This is Chapter 10 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
This topic is not often mentioned, yet a critically important aspect of a successful PR campaign. If you want to steer the public or professionals towards your agenda, how do you do it? You can’t simply say we want to make more profit so you should listen to us. No one would embrace your agenda if you did that.
Instead, you must hook into genuine values that people already hold. The stronger the values the better. This is key for good PR to work.
Months ago, I mentioned the crimes of Big Tobacco in an email I sent out to subscribers, and I received this reply from Michael:
“Thanks for this. While I understand the opinion, I’m a big believer in the Constitution and personal responsibility. Poor diet’s impact I’d say is over a billion [deaths per year]. The same could be said about unhealthy food, it’s a person’s free choice. Can’t blame McDonald’s if you’re obese and diabetic.”
First of all, I am big on personal responsibility too. I largely agree with this.
But these are exactly the values that Big Tobacco, not to mention other industries such as fast food, use against us. It’s called spin for a reason.
Big Tobacco successfully avoided legislation and continually won court cases based on using this idea of individual responsibility. As it fits in the American individualistic view, it was especially useful.
Brandt writes about this in the book. “Widely shared libertarian attitudes about both the role of the state and the behavior of individuals constrained the future of campaigns against tobacco. The American individualist credo, ‘It’s my body and I’ll do as a I please,” cast a net over further antismoking initiatives…The tobacco companies and the Tobacco Institute had aggressively and effectively presented the case for smoking as a voluntary risk…The industry and its political allies frequently invoked Big Brother or the Prohibition debacle to point out how paternalistic government interventions offended the basic American values of independence, autonomy, and the right to take risks. Dictating other people’s behavior, even in the name of health, was portrayed as un-American.”
Big Brother is absolutely something to be worried about. Prohibition was a spectacular failure. Independence is a great thing. I agree with all of these. And I certainly wish we enforced the Constitution much more than we do these days.
Yet, understand that these are not the full picture. The truth is messier. These same exact values can be twisted. They are spun in order to abdicate any responsibility from the companies involved.
Again, I am in total favor of people being personally responsible. Too few people become radically self-responsible. And we must talk about corporate responsibility too. Corporations used to have a social responsibility, not just a fiduciary one (that’s the responsibility to make as much profit as possible for their stakeholders).
Corporations have lots of benefits, in being treated as persons, so why not an equal playing field of responsibilities too? Responsibilities should actually be more important to big business, not less, because of the outsized power they have as compared to individuals.
Furthermore, we can’t think of free choice as an all-or-nothing thing. There are shades of grey involved. Many studies have shown just how swayable our thoughts and feelings are. One that sticks out in my mind is covered in Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating. Giving a free bottle of wine to restaurant guests altered their outlook and behavior. If the label said California (a place known for good wine), compared to North Dakota (not at all known for wine), the differences were stark. With the California wine people stayed longer, tipped bigger and rated enjoyment of their food higher. And they said the wine had nothing to do with it.
I’m not saying we’re stimulus-response automatons. But neither is free choice absolute. There are shades of gray in all things. This is a large function of why propaganda, advertising and public relations exist. So much money is spent in these areas because they work.
So our question can transform a bit more into reflecting how much is free will? How much is choice overtly or covertly swayed?
How much is it an individual’s free choice when we’re talking about an underage child taking up smoking because of advertising specifically pointed at them? Take into consideration that R.J. Reynolds knew that Joe Camel targeted youths, and that’s just one example of many.
Is the adult still capable of free choice if they became addicted as a teenager when their brain is still developing?
Furthermore, how much is free choice when Big Tobacco claimed cigarettes were not addictive when they were specifically and purposefully engineering the cigarettes to be more addictive?
Where is the responsibility behind what a May 1994, New York Times piece shared featuring leaked documents from Merrell Williams? This included “the executives of the…Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation chose to remain silent, to keep their research results secret, to stop work on a safer cigarette and to pursue a legal and public relations strategy of admitting nothing.”
Such actions directly affect your autonomy because information is not only withheld but disinformation purposefully spread. How can you make a free choice, choose to smoke with informed consent, when the information necessary to do so is withheld from you and your perspective distorted?
“It is ironic that the impact of smoking on nonsmokers, rather than on smokers themselves, is what finally transformed the regulation and cultural perception of the cigarette,” writes Brandt. Why was it this that changed everything? Because this had to do with the same values of liberty and autonomy.
In 1986, a National Academy of Sciences report showed that children of smokers were twice as likely to suffer from respiratory infections, pneumonia, and bronchitis as children of non-smokers. This report estimates that ETS caused between 2,500 and 8,400 lung cancer deaths per year.
In 1974, Surgeon General Jesse Steinfeld said, “Nonsmokers have as much right to clean air and wholesome air as smokers have to their so-called right to smoke, which I would redefine as a ‘right to pollute.’…It is time that we interpret the Bill of Rights for the Nonsmoker as well as the smoker.”
