When I was very small, screen baddies were always German. Then they became Russian and then Chinese. The Brits were the good guys. So ingrained was this approach that when, as a child, I watched the first-ever episode of Star Trek broadcast in the UK, I was genuinely astonished to see a Captain’s senior crew that comprised three men: American, Russian and Chinese, and a black woman. The notion that this lot could possibly work together seemed to me to be beyond comprehension. And more surprising, even, than the addition of a Vulcan (who at least didn’t have any known ideological issues).

In that respect Star Trek was miles ahead of its time, predicting the collapse of communism and the transformation of China into the world’s manufacturing powerhouse long before the reality.

But at the point where the baddies became goodies, America looked around for a new nation of baddies – and alighted on the Brits.  It solved all the problems: we weren’t an ethnic race protecting our heritage, probably nobody would believe that we’re really bad, and either way, we’re too polite to complain.

So we see British bad guys everywhere, in James Bond, on TV in 24, and now in Star Trek.

Does it matter? Yes of course it does. In a world where people are hugely influenced by the media, where they send birthday presents to soap characters and where statues to William Wallace look like Mel Gibson, how can we be sure that everyone can differentiate between fantasy and reality?

So the next generation of Star Trek fans will not see, as I did, thought-provoking multi-national harmony but, instead, a very British baddie.

Big, global crises are the currency of the age for today’s 24-hour news media.  We news consumers expect to see these crises unfurl in front of us as they happen, almost voyeuristically viewing other people’s suffering.  As a result, there seems to be at least a crisis every week in this modern world –  or, as actually might be the case, crises have always occurred with the same regularity: it’s just that  we didn’t hear about them.

“That doesn’t affect me”

Terrible as it is to hear about a bombing in Boston or an earthquake in China, we generally feel disassociated from these events. But what if a crisis affects you or your business?  Just recently a building in Bangladesh housing textile companies collapsed with 300 people presumed dead and many more missing and injured.  Suddenly this tragic event in a faraway country implicated western businesses, Primark, Wal-Mart, Benetton and Mango among them.  Some of these have denied involvement; others are scrambling to explain why they didn’t monitor suppliers’ working practices more closely.  Either way,  corporate PR teams across the world have sprung into action.

Other worldwide names – Google, Starbucks and Amazon – were recently accused of manipulating tax laws in order to pay minimal corporation tax on their UK operations.  Whether guilty or not, mud sticks and the Internet and social media can generate an awful lot of mud in a very short time.  What’s worse is that the Internet is not like newspapers (“tomorrow’s fish ‘n’ chip papers”, as some people put it), read and forgotten – the Internet’s memory is forever.

The public’s ability to use social media to wade into any debate means that organisations can no longer sit behind a polished brand created by the marketers.  They have to ‘live the brand’ or create a disconnect between what they say and what’s being said about them. 

It’s as a result of this that spend on corporate PR is up by 9.24%, despite the recession, and the Internet’s ability to give everyone a public voice is blamed for causing a shift from proactive PR to Reputation Management.  PR is evolving to become the defining strand that links brand and reality.

“No-one’s interested in our small business”

It’s certainly a mistake to believe that any business is immune from a PR crisis or that it takes a world-shattering event or global company to have an impact. 

A product fault, a food poisoning scare, a Tribunal case, an employee injured at work, a natural disaster that halts production, a customer services issue, allegations of impropriety or, whether true or not, a careless remark that affects sales or share price.  Any one of these can damage – within a matter of days – a reputation that has been painstakingly built up over many years.

Preparing for the unknown

There will never be a world without crises and, in fact, most crises are not caused by one incident alone but by a whole string of coincidences that conspire to trigger an undesirable outcome.  The key to dealing with a crisis in the corporate world is not to expect it never to happen, but to manage it effectively if it does.

Assuming that you have taken all regulatory and common sense precautions in the workplace, how do you prepare for the unknown?  Here’s a five-step plan to crisis management for your business:

STEP 1 – Think the unthinkable.  Consider what could happen, where it could happen, when it could happen, and why it could happen. 

STEP 2 – Convene a crisis management team and make sure you have mobile and home contact numbers.  Crises usually don’t happen during working hours or on a convenient day when everyone’s in the office.

STEP 3 – Identify the threat.  What or whom must be protected?  Your company name, your brand, your customers, your corporate future, one individual?  Using this information, decide on the Key Messages that you want to communicate.  What should they be and how can you reinforce them?

STEP 4 – Compile a list of people and organisations that would need to know, and keep it up to date.  This would include: senior management team, emergency services, employees, insurers, regulatory bodies.

STEP 5 – Prepare a news briefing template that has all the necessary information about the business and just needs the gaps filling in if something happens.  Have ready a list of contacts for your key media: local, regional, trade and industry.

All this will provide a ‘holding’ position until you decide how to deal with the crisis itself and ongoing media 24-hour attention…. or you could avoid losing sleep and call in the experts   [hyperlink]  http://www.lexiconpr.com/manage-media-in-a-crisis.html

“History is written by the victors”

Sounds simple, but the best thing Richard III could have done to change his image was to have won at the Battle of Bosworth.

History is written by the victors and, had Richard been able to put down the rebellion, he would have had the opportunity to portray the Tudors as power-crazed traitors – and himself as a wrongly maligned, kindly king with the best interests of his subjects at heart and whose accession to the throne had been a legitimate one.

