Proactive Strategies for Problem Solving

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: Rachel, we’re going to get to the start of your great insights in a moment. But we do like to share some personal things about our guests that people might not be aware of, and how they may be able to take a guess on where you’re from once you start talking, but I know there’s something about you that I found to be really cool that a lot of people might not be aware of.

RACHEL: My background when I started was actually a violinist, and so I did my degree in performance violin. I actually studied also in Interlochen, Michigan, when I was a teenager. And I still play the violin, uh, in an orchestra, the Hunter College Orchestra. We have about eight concerts a year, and it’s great fun. I’m one of the oldest people in the orchestra, but it’s a fantastic opportunity for me to keep my hand in.

DOUG: Yeah, well, youngest of heart. And I know you’re going to be a maestro when it comes to what you discuss as the decision dilemma that’s facing many organizations. What do you mean by that phrase? Decision dilemma?

RACHEL: I think that dilemma literally means stuck between a rock and a hard place. And for companies and for brands, they are facing more dilemmas than ever. And it really is about being stuck between a decision that has a negative impact and another decision that has negative impact. And being able to navigate through that in a way that you can come out with an advantage, or at least no regrets about what you do. Now, some of the options and decisions that people have to make at the moment are many and varied, and they’re completely due to the context in which the brands are operating. And this is different from Covid, where in fact there was a sort of singular thematic to the issue and many brands faced the same problem, but now they’re facing everything from geopolitics. How should they manage their supply chain? When there is a request for more of the supply chain to go to the to the US, but they need to arbitrage in some way. How do they manage when there is different beliefs around what is scientifically true, around safety in terms of food? So, there’s that polarity. There’s different beliefs and systems operating. There’s often multiple truths. And brands have to navigate through that and understand where the audience is at and what impact the audience is going to have in terms of, you know, receiving the information, receiving their communication. And that’s the biggest challenge facing a lot of brands today is how to navigate those dilemmas.

DOUG: In your role as an advisor. Is there an approach you’re trying to take? Is what I’m hearing from you. And this makes a lot of sense, is that many more decisions than in the past have both a positive side and a negative backlash to them. So, it’s much more of a balance. How do you and how do you advise people to approach that as advisors to other organizations?

RACHEL: It does start with understanding the business first. And a lot of this is, is, um, you know, what are the business decisions, the values, the North stars that the CEO and C-suite are following? Because, um, many decisions actually require a values based approach in addition to a business approach. What’s the impact on the business? So, we start with understanding that what is the actual appetite of the organization. We then look at audience analysis. And with AI that’s given us a lot more flexibility and and depth of understanding to use things like synthetic audience, um, simulations where we can really test messaging, we can understand in advance what audiences are going to think, and then we can weigh up the scale and reach of those audiences depending on what they think. And so for a company who may face a need to to to reach two audiences with completely polar opposite views, for example, they need to then determine if they go up with one message, what impact that’s going to have on the other audience.

And if they determine that they do need to reach two audiences equally. And you obviously can’t have a split message, uh, particularly around things like food safety, for example. They have to find a third way. And often our advice is helping them brainstorm what that third way could be to find a point in the middle, potentially, that is outside the immediate communications that both sides of the coin can agree on in terms of the audience.

DOUG: Yeah. Now, that’s obviously a very difficult needle to thread. And there are also issues about what is the internal staff saying because you have different key publics there your internal, your employees, your clients, your prospects. Government agencies can be involved. So do you just throw your hands up and say, this is too absurd, or is this actually a boon to public relations because there are so many really subtle courses that you have to take?

RACHEL: Well, I think the challenge at the moment is that a lot of companies are in this moment of stasis, and they have metaphorically thrown their hands up and said, it’s too uncertain. We’ll just do nothing. For the moment. The point of safety, um, for us is, is staying still. Unfortunately for a lot of companies, the ability to stay still does not last very long. Uncertainty is not going to go away in the next one month. It’s not going to go away in the next six months. And it’s potentially not going to go away in the next few years so companies can’t stay still. They have to move forward, and they have to look at ways to try and navigate the sort of fractured and fragmented stakeholder environment that they’re in. But this is where understanding to what are the anchors in the business is important. And for companies, you know that they can look at their anchors. It could be their people. It could be certain parts of their customer base. It could be their research and development. But they have to really understand what is absolutely critical to their business and then base the decision making around that. And then as, as we said, weigh up the consequences of different courses, different scenarios. It is new scenario planning it, and it is more scenario planning. And often our role is to really help be the sounding board for that scenario planning and also let them know when they need to make decisions, business decisions. Because it’s not just about communication, it’s making a business decision at the right moment in the process to be able to move forward.

DOUG: Yeah. And you’ve done a great job so far of addressing sort of the complications in the business environment. Of course, the media distribution options have become more complex and more involved than they used to be. So now you’re going through this process. You’ve sort of figured out what the voice is that they want to have and decisions they’re going to make. So how do you decide? And is that affected by the uncertainty in the business world, how you message that content and how you share it?

RACHEL: That’s right. I think that that’s the next, if you like, part of the process is being able to really understand from an audience point of view, what their consumption habits are from a scale, from a reach, from a channel, from a tonality perspective as well. And who are they regard as influencers? Who’s most influential to them. And I think one of the biggest things that we’re seeing is that a lot of consumer groups have particular influences that have enormous sway over them. And this is particularly true in the political context that we’re operating in. So, um, understanding that political sway, understanding how you can address that political sway, uh, often requires bringing on public affairs experts. It also requires thinking about influence in different ways. Um, not everything has to be done out front. Um, some of it has to be done behind the scenes. And I think that is the other thing we are seeing is that it is definitely a public affairs environment where that is leading a lot of the conversations in terms of how to approach some of these dilemmas.

