WAL * MART

Back in June of 2012, the corporate giant, WAL*MART, ran into a bit of a sticky situation. 

The article with the full story can be found at the following link: http://business.time.com/2012/06/15/wal-mart-pr-rep-poses-as-reporter-to-infiltrate-union-meeting/

Stephanie Harnett, an employee of Mercury Public Affairs (a firm that represents Wal-Mart), posed as a student reporter to "infiltrate a closed press conference held by a pro-labor group opposed to Wal-Mart’s new store." She said her name was Zoe Mitchell and was a student at the University of Southern California. Unfortunately, Wal-Mart and her employer And this is not the first time this has happened. An anonymous tipster told TIME magazine that she was in a similar situation years prior to this incident,  when she worked for Wal-Mart through a public relations agency, they asked her to sit in on anti-Wal-Mart gatherings and sentiments. And since these orders came from the public relations firm and not Wal-Mart, the tipster was under the impression that it was a common practice of the corporation.  

The big problem emerged when Harnett later appeared in her public relations role and handed out business card that had her real name, and position printed on it… a.k.a. the organization she lied to, realized she lied.

My worry is, when did lying and spying become tactics of public relations? I understand why you would want to know what your enemies are plotting.  In my studies, I have been taught that honesty, ingenuity, and creativity make the company, not stealing ideas, lying, and spying on your opponents. It does not matter that Wal-Mart denounced the incident, it happened, they have been tied to situations like this multiple times and it is probably not going away. All this does for me is discredit their head-honchos. However, I will not lie, I will still shop at their stores…. Mostly because they are incredibly convenient.

What?! You know Wal-Mart is cheap and easy! The head staff and the public relation firms associated with Wal-Mart do not directly my shopping experience.

Until next time! Have a good weekend!

Wells Fargo - Do they have a PR department?

On July 13^th 2012, Wells Fargo, the country’s largest mortgage lender, agreed to settle the charges being lead against them from 2004 to 2009. Wells Fargo was charged for implementing higher interest rates and fees on home loans exclusively for the minority community in America. Basically, Wells Fargo had created the equivalent of a racial surtax. This incident has been coined as “reverse redlining”. Back in the days of segregation, banks would refuse people of color loans for their homes. Reverse redlining is giving people of color clearance to buy homes that exceed their salary, loans they cannot afford, and interest rates they cannot pay back. This tanked many upstanding citizens’ credit scores, and created a financial set back that will be affecting the minority community for decades to come.

But what does this have to do with public relations?

An effective public relations team could have nipped this entire thing in the butt. A huge thing I have learned this year is that in a large company or organization the public relations department is most effective when they are involved with the decision making process and NOT just left to clean up after the mess has occurred. Don’t you think that maybe, just MAYBE someone could have foreseen the outrage of the public when it was released that a huge company was targeting Latinos and blacks? Was there anyone in that meeting that said, “Hey! That’s racist!”? Did anyone ask, “What if the public finds out? Are we going to be known as a racist company?”

Listen… public relation departments nation-wide have the ability to affect at least one of the following areas of a company: financial, reputation/brand equity, employees/internal publics, and public policy. Wells Fargo lost a lot of face and all four areas were impacted, they lost money because of the law suit, their reputation was damaged because of the racial discrimination, the bad publicity reflects badly on their employees and some of their employees were probably left in the dark, and lastly their public policy was damaged because it seems the company doesn’t have any respect for the public.

At the end of the day, Wells Fargo is still alive and well regardless of this incident. The public relations angle they are taking is reassuring the public that they will be more transparent, and return to their roots because after all, the company has been around for over 150 years. Eventually, this racial discrimination will be forgotten… well, maybe not entirely. But it will take a lot more than just a law suit to bring this company down. 

PETA and Pokemon

http://features.peta.org/pokemon-black-and-white-parody/

As some of you may already know. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, have decided to use Pokemon as the means to gain awareness. It is called Pokemon: Black and Blue, Gotta Free 'Em All. The game that is posted on their site opens up as follows:

As battling Pokemon grew in popularity, generations of children were growing up believing that Pokemon exist for no other reasons than to be used and abused by humans... Children learned about dominance instead of compassion. While Pokemon faced the worst abuses, children also started bullying each other... until one Pokemon decided he'd had enough...

Cue  a battered and bandaged Pikachu battling some chick that has a bottle in one hand and a bloody bat in the other. Pikachu has attacks like thunder shock and quick attack, but he also has the ability to protest and give a group hug. While his opponent, Cheren, can use shock collars, tail docking, and discipline with a bat. When Cheren is defeated, (yes I did play the game) her personal Pokemon Tepig is released and travels with you. And guess what?! A nurse gives you a chest to unlock... and what happens when it's unlocked? You get a "bonus" video... like some kind of reward... to watch... too bad the video is a reel of animals in cages, and being mistreated. It is very uncomfortable to watch.

Now what does this have to do with Public Relations? It is a form of campaigning. Public Relations is not JUST about saving face for a company, it can also work to promote the company or organization. The release of the Pokemon parody is both wonderful and terrible. It is wonderful because it brings in a HUGE audience, but it is terrible because they are taking a globally loved game and show and inadvertently making it seem like it is actually bad for the kids who grew up playing it. Personally, I like the idea of the game, the fact that it gives lots of information in support if the company, but slandering a world-wide media giant that has given countless kids education and entertainment for years for you own gain is distasteful in my opinion. But I am assuming that PETA did get all of the legal rights from Pokemon to use their trademark so there is nothing to be done about it. In the end, Pokemon is introduced to an audience it did not have, and PETA was introduced to an audience is did not have. Whether to publicity is good or bad for either  is still to be determined in the future.

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Enron

Today I would like to examine Enron. Now, I’m aware that most of my audience was fairly young when this happened. Heck… I was 8 years old. I first heard about it in my Consumer Economics class in high school. So to give a brief recap, in December of 2001 Enron experienced the largest bankruptcy to date (later surpassed by Worldcom in 2002, and the Lehman Brothers in 2008). Although, prior to the scandal, Enron was a blue chip stock, also known as, as stock that can fair profitably in both good and bad times. The problem was, Enron’s internal and external auditors were “in on it” meaning they were aware of the creation of offshore entities to avoid taxes and the destruction of documentation. But most of the company did not know that their CFO (chief financial officer) Andrew Fastow led a small group of people to create companies that were not on company records to ensure him, his friends and family, hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2001, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) expressed interest in looking into the companies assets. You can see in the first three paragraphs of the following press release that Enron was ready to oblige.

This is quite intriguing because it seems that the executives were almost cocky about what they had done. They did not at all expect to get caught. This air of arrogance is what turns me off of their public relations. There is being open and transparent. Enron executives made it look like they were open AND transparent. Even though they did not take into consideration just how transparent they really were. 

Just as a reminder... openness is what you tell people up front, transparency is what people can find out. 

All in all, no degree of PR can help the monstrous scandal Enron concocted. And that is something to remember. Public relations should be involved in the process from the very beginning, that way they can attempt to be proactive in case something in the company goes wrong and a statement needs to be created and delivered.