Taking a Company Public? Propaganda 101: Glittering Generalities and Testimonials

by

James Scott

As a public company you\’ll be combating a multitude of obstacles and one of the most important is reputation management or perception management. People most often associate propaganda with governments. Corporations also make extensive use of it. While advertising may qualify as propaganda, it differs in some crucial ways. Advertising focuses on a call to action. Corporate propaganda predisposes consumers to respond to those calls to action, to consider new information about those corporations in the best possible light, or to consider competition in the worst possible light. Publicly traded and large privately held corporations have used these methods to accelerate their growth and success strategies and even take down competitors. This is a brief case study noting several examples of both positive and negative uses of propaganda in a corporate environment.

Propaganda is rooted in the word \”propagation\”, as it advances or spreads a desired way of thinking. Almost all methods do this by careful manipulation of semantics, usually abusing their proper use in the process to reinforce logical fallacies. The most effective propaganda combines appeals in ways that mutually reinforce their effectiveness. Because of that, almost all propaganda begins with …

GLITTERING GENERALITIES

The fewer details people consider, the less they approach decisions critically. That makes the decision more emotional, and emotions are easy to manipulate.

Over Simplification

Make certain the target market perceives the issue in simple terms. Too many details raise too many questions.

Unstated Assumptions

Ambiguous terms leave listeners responsible for their own inferences, regardless of the speaker\’s intended implications.

Intentional Vagueness.

Nobody need bother with the details once they invest in the concept.

Red Herring,

Send those who insist on details looking someplace else — because they will not find any here.

PASS! -Ivory Soap 99 & 44/100% Pure! It Floats!

Two words: Pure what? The fact that it floats has nothing to do with its level of purity of … whatever — but purity sells.

FAIL! -WorldCom

At a time when corporate statements became ever more vague, WorldCom raised it to an art form so effectively, that when the government learned about its daisy-chained subsidiaries (and $3.3 billion in accounting errors) a new law ended up changing accounting laws — Sarbanes Oxley, now called SOX for short. It also led to the collapse of Arthur Andersen accounting, and scrutiny for dozens of other major companies that Arthur Andersen had served.

TESTIMONIALS

Celebrities \”are models of behavior — the ultimate sellers. They sell us things. And because of the intimacy and kinship we feel for them, they humanize the process.\” (Derakhshani, 2007, p. 30)

Beautiful people

Quite simply, celebrities constitute modern royalty. Parasocial relationships with them are among the strongest, so they can heavily influence public opinion.

Anecdotal Accounts

Never let the facts get in the way of a good story

PASS! – GM-Clint Eastwood\’s appearance in the \”Halftime in America\” ad during the 2012 Super Bowl

While involving the auto industry in general, Clint Eastwood\’s immediately iconic \”Halftime in America\” commercial during the Super Bowl came on the heels of the GM bailout\’s success. Conservative pundits so solidly associated it with GM\’s relationship to the Obama Administration that they immediately branded it a political ad. However, that accusation seems to have faded with Eastwood\’s somewhat less dignified anti-testimonial at the 2012 Republican National Convention.

FAIL! -Lehman Bros.

Lehman Bros. here represents the first of several banks to collapse in late 2008. In this case the testimonial was not invited. The U.S. Secretary of the Treasury declaring globally on television that U.S. banks are failing equates financially to a security guard shouting \”Fire!\” in a crowded theater. It crosses over with appeal to authority.

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