DOU: Yeah. And what we’re seeing along those lines is local is becoming even more important, that is, than it’s ever been. That’s actually been a boon to our businesses. You know, one of our core products is providing satellite media tours, which now are becoming hybrid and super localized and saturated with that kind of flexibility. And we’re seeing a lot of distribution to those trusted mediums of local TV stations who a recent survey found actually relying on PR more than they’ve ever been, 91% of the producers said they’re open to being pitched for stories about a brand or nonprofit. If we could go back to our younger selves at the start of our career, we weren’t getting 90% of them wanting to hear our calls at the time, for sure. So that’s a change. So how do you go about sort of getting the messages out to these different audiences, and the fact that the silos have broken down, and if you share it in one place, it’s likely to go anywhere.

RACHEL: You know, there’s always a combination of influencer, of earned across multiple channels and paid. And it’s not a case of, you know, a complete formula that works for every client. You have to think about it from an audience perspective, and really understand what the consumption habits are of of your audiences and tailor to that. Um, I do think that your comment around local media is really interesting because in many, in many ways, we’ve seen the death of local over the past few years, and that’s been to the detriment of communities and to a large extent. And you look at some of, the major issues that have happened. Like, you know, the big fire that got an apartment block in London and caused huge casualties that may have not have happened if there was a strong local community media outlet highlighting some of these issues at a local level. Um, uh, you know, before they became, uh, sort of matched to tinderbox from perspective.

DOUG: Local really cuts different ways in the US because I think there’s well, I know there’s a false impression that local TV news is declining here. What’s actually happening? According to the National Association of Broadcasters, is the number of local TV news programs in Spanish language have doubled during the last ten years. In English, they’ve increased 30 to 40%. What hasn’t increased is the staff. And that’s to the problem that you point out that they don’t have the bandwidth. But whether you want to look at is the silver lining. From the perspective of PR practitioners, they’re more reliant on PR practitioners to fill this additional time with content because they typically have fewer reporters, fewer producers. And we’ve seen that decline the last three years in our survey, especially among health care producers who went for more than half the stations, having them to below 20% of the stations having these dedicated producers, but the content is there. To your point, it might not be the investigative content where that’s really taking a hit. Circling back, what are some of the unique philosophies or tools or values that are really important from a communicators standpoint, help their client navigate this complex pathway?

RACHEL: We talked about synthetic audiences, and I think that that’s going to become increasingly important, enabling PR professionals to really test messaging and to understand how things are going to be received, both from a media point of view, but also from a stakeholder point of view at this very local level, and the sort of hyper personalization that allows much more of that than before. And that’s going to be a big change. I think the other thing that we are seeing is that and we are in fact, using and developing AR tools like risk radars that enable you very quickly to understand the risks of campaigns, understand the risk of scenarios, understand the risk of messaging, and that ability to both understand risk and quantify risk is absolutely critical in the dilemma economy that I talked about, because it is about weighing it up. And if there isn’t a process that you can do it efficiently, it becomes very cumbersome and also not necessarily that accurate either. So, getting some predictive abilities with risk management is something that we’re looking at. The other thing that we are looking at is frameworks. And we have frameworks that one we’ve actually called two truths, which is very much designed to help with the dilemma management that I, that I talked about and that is, um, helping clients and brands manage the stakeholder communication in a polarized world, and it’s extremely important to have a process around that. And as I said, understand the points where you have to have decision making, understand the value sets of organizations as well as understand, at the end of the day, what they need to achieve from a business point of view. And that’s why all of this is, is really material to the C-suite at the moment and a real elevation to of the art of communication.

DOUG: Yeah. And the truth idea is so important because right now, one side automatically thinks they’re right, the other side is wrong. But sometimes there can be some truth in both perspectives. Obviously not all the time. Before I give you a chance to give your final thought, I just want to give a shout out to Bushman Hill at his close place in my heart is the first satellite media tool we ever did was 31 years ago. Plus with FleishmanHillard when they were just starting as an experiment.

RACHEL: That’s amazing.

DOUG: Thank you. Yeah. So, that was really exciting to us. Hey, do you think we could get the hosts of the United Negro College Fund telethon interviewed on TV stations around the country and trying to said, okay, if you can’t get me 30 interviews, um, what kind of reduction will you get? So, of course, I said, well, if we get you 30, more than 30 or more, what can you get us? And he said, I’ll get you a signed picture of Lou Rawls, who hosted it, which still is in my office to this very day.

RACHEL: Well, that’s an important memento of how you can be successful by really negotiating, isn’t it? So.

DOUG: Yes, that that negotiation takes a spot in my office and as you sort of wrap up your beautiful concert of ideas, do you want to share a final thought with the viewers what they should take away?

RACHEL: I think the final thought is that it is a complex time. There is a lot of uncertainty, but in fact there is for clients. It’s now time to also see the potential for opportunity. And in order to help clients, you know, see that potential for opportunity. We have to get them out of the stasis and actually moving forward with determining what their communications path is. It may be that it’s not communicating, because yes, you can communicate your way into a problem as well as out of it, but making a deliberate decision about that. Having weighed up all the risks and opportunities is what we should be all focused on today. And there will be winners and let’s all hope we’re on the winning side.

DOUG: That is really great. And as you know, you know, if you don’t communicate you’re going to be communicated about. So, you may not have control, but at least you need a voice out there. Rachel. Such an enjoyable conversation. Love your insights. Thanks for being with us.

RACHEL: Thank you so much. It’s a great conversation. Thank you to you.