When attempting to play with fire, the first rule is clearly 'just don't'.
For those choosing to flout that obvious and most fundamental rule, the second regrettable caution would be to permit it only under 'adult supervision'.
And the third rule, if both these rules have been foolishly ignored, would be to 'have the fire service on hand'.
Companies and celebrities should sit down, and as millennials say, “take many seats”, if they believe they can manage publicity stunts on their own. That is the big message from two recent PR disasters we have all witnessed.
Those who wish to attempt publicity stunts should know that they cannot be left in the hands of inadequately endowed adults or those amateurs in CXO suites, masquerading as industry mavens.
Image Fires can turn into blazes. They can start anywhere, especially when amateurs are at the wheel. Anything that is in the public domain can become the target of a firestorm in these trigger-happy times. Those who lack sufficient experience should never do anything that is best left in the hands of seasoned professionals, and it is most definitely not worth trying at home.
There is a reason experts exist and there is an even stronger argument for why it is advisable to stay away from this type of communications adventurism.
The Red Flags YesMadam Ignored
The recent public thrashing of spa aggregator YesMadam was inadequate.
Conducting a fake survey and hitching it to the idea of ‘De-Stress Leaves’, alluding to sackings, trivialising the mental agony that is involved in real-life stress as well as job security, especially in the sector that YesMadam operates in, were all violently fluttering red flags.
Claiming, after a firestorm of protest, that ‘no employees were fired during the description of the stunt,’ was blithely explained away as the need of the hour, to highlight stress. Then a long chirpy apology dressed up as a defence on LinkedIn when most of the programme was on Instagram and other channels itself is a joke as far as media choice is concerned.
That the start-up type operation which describes itself on LinkedIn as having ‘Sharks on Board’ (almost a violation of the de-stress hope) claims to have a ‘management team,’ some of whom are graduates from venerable institutions, it hasn’t helped them see sense in their own CXO suite. It is bizarre that they could have attempted what they claimed to have done, given the visible inadequacy of prep, pose or even back-up support. Worse, by their own confession, they claim to have been attempting their version of social service and triggering social change by unleashing this ham-handed excess.
Such Idiocy Lives On
Another recent example of attempting to play with this dark and arcane art of ‘Stunt PR’ was by the eminently forgettable actor Poonam Pandey. She tried to trend jack the news of the government initiating a free cervical cancer vaccine and worked with her clearly inadequate PR team to fake her own death by cervical cancer.
The bigger question was whether she had trivialised the seriousness of the disease itself, in addition to the minor consequence that some media outlets had fallen for the faking.
In her case, unlike the recently pilloried YesMadam, there was distinct and public proof that she was constantly eyeball-chasing. Upping your ante desperately will hurtle you to crash into a blazing heap, inevitably.
Once they are outed, the responses to the failed exercises range from the anodyne ‘ganda’ to more acerbic, crass, stupid, untrustworthy, and far worse.
The damage is often long term because these idiotic events tend to live on both in the public memory as well as forever on the internet, where the blemish of failure and complete incompetence begins to colour everything else that may be attempted in the future. Remember, the present never forgets the past as far as these stunts are concerned.
Little Room For Error
As a practitioner of image management, one of the things that I have tried to focus on whenever something dangerous is being attempted is to measure the results.
Before recommending anything treacherous, I tend to seek precise answers or estimates to the quantitative questions first. What will the benefit be in terms of either enhanced marketing impact immediately resulting in sales or the company’s ability to attract fresh new talent or more fundamentally triggering investors to push up the share price?
Unless there is evidence that at least two of these elements are not enhanced by any communications activity that is outside the box then there must be particularly good reason to take the risky route.
The so-called qualitative stuff is a dream sequence. It is an approach best left to the wafflers, the dreamers, amateurs, inheritors, and those not weighed down by the reality of company management.
Image management has been crafted into a venerable science.
There’s very little room for error because markets are getting increasingly unforgiving, and when the options, the choices and the roots are the result of careful analysis of corporate target the assets we have, and the possible responses of competition, then there may be room for creativity, but definitely very little for stupidity.
(Dilip Cherian is India’s 'Image Guru' and now a master at Litigation Landscaping. He can be found on X @dilipthecherian. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)