Stop Using PR Language With The C-Suite

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He and his colleagues have put together the playbook for becoming one of the most especially members of the leadership team.
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Especially in town of the major crisis organization.
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Professor Fred Garcia, welcome to the podcast.
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Well, thank you, Peter.
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Delighted to have the opportunity to chat with you and to uh share some of what we talk about in our book with your audience.
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Well, let's begin by having you outline what the major problem is between senior public relations staff and their C suite staff, and then how to go about correcting it.
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Well, thank you.
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I have been in public relations and related disciplines for more than 45 years, and my co-author for nearly 50 years.
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And one of the things that we have found is whether it's the public relations function or other staff functions, the HR, security, strategic planning, et cetera, they tend to make two fundamental mistakes when they're in the C-suite.
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The first is what we in the book call the FaceTime fallacy.
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And that suggests that there's a tendency for staff people to assume that because they're in the room with senior leaders, with a CEO, the CFO, the CHRO, because they're in the room, that means that they have influence over those leaders.
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And there's very little evidence that that actually is true.
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That they're there initially to represent their staff function, but unless the CEO or other senior leader believes they have a PR problem, they're not really going to turn to the PR person unless they think they have an HR problem, they're not going to turn to the HR person.
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Unless they think they have a security problem, they're not going to turn to the security person.
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So there's a tendency to conflate presence in the room with influence over the leader.
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That's challenge number one.
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Challenge number two is there's a tendency to speak only from the staff perspective.
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And one of the biggest marginalizing behaviors for PR people is when they go into the room with the CEO and they use PR talk.
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When they talk about the press release, even when they use the word stakeholders, when they talk about clicks, when they use the private vocabulary of PR, they're talking about something the CEO really doesn't care about, really doesn't have an interest in.
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And as a result, we tend to marginalize ourselves by reveling in our staff vocabulary.
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Now, when I teach my graduate students in the masters in public relations and corporate communication, one of the things I tell them is you're learning a really fancy vocabulary about the mechanics of public relations.
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Please don't use it people who are not in public relations because you will need to confuse people or marginalize yourself.
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Rather, if you want to have influence over senior leaders, you have to do what we're already pretty good at with other stakeholders.
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And that is we can't move people until we meet them where they are.
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And we know that about our employees.
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You can't move employees until you meet them where they are.
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Our investors, you can't move investors until you meet them where they are.
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Our customers, you can't move them until you meet them where they are.
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But when it comes time to deal with a CEO, we tend to forget that central discipline.
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So we need to address senior leaders first in their own vocabulary, not in ours.
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And second, address their needs, their concerns, their worries from their perspective.
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We need to understand how they are assessed by their boards or their other bosses.
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We need to understand what they consider to be their own success.
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What are the obstacles to their success?
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We need to be relentlessly focused on the CEO's perspective the way we would otherwise be with a client's perspective.
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And we need to address their concerns on their terms, not on our terms.
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Now, I have believed for most of my career that most public relations people, most of the time, inadvertently marginalize themselves for even another reason.
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And that is we tend to think that our distinctive skill and our distinctive capacity is the ability to communicate.
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And at least the people in-house typically have the word communication, or even worse, the word communications rule as part of their title.
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So I'm in executive communications, I'm in internal communications, I'm in media communications.
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The challenge with using the word communication or communications is that every single CEO, every single leader thinks that they are good at communicating.
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And if our distinctive proposition is that we are good communicators, they say, well, so are we.
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So I don't need you in the room if I need to communicate because I know how to communicate.
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And they assume that communication is speaking, reading, and writing.
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They've been doing that since they were kids.
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They've done it their whole lives.
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They do it every day, they do it all day.
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Now they don't use any other business discipline that way.
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So they don't do supply chain management over the dinner table, but they communicate at the dinner table.
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They don't talk to their buddies at the gym or on the golf course about the law that they're worried about or about regulatory stuff.
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They they just and one of the things I find is there's a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect that senior leaders typically possess.
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And the Dunning-Kruger effect, as you know, says that you don't know that you're not good at something unless you're good enough at it to know what good looks and feels and sounds like.
