perceive to be their enemies, and in doing so forget their lines, their responsibilities and their own stakeholders’ expectations.
I have, unhappily, witnessed a few of these operations, and none of the actions that I have observed to this effect has ever worked without some form of countervailing blow-back. Significantly none of the actions were ever taken on the basis of a management consensus; most were minority actions taken with the private approval of very senior management.
Sometimes, particularly with regard to social media, it’s best not to engage vociferous and determined opponents substantively once it becomes clear that a debate is not being offered.
But some companies get stubborn and self-righteous. They want not only to be right but they want proof and a certificate of it. Deep down, they want their critics to make public grovelling apologies, little realizing that in this there is no difference between them and their tormentors. Eventually they lose credibility with their real customers and other stakeholders by being seen to beat the same drum over and over and enter a corporate trance like an addled hippy.
However, companies need to mix circumspection with passion. They need always to be responsive. They don’t have to turn the other cheek but they should not hide and should never fail to respond with a sense of the debate as a whole and not just the last thing said.
They need also to remain genuine (as long as they had been before) and to show continued understanding of the issue or the grievance.
But really none of these things can be done if you do not demonstrate a transparent commitment to talk directly and openly with external groups and any other individuals who are taking you to task. They may not reply satisfactorily but you have done your best and you will thus impress the people and institutions watching you who really matter.
March 31st, 2012
From Intercourse to Onan: how the email has ruined communications
How often do you send someone an email asking a question or making an inquiry when you might better have phoned them and had a conclusive conversation?
I once sat opposite someone at work who would regularly invite me to lunch with him that same day. By email. We were bleedin’ well opposite each other. But after a while I felt I was also too busy to talk so I too started replying by email.
But we seem to be starting to lose, not only the art of conversation, but the art of communications overall.
For all the world’s obsession with emails, one point is salient and striking (albeit a whopping generalization). Within the last 20 years people in the industrialized and developed countries have changed their principal mode of collective communication from audio telephony to email and text. From communal to solitary.
From two way to one way. From discussion to declamation. Video conferencing hasn’t caught on yet but tapping out text while walking along the pavement has.
And a steady stream of people are regularly dying as they tap out their texts while walking across roads, into walls, off cliffs, or while driving.
And yet the telephone is interactive – you can say ‘hello, what’s up?’, and you can hear the other person respond ‘hi!, I’ve got a bad headache, what are you doing?’ etc. And you dont have to wait for the answer to the question ‘Hey, shall we go for lunch later?’
The email/text can only ever be an unmoderated statement, encouraging people to get used to waiting for an answer when they ask, something they are not particularly used to in live conversation.
Of course they don’t have to wait nearly as long as they would have to if they had sent a letter through the post, but my basis for comparison is not the post but the telephone or live speech.
This extraordinary development from phone to email is an unprecedented technological example of people opting against a more advanced, more immediate and more available communication exchange to a primitive transmission; from an interactive form of intercourse to one way, onanistic comment into the void.
Aristotle would have rejoiced at this stunning confirmation of his transmission-reception dichotomy. It is as if our stone age ancestors took a look at two way radio and collectively decided to stick with ululation in order to communicate.
The advantages of email in the business context are many times more, but few of them reflect well on actual business use. And yet it’s obvious just why the email has caught on and stayed.
Email appeals to and encourages our worst instincts. It allows rest to the wicked and cover to the shy. It turns a conversation into a code, and it turns leadership into disembodied commands, suiting the tens of thousands of appalling bosses who prosper through opting not to communicate properly or clearly in business environments. Email is Pontius Pilate, it comes supplied with a bar of soap and hand towels.
Email is also perfect for the business vice of ambiguity. Are you one of those who do not reply at all if you find the response difficult or too sensitive to make? Do you pray that you do not meet them as this will expose you to that old fashioned face to face where, yes, you really do have to reply to a straight question? It’s the first and surest evidence of cowardice. Nothing enrages people more than the knowledge that someone has got the email that was sent to them and that needs an answer but has decided not to answer it at all.