As it happens, Richard’s 8,000-strong Yorkist army was roundly defeated by 5,000 of Henry Tudor’s men fuelled by a hatred stirred up by Tudor’s rampant anti-Richard propaganda and PR machine.

With that victory, Henry Tudor was then able, uncontested, to consolidate his own position as new king by further lambasting his vilified predecessor’s reputation to enhance his own. And it served his successors and descendants – those of the great Tudor dynasty – to do likewise, creating a duality in which Richard III personified evil and those that had conquered him, the Tudors, as the embodiment of all that was good. And who was going to argue with them?

Remember, of course, Shakespeare wrote Richard III – and therefore, in Richard, one of the most hated fictionalised characters in history – under the reign of the greatest Tudor monarch of them all, Elizabeth I (herself being one of the greatest ever PR practitioners). Shakespeare  naturally sought favour with Elizabeth, and there was no way he was going to risk putting his head upon the executioner’s block by lauding her dynasty’s most notable domestic enemy!

Be proactive

You did lots of good stuff, man, so why not shout about it a bit more? Here are a few examples of what we would have looked to highlight if he was King today.

A fairer deal for the North

Richard is seen to have terrorised the people of northern England both before and during his reign, but the reality was very different. Richard’s Council of the North, derived from his ducal council, greatly improved conditions for Northern England, as commoners of that region were formerly without any substantial economic activity independent of London.

• Press release – ‘Richard a champion for the North and its business interests’
• Twitter campaign to drive home his desire to give a voice to the rugged, hard-working and welcoming people of the North.
• Speaking engagements, school visits and visits to businesses within the various regions of the north to ensure balance i.e. he can’t be seen to just be sticking up for the people of Yorkshire – he needs to be seen to be helping those in the North East, Manchester, Merseyside and so forth, too

Protector of the poor

Talk about being a man of the people and ‘a father of modern democracy’, Richard instituted what later became known as the ‘Court of Requests’, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard! Now that is quite something, and flies in the face of image of him as a cruel oppressor.

• Press release – ‘Noble king wants justice for all’
• Twitter activity highlighting his belief in justice for all sections of society
• Get Billy Bragg or similar on board as a spokesperson supporting the policy campaign and hope (or force him to through threat of violence) he writes a chart-topping song about it
• Get TV, radio and press to follow Richard as he visits the homes of real people (whose cases have of course been properly researched and vetted!), sympathises with them and explains his plans for making sure everybody is properly represented in court.

Champion of free speech and expression

Richard also banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books – making him a pioneer of free speech – and ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English.

• Press release – ‘Patron of the arts King Richard determined that his people should enjoy freedom of speech’
• Get Richard booked in for a laid back interview with Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby on This Morning, where the king discusses his love of books and shares his thoughts on some popular new releases
• Get #WhyIValueFreedomofSpeech and #ILoveBooks trending as topics on Twitter

The Princes in the Tower – what’s your side of the story, Richard?

Plenty of historians feel the evidence linking Richard to the disappearance of Edward V (whom Richard replaced as king when he was ‘found to be illegitimate’ – it seems Richard was capable of creating high impact, roguish PR campaigns of his own) and his brother aka The Princes in the Tower is flimsy at best.

So why wasn’t Richard clearer with his own story? One of the great dangers in PR is letting important questions about yourself or your company go unanswered. Richard’s strategy for dealing with the rumours that he had murdered the princes so that the displaced Edward could not later challenge his right to the throne was to ignore them until they went away – poor strategy, Richard.

The rumours snowballed and were used to their full advantage to the Tudors as they plotted their rebellion, turning the kingdom against him.

Body image

It’s shallow, we know, but it matters to people what leaders look like, or are perceived to have looked like.

True enough, Richard looks alright in extant portrait paintings, and portraits were of course used very effectively as PR and propaganda tools before the dawn of photography.

The problem, though, is that Richard has been imagined – thanks chiefly to Shakespeare – as some kind of ghastly gargoyle that clawed his way to power and afterwards devoured his subjects. Thomas More, for one (demonstrating appalling prejudice, as we’d see it now), emphasised Richard’s outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind, linking his physical attributes – “little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed … hard-favoured of visage” – to a devious and flattering nature that saw him plan the downfall of his enemies and supposed friends. Shakespeare followed suit, adding in a hunch, a limp and a withered arm for good measure.

These days, of course, we’d have an open goal to aim at, castigating his detractors for their dreadful prejudices and highlighting the fact that good looks and physical attributes do not a good person or leader make, and vice versa.

Lexicon’s team comprises a dynamic and forward thinking group of highly capable and skilled members. Through a combination of experience, stemming from the vital founder and captain herself, to the fresh talent of the annual interns we hire, we have established ourselves as an agency which inspires creative originality with every project we embark upon.

We pride ourselves on being experts in the business with more than 23 years of experience we can offer the highest quality of service to a global demand at out-of-London prices. We have a long standing relationship with our clients and offer measureable results and, like Lexicon itself, we strive to deliver longevity, profitability and growth to our clients.

Prizing innovation and creativity has enabled the continuous growth of Lexicon PR. Our dedication to clients, quality and perfection has ensured our longevity and will continue to set us apart in the future, calm sea or storm.

The winning photograph can be viewed here.