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And and when I'm trying to teach the Dunning-Kruger effect to my clients or to my students, I point to, for example, the TV show Seinfeld and Elaine dancing.
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And if you remember the Seinfeld episode, Elaine is a horrible dancer.
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But when she's hey, you're a really bad dancer, she gets really hurt.
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And she says, But I love to dance.
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But but loving to do something doesn't mean you're good at it.
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And it's the same with CEOs.
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They've been communicating their whole life, so they think they're good at it, and they're not, because they don't know what good sounds like, feels like, looks like.
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And so part of what I and my co-author do is try to help staff people to understand what is the distinctive value proposition you bring.
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And in the case of people who have the word communication in their title, it's not communication, but it's actually something else.
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So you'd appreciate this as a professor yourself.
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When I first became a professor of public relations, it was in 1988.
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It was 38 years ago.
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I'm starting my 39th year on the New York University faculty.
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Uh, coming from an academic family, I said to myself, now that I'm a PR professor, I need to write a book.
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And so I sat down to write a book about what I believed was the distinctive value proposition of public relations people.
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And I believe it's not our ability to string words and sentences and paragraphs together or to combine them with video or images, and these days with all kinds of other cool bells and whistles.
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Rather, what we do when we are doing our best work, and what we do when clients most value our work is we are able to anticipate and predict how any group of stakeholders is likely to behave if we do A or if we do B or if we do C.
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And then we can influence that behavior.
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We know how to get them to behave according to option A or option B or option C.
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So our real value is we understand stakeholders, we understand their value systems, we understand what drives behavior, we understand their decision triggers, and we can influence them to feel, think, know, and do something they otherwise would not.
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Now, when I was sitting down to write that, I came up with a phrase that I was really proud of.
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I said, when we do our best work, we operate as a kind of applied anthropologist.
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And if you think of what an anthropologist does, an anthropologist carefully studies discrete and identifiable groups and understands the social relationships within any given group, the power relationships within that group and among groups, understands the behavioral triggers, understands the decision triggers.
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When we do our best work, we are an applied anthropologist who can anticipate how any group is likely to behave.
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And the applied part is we can advise our clients or our employers on if we want this outcome, here's how we engage this group.
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If we want this other outcome, here's how we differently engage this group.
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And when we do it well, clients begin to see real value on something they don't think they already know.
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So CEOs and other senior leaders essentially lose sleep because they can't answer two questions.
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Question one, why did they do that?
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And it almost doesn't matter who the they are or what the dat is.
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It suggests that they are disappointed that the group that they care about is not behaving the way they want to.
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Why aren't our investors giving us credit for innovation and have why is that not reflected in our stock price?
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Why aren't our employees working smarter now that they have a better operating system?
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Why aren't our customers paying the premium price for the premium service?
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Those are all questions that suggest they don't understand stakeholder behaviors and attitudes.
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We can answer that question, and distinctively, among all the staff functions, we can answer that question better and more robustly than any other function in the company.
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So HR can answer that for employees, and sales can answer that for customers, and lawyers can answer that for regulators, but the PR people are supposed to be able to answer that question for every single stakeholder group.
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The second question we can answer is how do we get them to do this other thing?
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And again, we are the only SaaS function that can actually answer both of those questions across all stakeholder groups.
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So 38 years ago, I sat down to write this book.
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I was very proud of myself that I came up with this phrase, applied anthropologist.
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But then I did what I advise my students to do before they write a book.
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And that is I read a book.
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And I discovered I'd been beaten to that idea by 65 years.
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And to make matters worse, I've been beaten to it by a public relations professor at my own university, at New York University.
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And that was someone whom I know you've heard of, and that is Edward L.
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Bernays, who is the first person to have called himself a public relations counselor and was the first professor of public relations at any university.
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And when he became a professor of public relations at New York University in 1923, he said, Now that I'm a professor, I need to write a book.
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And he wrote a book.
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It was called Crystallizing Public Opinion.
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And I still assign that book to some of my graduate students for their theses.
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And what I find fascinating about crystallizing public opinion, which is all about PR, is it's not about communication.
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It's about something altogether different.
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And not in crystallizing public opinion, but around crystallizing opinion, Bernays defined public relations this way.
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And I require my students to memorize this definition.