This cowardice represents the purest expression of ambiguity because there is always that flickering possibility that the intended recipients have not read the email or that it has been ‘lost’ in the ether. Letters really did get lost in the post in the past but we continue to lie to each other about emails that somehow apparently never made it despite being properly addressed and sent.
Rather than reduce ambiguity by appearing to facilitate the yes/no conundrum, email actually increases ambiguity, as even if you do respond you can get away with lazy, gnomic and target-missing answers that would be picked up and corrected immediately by any interlocutor in a live conversation.
Email allows us to send an email saying we are too busy, and fail to understand the irony. Email has brought the practice of interactive meetings to a standstill, as all around the meeting table the small sounds of barely audible clicks and sidelong glances show that no-one is actually participating in the meeting. They are all there but barren in original thought; only their blackberries are fruitful.
Email makes cliches look reasonable and validates the worst excesses of business-speak, making it the favorite communication method of internal communications programs. But above all, it allows secrecy, pretense and pseudo-confidentiality to flourish and copiously rewards those who are engaged in these for a living.
For personal communications, the crimes are more innocent. It means you don’t have to move from your seat in order to conduct a conversation, stilted as it may become.
Because for many people it is less challenging to write on your own than to talk in company, email has the huge benefit of not betraying your feelings, so the recipient has to guess them without being able to look deep into your eyes.
No, despite its many obvious advantages, email has overall been an disaster for communications. It has turned us from social communicants to corner-loving losers with keyboards and RSI.
Let’s hope it is just a passing phase, otherwise companies and individuals will soon stop communicating meaningfully with each other altogether.
Let’s be clear about what is happening, not just in the social media but in modern social life generally. Not to put too fine a point on it, the doors of perception are both swinging open and getting a lot more difficult to walk through.
As communication channels proliferate, people are passing more data but communicating less with each other, and they are reverting to a hand flutter as they pass each other instead of stopping to talk.
Where is this all going? It is very difficult to peer through the rolling gloaming but while our eyesight improves, our lines of sight become more encumbered, and get refracted. We are declaiming and talking more, and we are debating and listening less.
As the US Presidential elections loom in the shadow glitz of the future, and recent elections in Europe are analysed and digested, we are realizing that people are starting to believe nothing. They are assuming that everything they are told is dubious, unlikely or just counterfeit, a product of spin, misdirection and lies.
When a company claims that they are a people business, it is more than likely that they are quite the opposite. If you are told that customers come first, you will be put on hold for more than ten minutes or referred to a web site (how irritating is that?) If a company claims to be a thought leader, you can be sure that they are near the back of the elephant trail and waiting for the next idea to be prattled back down the line. The only certain outcome of this behavior is the graveyard.
Some tabloid newspapers have given up with the truth altogether because the truth doesn’t sell. Unfortunately this is true whether it is the media, second hand cars, third hand policies, corporate responsibility or snake oil. If something sells that does not necessarily give it value. It simply confirms a price.
But when people believe nothing, they will believe anything. One might be forgiven for suspecting that for this reason alone it is in the interest of all propagandists to keep people ignorant and suspicious, because like this they can be manipulated with the greatest of ease.
The way back is through genuine and committed communication, a communication that waits for an answer, that explains and illustrates, that is patient and painstaking.
For companies, the best way back to the foothills of corporate reputation would be the banning of all internal email messages within sites and a training course on how to use that dusty thing hidden by the books called a telephone.
But to be realistic, the indiscriminate use of email is adding to the growing communication problems that companies have with their stakeholders and especially with their employees.
Also, they should stop grabbing the tail of the company in front..
With all the available communications resources cheaply obtained and even more cheaply used, our generation probably communicates less meaningfully or intelligently amongst ourselves than any generation past, literate or not. I say this because the evidence grows every day that most people do not read more than two lines of text before they press the like button, or make a one brief comment and maybe three lines are needed before they even think of sharing.
Fewer of us are reading, and those who are, are reading less. But we are not slow in coming to a conclusion about what we have glanced at. Even on the hallowed pages of Linked-In, it is fairly clear that many, perhaps most, readers do not even click past the headline before they either move on (acceptable) or start to tap out a quick reaction (unacceptable).