You’d be hard-pressed to believe that this was free choice and personal responsibility of the children. But then again, that was argued for! In 1996, Charles Harper, the CEO of R.J. Reynolds, stated, “If children don’t like to be in a smoky room, they’ll leave.”
You can say it’s the parent’s responsibility. Again, I agree in part, but what if that parent became a smoker because their parents before them were addicted? And that parent didn’t think it was important to quit because Big Tobacco lied about the dangers, the addictiveness, and grasped their values of independence, coolness, and manliness with the Marlboro man.
Upon careful reflection, values most often cut both ways. And it is important to recognize that rights go hand in hand with responsibilities. This is true, or at least ought to be, for individuals as well as companies.
Be aware of when industry uses your closely held values to manipulate you into believing and acting on their bidding. John Stauber and Sheldon Ramptom wrote in Toxic Sludge is Good For You!, “If the PR industry were only based on ‘lies and damn lies,’ it might be easier to see through its deceptions. But PR’s cunning half-truths and ‘spins’ appeal to us and work on us because they come from us, from the constant plumbing of the public mind by surveys, opinion polls, focus groups, and information gathered as we apply for bank loans, purchase goods with credit cards, place birth announcements in newspapers, vote and make phone calls. Every day we as individuals are leaving behind the electronic equivalent of fingerprints and DNA samples that marketing and PR firms lift from the commercial landscape, and refine for their use in their efforts to manipulate our minds.”
And keep in mind that this was all before social media even existed! This is the art of spin.
Key Takeaways on Weaponization of Values
- When it comes to PR, outright lies aren’t nearly as effective as half-truths spun in a way to hook onto values you hold near and dear.
- The common industry line is to place the blame on the individual, while abdicating any real responsibility for the companies involved. Notice where the blame is placed.
- Corporations have lots of rights legally, they ought to have greater responsibilities too. This is especially the case when you acknowledge they have outsized power as compared to individual people.
- Free choice nor stimulus-response are black and white. We must see these with shades of grey to properly navigate the world.
Please leave any comments or questions below. Feel free to share it with anyone you’d like.
Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.
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Toxic Sludge should be required reading! Definitely agree with you on the greater responsibilities for the corporations. I hadn’t really thought of it in that way before, but it makes sense. They are a tier above real people as far as their citizenry goes in terms of privilige, that privilige makes it even more important that they have more responsibility to balance it out. Unfortunately, as you no doubt know, their legal responsibilities seem to stop at making a profit. I have nothing against profit, but if a public corporation’s only responsibility to it’s shareholders is to make a profit; there’s going to be some shenanigans going on.
Wouldn’t it be great if our schools actually taught some of this stuff, had books like that as required reading? I can dream right?
Detailing the descent of corporate responsibility, along with monopolization, political influence and the like shows how we arrive at the craziness we’re at today.
Agreed wholeheartedly with the above essay. Add medical costs’ to the debate. How about all smokers, confirmed to be smokers by lab tests’ only can join a pool of insured with other smokers. That list would go broke paying medical bills. All fast food drive-thru eaters the same. They all that make unhealthy choices incentivized by marketing of Edward Bernays fame, the Godfather of modern marketing psychology, nephew of Sigmund Freud. Edward was consulted by the tobacco industry to find a new market for their product. That was in the early 1900’s. Women. They had to get women to smoke. Bernays sold the concept that woman not smoking was to be patriarchal oppression. Women didn’t smoke because it was nasty to them. They were convinced their common sense nature was faulty. Virginia Slims cigarettes were marketed to women. “You’ve come a long way baby, to get where you got to today, you’ve got your own cigarette now baby, you’ve come a long long way.” They were “gaslit.” Convinced to use their ego’s (as we all are) to mount an offensive against an enemy that was manufactured. Manufactured by a corporation that cared only about The Benjamin.
Such is our “modern western world.” Smartest ever we pompously believe.
“Men (people) are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions.”
― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.”
― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda
Everyone one of us are clueless as to whom we really are or could have been. All in the Western World have been manipulated. We then defend ourselves having never truly been ourselves. Those living in the Amazon if any are left, would be the only truly happy salt of the Earth in existence today. Unscathed by “tell-A-vision” and “tell-A-vision PROGRAMMING.”
Yep! Not sure if you saw the earlier chapter in which I talked about Bernays and some of those examples. https://loganchristopher.com/public-relations/
The problem with your theory about spin is this. We all know that tobacco and fast food are bad for us, regardless of how they spin it. People make mistakes every day. Don’t pretend it isn’t their fault. We have enough people shifting blame.
I’m curious how you’re taking away from this article that I am saying the companies aren’t at fault?