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He says public relations is a vocation applied by a social scientist who advises a client or employer on social attitudes and on the actions to take in order to win the support of the public, on whom the viability of the client depends.
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Now, I think that's a pretty apt description of public relations.
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It is just a 1923 way of saying applied anthropology, because the word anthropology did not come into the English language to mean what we now use it for until about the 1930s when Margaret Meade began to popularize that phrase.
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But what he's describing is a vocation applied by a social scientist.
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And I remind my graduate students, they are getting a master of science in public relations.
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So they need to see their work as the work of a social scientist.
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And when we change our mindset from our superpower is we can communicate to our superpower is we can influence outcomes by influencing the behavior of the groups who matter to our employers and clients.
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That's a foundationally higher value proposition than we know how to communicate.
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Because no one else in the company knows how to do what is our real superpower, influence outcomes by changing behavior.
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You know, one of the things I understand what you're saying in terms of um making making that particular change.
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The other thing I would ask about is you know the the language we use when we began to try to let people know what that change is, or how to impact that change.
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How do we go to that?
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What the language is that we're going to use as compare what we would normally say about uh increasing leadership or increasing participation or something along those lines?
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What other language do we would use to just at the end use and how about you know engaging people with their language?
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Yeah, j just to make sure I I answered the question correctly, are you talking about what PR people should what's the language fair people should use when they talk to senior leaders?
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That's right.
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Yeah, okay, oh yeah.
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Okay.
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So we need to avoid PR talk.
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Okay.
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So I I never with a CEO talk about stakeholders.
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Okay.
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I talk about the groups who matter to you and the company.
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So they can get that.
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Right.
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So stakeholders is a is a particular PR term.
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Uh when I started in PR, we didn't even use the word stakeholders.
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We used the word constituency.
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And that came out of politics.
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But whether it's the word stakeholder or constituency, people often glaze over when you use that language.
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So I talk about let's better understand the groups who matter to you and matter to the company and what these groups care about.
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I don't use the word message.
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I ask what do they need to hear you say?
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Right.
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What do they need to see you do in order to trust you?
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And so I I don't use the word press release.
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I talk about the announcement we're going to make to our customers, employees, investors.
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So we use business language, not private communication language, when we talk to business leaders, whether it is for-profit businesses or not-for-profit businesses from government.
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I do, I have done over the decades lots of work with the military.
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I don't talk about their boss.
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I talk about your commanding general.
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I use their vocabulary.
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And the more we default to our private vocabulary, the more marginalized we become.
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So again, you can't move people until you meet them where they are.
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We need to meet executives where they are, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, physically.
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But if we stay in our own private comfort zone, we're never going to be invited back into the room except when they think they have a problem that requires a media solution or something like that.
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But if we're trying to advise them on the direction of the company, which by the way, PR people can effectively do, then we need to be seen as more than the communicators.
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The communication still matters, but they think they're good at it.
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But we are the ones who can help direct the kind of communication that will work and the kinds of other things that will work that they need to see us do and not just hear us say, I go back to Bernays.
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The actions to take in order to win the support of the public on whom the viability of the client depends.
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Well, you know, and as I'm listening to you, I mean, now that begins to make sense because the consumers could be behaving in a particular way by doing A, B, C, and D, but no, as a company, we want to actually see them do E, F and G.
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So Exactly.
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Okay, now how do we get them to do that?
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And and and and directing them to do that's not gonna succeed.
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So one of the things we find is it's very hard to change behavior unless you change emotion.
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So we one of the ways to think about it is that human beings are not thinking machines.
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We are feeling machines that think.
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But we feel before we think, and decisions are typically made primarily in the limbic part of the human brain.
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That's the emotion part of the brain, it's the part of the brain we don't have direct access to.
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But when we're asked to rationalize our decisions, we tend to use the fruits of our neocortex, the thinking part of our brain.
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But that's rarely where the decision originates.
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It originates primarily in the feeling part of the brain.
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So the first thing we need to do is to change what people feel in order to get them to behave differently.
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And the language I just use, we need to change what people feel.
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We need to change what people know in order to change what people do.
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That's plain English.
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You don't need to have an advanced degree in human psychology to understand that vocabulary.
