The blog is taking a break for a while – back in the New Year unless some sudden inspiration on some obscure topic provokes a post. In the meantime – some odds and sods – in two parts.
Politics and brands
For decades people have bemoaned politics being marketed like soap powder – despite much political discourse resembling the soap powder market in having lots of activity and lots of promotion about products which underneath are pretty much alike.
Anyone puzzled by Treasurer Scott Morrison’s bizarre comments about tax and spending ought to remember that the man is a fundamentalist Christian who spends his life believing in the unbelievable.
As the blog remarked recently about Galileo – when he showed sunspots through his telescope to believers in an Aristotelian universe they couldn’t see them – and despite the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment not much has changed since then in some minds.
It is very useful to be reminded, from time to time, just how amazing the polymath and National Treasure, Barry Jones, actually is.
The blog first met Barry Jones when it was a student active in the University of Melbourne anti-hanging committee when Barry was leading the opposition to the Ryan hanging. Later the blog worked for the ALP Parliamentary Party when Barry was a Victorian MP and like everybody who knows him is constantly amazed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge.
Recently the blog has has seen two dramatic contrasts to US climate change communication – one from academics and one from Exxon Mobil.
The first, from the George Mason University Centre for Climate Change Communication, comes in the form of a new peer reviewed paper on how best practice insights from psychological science can be used to improve public engagement with climate change. The second, from the US Centre for Media and Democracy (publisher of PR Watch), regarding the New York Attorney General’s current investigation into whether Exxon Mobil deceived its shareholders and the public about the impact of fossil fuel burning on climate change and the oil business’ viability.
For as long as the blog can remember someone in the PR industry has been telling it that something or other is transforming the industry ensuring it will never be the same again.
The latest transformation allegedly comes from social media and the blog concedes that while it is actually transformational the worry is that too many PR people are obsessed by the tool itself and give insufficient thought to how it can best be used and what the risks and limitations are. The last blog post on Tony Jaques’ analysis of the Victorian Taxi Association Twitter campaign disaster and similar “hashtag bashtag” results are an example of what can go wrong. Yet questioning the role of social media is a quick way to get dubbed a Luddite or a grumpy old man.
Looking back over a longish career the blog is frequently forced to admit that some decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.
One of the most memorable was in the Cadets’ Mess at the Scheyville Officer Training Unit in late 1967 when the Adjutant asked the blog whether it would like to go into the Army PR unit after graduation. The PR unit had some big advantages – temporary Captain rank; more money; the likelihood the blog would know more about PR than anything else in the Army; and, a possible degree of additional safety. Having watched too many WWII movies with stiff upper lip Brit characters when young the blog had a terrible rush of blood and replied “Sir, I was rather thinking I might go into a combat arm.” Next thing the blog knew it was in the Royal Australian Artillery and then bound for South Vietnam.
The blog’s not in the habit of making nice comments about Popes partly, of course, because there have been so few of them that would warrant it. But Pope Francis deserves much credit for achieving a significant shift in US opinion on climate change.
The George Mason University Centre for Climate Change Communication undertakes a number of longitudinal attitudinal studies on the subject and their latest, The Francis Effect: How Pope Francis changed the conversation about global warming, shows that more Americans, and more American Catholics, are worried about global warming than six months ago; and more believe it will have significant impacts on human beings. See http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/
One of the most important distinctions between behavioural psychology (of great importance to communicators) and some economics (of use to communicators) is that the psychological research often demonstrates a much stronger adherence to scientific principles than the economics research.
The blog has written before about Daniel Kahneman’s warning about a ‘train wreck’ in psychology research due to the over-frequent use of samples drawn from US college students and problems of replicability. In response to that call there have been a number of efforts to overcome the problems and an iterative process that has scrutinised the new techniques to ensure they don’t repeat previous methodological problems or create new ones.
Horace, at least for those who have a fleeting knowledge of his work, is famous for two lines – Carpe Diem and dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.
Most people come across the second (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country) because of Wilfred Owen’s famous use of it in his poem Dulce et decorum est in the final stanza The Old Lie. Of course, well before that poem – perhaps the most famous of World War I – Owen had written The Ballad of Peace and War which expressed somewhat similar sentiments to Horace’s but war does tend to change one’s mind about things.
The Tony Jaques issues management newsletter (see last blog) on the Minerals Council’s inept coal campaign was recently re-published on Mumbrella, and perhaps predictably, prompted a variety of responses.
The blog also got some comments about allegedly disparaging PR (would the blog do that?) by endorsing Tony’s views. The comments directed to the blog were in person because, as regular readers will know, the blog has switched off the comments function after making the mistake of reading a few of the comments on its old crikey column.