And we just don’t know too many companies “by reputation” although we know many companies as consumers and customers and when they are in the news. Sometimes we think that familiarity and favorability might be enough to be called reputation. This describes reputation as a remarkably thin line.
But to have a good reputation, companies need more than a few thousand likes on their Facebook page, cheaply collected through some misleading promotion. Companies need the relationship itself to enable current social collaboration and future social commerce.
Once companies understand that reputation has to be earned primarily by actions and commitments and not just by good social media engagement, likes, blog endorsements and online members, then the reputation line will get bolder and wider and will cross the declining brand line for sure and soon.
The reason for the skepticism is, I am sure, the ‘like’ button. This allows me. you and millions others to express our views publicly in a split second.
It is a blessing to those who claim to be able to measure reputation as it allows them simply to count the ‘likes’ and pretend that this is also a valid way of measuring reputation.
But it is deeply misleading to equate the like button with any sort of social or political activism, and still less as a measurement of reputation.
I don’t like the Like button
Apparently 675 million people around the world world are prepared to admit that they support Manchester United. This is ten times the population of the UK, and 150 times the population of the population of Manchester.
It is probably not the best example to take for the extraordinary brand loyalty that is provoked by football allegiance, as Manchester United is an unusual case, to say the least, in the width as well as the lack of profundity of the majority of their avowed support. Most of the 675 million are unlikely to be football fanatics in the “till I die” mold, but supportive enough, I suspect, to buy a lot of the merchandise on a regular basis. A majority of them don’t even know where Manchester is. I asked a Korean friend why he was wearing the colors of Manchester United. “Frank Lampard” he said.
Most English professional football clubs do not have a global following but the vast majority retain supporters mostly from around the locality of the club. But whomever they support, football fans are no normal consumers or customers. They are members of a tribe, usually from birth, by reason of their attachment or passion for the tribe and inordinate hostility to rivals. Characterization by colors, chanting, the threat of violence, collective social arrogance and the suspension of logic are the signs of a type of brand that many companies would, ahem, kill for.
But it’s not so simple. The fans make a big distinction between the ownership of their club and its soul. A crucial feature of the tribe is to pledge allegiance not to the management, least of all to the business management, but to the ‘soul’ of the club. This ‘soul’ may not necessarily include overt support for the club’s manager or indeed any of their players. Well mobilized fans can have an impact on the running of the club that shareholders of large companies could never have. And winning football games isn’t the mainspring of such support, otherwise no-one would support any clubs that did not win all the main competitions. But the link holds good for what the owners see as crucial: the income. Not just the gate money, but the TV rights, sponsorship, image rights, marketing rights, left rights, right rights, half rights and center rights.
In practice a tribal brand like that of a football club is not really a brand. But it does act like one in relation to the cash machines. But most brands would have been damaged beyond repair by a tenth of the issues that football clubs have.
Fans tolerate the sure knowledge that virtually all major football clubs are appallingly corrupt. Many have owners who are no more than wealthy international criminals from the dark corners of the world, grand thieves who cheapen and degrade the commercial products, take cash back-handers, make huge profit margines from the club’s commercial products, pay the players wages that make all of them millionaires within a couple of years and make City boardrooms blush with shame. They run their clubs without shame, using them as anything from milch-cow to plaything by cynically abusing the tribalist support they engender to inflate their wallets.
The best clubs in the land, including Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City and Liverpool, are all loss-making. It is no help also to observe that this is by no means unique to Britain. Or that, similar to many corporate brands, while the brand keeps the cash registers going throughout the world there is also a complete disconnect with reputation, since the reputation of most football clubs is down there with journalists, car salesmen and politicians.
And what of the players and their habits? Perhaps enough has been said already. A simple observation may suffice: Brand Beckham survives character Beckham. A true fan effectively turns a blind eye to his beloved. No brands, in short, have ever been abused so much and so regularly by the brand holders, with so little impact on the brand consumers. Bonkers Rovers till I die. Got it?
With thanks to Quentin Langley, Brandjack.