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And so CEOs respond very well.
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What is it?
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What is the experience we need to create in order for these people we're trying to influence to do what we need them to do?
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What do they need to see us do?
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What do they need to hear us say?
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What do they need to participate in in order to change the way we need them to change?
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And that way of thinking and that way of explaining and that way of rallying our senior leaders typically energizes them.
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You know, I think what's interesting as I listen to you, I'm thinking about it, I think it's Burger King that has redone their uh ads.
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Now one time you saw this guy with a big a crown on, blah, blah, blah.
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But when I was to Burger King wasn't telling them, they fired this king.
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And they they brought people there.
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Yeah.
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I like the crispiness of this.
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Oh, this this sauce is even fl more flavorful.
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Right.
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So they're essentially showing here's how you can feel when you eat this nugget.
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Right.
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Or when you eat these fries, or when you try this sauce, it's creating vicariously an experience for people that makes them want to go out and try that food.
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It's not about some guy with a big crown who marches around in a weird way.
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Well, you know, I think another organization that learned that the hard way was cracker barrel.
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You know, when somehow or another they suddenly changed their logo, and obviously they didn't ask anybody, clients or otherwise.
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And all and the wheel wheels came up on that one.
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They had the CEO running around trying to explain how we're going to fix it.
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Yeah, and and and I I I don't use the the cracker barrel example because it happened just recently, but I in a book that we're that a colleague and I are putting out in a couple of months, we talk about how frequently even sophisticated companies fail to understand their key customer base.
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So we start with Coca-Cola.
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That in 1985, when I was working at Burst and Mars Cellar, which was the Coca-Cola PR firm, uh, they the the the company Coca-Cola unilaterally, without any warning to anybody, announced you can't have Coke anymore.
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We are discontinuing Coca-Cola.
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Now we have a different beverage that we're calling new Coke.
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And they're loyal Coke drinkers who, for decades, had been told the whole reason to drink Coca-Cola is how you feel with other people.
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Right.
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Not about the taste, not about, not about the flavor.
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It's about what Coke is in.
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It is in the Coke gate.
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It is in a refreshing break at work.
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It is in enjoying ourselves at the beach.
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It's never about what's in Coke and suddenly to say, hey, we've changed the taste so it's closer to Pepsi.
00:24:39.680 --> 00:24:44.880
And the people who grew up with Coke said, you don't have the right to do that.
00:24:44.880 --> 00:25:00.720
And there was a massive backlash against Coca-Cola, literally 8,000 phone calls a day to their Atlanta headquarters, which people had to look up the number, they had to dial it on a rotary phone, they had to wait to talk to an actual human being.
00:25:00.720 --> 00:25:06.560
And Coca-Cola, 50 days later, yielded, said, okay, we're going to bring back the old Coke.
00:25:06.560 --> 00:25:08.080
We'll call it Coke Classic.
00:25:08.080 --> 00:25:31.520
Well, fast forward 40 years later, Bud Light alienates its entire customer base when a single trans influencer on Instagram uh does a spoof of Bud Light and its sponsorship of March Madness, and suddenly there's a massive anti-trans movement.
00:25:31.520 --> 00:25:39.840
And Kid Rock puts out a case of Bud Light and he shoots an automatic weapon into the Bud Light.
00:25:39.840 --> 00:25:46.720
And pretty soon a whole bunch of people are destroying their Bud Light on video and sharing the news about it.
00:25:46.720 --> 00:26:00.800
And it took Bud Light about six months to recover, at least reputationally, but they went from being the number one branded beer in the United States to the number four branded beer in the United States in a month.
00:26:00.800 --> 00:26:04.880
And it took them months and months and months before it began to come back.
00:26:04.880 --> 00:26:06.880
So it's not just Cracker Bell.
00:26:06.880 --> 00:26:21.360
What's fascinating to me is really sophisticated companies with really expensive advertising agencies come up with these ideas that completely ignore their most loyal customers and infuriate them.
00:26:21.360 --> 00:26:23.120
That's what happened at Cracker Barrel.
00:26:23.120 --> 00:26:24.160
That's what happened at Koch.
00:26:24.160 --> 00:26:25.680
That's what happened at Bud Light.
00:26:26.000 --> 00:26:37.680
And you know, that that that that really caught me by surprise when you when you hear about something like that happening, because somewhere in the communications office, hopefully they would have asked those folks, you know, what do we need to do?
00:26:37.680 --> 00:26:39.200
How can we go about this?
00:26:39.200 --> 00:26:41.600
Uh or should we even go about it?
00:26:41.600 --> 00:26:46.480
You know, you know, take re you you ask your customers, well, what do you think about this?
00:26:46.480 --> 00:26:47.920
What do you think about that?
00:26:47.920 --> 00:26:49.280
And to let them know.
00:26:49.280 --> 00:26:51.600
And obviously, uh somebody didn't do that.
00:26:51.600 --> 00:27:02.080
And the as I said the CEO on TV uh quite a long time trying to explain it, and they they had to have to go back to their original uh logo and so forth.
00:27:02.560 --> 00:27:13.200
As Coca-Cola had to go back to its original formulation, and Bud Light had to stop marketing uh using the culture wars as part of the marketing.
00:27:13.200 --> 00:27:15.440
So it's fascinating.
00:27:15.440 --> 00:27:19.600
Again, you can't move people until you meet them where they are, right?
00:27:19.600 --> 00:27:26.480
But you can but you can alienate them if you don't really understand the people who matter most to you.
00:27:26.480 --> 00:27:33.759
And in the case of a consumer product, it's a relatively accessible consumer product for most customers.
00:27:33.759 --> 00:27:37.680
If you don't understand your customer base, you can alienate them.
00:27:37.680 --> 00:27:45.200
I I have a graduate student who did a thesis on how brands survive crises.
00:27:45.200 --> 00:27:54.880
And what she found is the hardest crisis for a brand to survive is when their customers feel betrayed by the brand.
00:27:54.880 --> 00:28:00.640
And I think that actually describes Cracker Barrel, Bud Light, and Coca-Cola.
00:28:01.200 --> 00:28:03.280
You know, you could probably go back even a little further.
00:28:03.280 --> 00:28:07.360
I think what was the uh the Edsel when uh that uh that came out.
00:28:08.560 --> 00:28:09.120
Right.
00:28:09.120 --> 00:28:09.840
Yeah.
00:28:09.840 --> 00:28:16.080
I mean this what's what's fascinating to me is history may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
00:28:16.080 --> 00:28:21.920
And you can look back and say, how did Cracker Barrel not learn from Coca-Cola?
00:28:21.920 --> 00:28:26.560
How did Bud Light not learn from Coca-Cola?
00:28:26.560 --> 00:28:30.080
And the answer is they were in their own universes.
00:28:30.080 --> 00:28:34.960
And they didn't think about what the likely stakeholder reaction would be.
00:28:34.960 --> 00:28:39.680
I part of it is they just assume that their loyal customers are going to be loyal forever.
00:28:39.680 --> 00:28:46.240
Um but we have no reason to believe that to be the case if they're if the customers feel betrayed.
00:28:46.880 --> 00:28:47.360
Mm-hmm.
00:28:47.360 --> 00:28:49.680
Well, I mean, that that's very exciting.
00:28:49.680 --> 00:28:55.200
And and you know, you would think that a lot of people, particularly on the PR folks, recognize that.
00:28:55.200 --> 00:29:10.560
And if not, then they can cause big problems for their clients if if uh they don't realize how things work, how things, things, I should say, clients work and what what they need to hear and do to be comfortable with what it is you're encouraging them to do.
00:29:10.880 --> 00:29:33.360
And that's why if we see our job not as creative message developers, but as applied anthropologists, we're more likely to actually study the groups that matter so that we can avoid the missteps that come from some brilliant inspiration that hasn't been tested out in the world.
00:29:33.920 --> 00:29:48.640
Well, you know, I've and I I would think that PR courses in college, you know, even at the undergraduate level, that should be included in PR courses simply because how important that particular piece of information is, you know, know who your customers are.
00:29:49.040 --> 00:29:49.680
Yeah.
00:29:49.680 --> 00:29:59.680
And this this idea of applied anthropology, I started preaching back, you know, 40 years ago, 45, uh 38 years ago when I when I was writing the book.
00:29:59.680 --> 00:30:10.800
I preach it in every one of my PR classes, whether it's a communication strategy course or a communication ethics course or a or my crisis communication course.
00:30:10.800 --> 00:30:14.880
I I speak it at TRSA events, I speak it at IEBC events.
00:30:14.880 --> 00:30:21.280
I'm actually going to be one of the featured speakers at the World Public Relations Forum in Nigeria in November.
00:30:21.280 --> 00:30:24.800
3,000 communication leaders from 120 countries.
00:30:24.800 --> 00:30:26.400
I'm going to be talking about that.
00:30:26.400 --> 00:30:36.240
You know, trying to elevate the perspective of what our superpower really is to communication leaders wherever I can find them.
00:30:36.240 --> 00:30:51.280
Because although they call themselves communication leaders, what they really are is experts on shaping the attitudes and behaviors of the groups that matter most to their clients and employers in communication is the how.
00:30:51.280 --> 00:30:53.440
It's not the why.
00:30:53.840 --> 00:31:02.640
Well, you know, a lot of this as I listen to you because I've been invited, uh I'll be speaking to some university, some university PR students uh later on this month.
00:31:02.640 --> 00:31:08.800
And I'm going to really focus on that, that you really need to know who your customers or clients really are.
00:31:08.800 --> 00:31:09.920
What do they need?
00:31:09.920 --> 00:31:16.640
What's going to impact them to, you know, make the change that we have to help them make the changes.
00:31:16.640 --> 00:31:17.680
What are those changes?
00:31:17.680 --> 00:31:22.320
Why, and you know, what to do and what not to do to get to get there.
00:31:22.720 --> 00:31:48.960
And one of the things that my co-author and I have found in our in our and we write about in our book, Influencing Leaders, is once the CEO sees that we can actually predict and influence outcomes, and they see that they can make better decisions because of the questions we ask them, then they want us in the room when an important decision has to be made.
00:31:48.960 --> 00:31:52.400
And that's what gets past the FaceTime fallacy.
00:31:52.400 --> 00:32:05.520
It's when we get invited into the room, not because of our staff function, but because the leader knows that we can influence the outcome that matters to the leader, that's when they want us in the room.
00:32:05.840 --> 00:32:09.520
Well, Fred, this has uh been very, very inf uh informational.
00:32:09.520 --> 00:32:25.680
And I hope that a lot of our uh audience, you know, take notes on this because obviously we've got a pretty large uh group here, and the fact that uh, you know, some of those are overseas as well, that uh they will uh find a lot of value in what uh you've presented to them today.
00:32:26.160 --> 00:32:26.960
Well, thank you.
00:32:26.960 --> 00:32:33.520
And and uh our book is called Influencing Leaders, the Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor.
00:32:33.520 --> 00:32:55.920
My colleague Jim Lukashewski, who's been my mentor for 43 years, and I are both PR people, so we come at it from a PR perspective, but it's really for any staff function or any outside advisor on what it takes to get the people who run complex organizations to seek our advice and to take our advice.
00:32:55.920 --> 00:33:16.160
And and you know, there's some some mindset and say some techniques and tools in there, but one of the things we have found is that we have been blessed, that we have been trusted by leaders, and we essentially share the secrets off on how others can be equally trusted by leaders.
00:33:18.000 --> 00:33:23.280
Well, let me uh sorry, let me say for that, thank you so very, very much.
00:33:23.280 --> 00:33:26.560
This has been very, very insightful and informative.
00:33:26.560 --> 00:33:36.000
That uh, you know, that we needed to really dig down to the basics of what public relations people really need to know to be as effective as they possibly can.
00:33:36.400 --> 00:33:37.040
Well, thank you.
00:33:37.040 --> 00:33:39.040
Delighted to have the opportunity to share.
00:33:39.840 --> 00:33:44.320
Well, let me say uh thank you again, and let me also say thank you to our listeners.
00:33:44.320 --> 00:33:50.800
If you do if you have enjoyed the podcast, we'd certainly like to get a review from you and also share this information with your friends.
00:33:50.800 --> 00:33:55.840
And please also listen to the next edition of the public listening with the podcast.