PR Power of Good: Create Consumer Citizens & Sustainable Businesses?

As companies are now facing major challenges,
such as resource scarcity and climate change, radically changing the way we do
business, we need a fresh business revolution, says Stephanie Draper of the
Forum of the Future. As companies seek to shape their world for the better, and
profit from it, we need to engage the masses – in creating closed-loop
products, in changing consumption patterns and the like. We could follow the
example of Edward Bernays, who instigated the birth of Public Relations and created
consumerism. We now have to use his techniques to produce “consumer
citizens” and reward sustainable businesses involved in creating a better
future.

Stephanie Draper for the Guardian
Professional Network (5 August 2011):

One of the major changes in the last century
has been the rise of the consumer. But this isn’t something that just happened
– the consumer was created, and the way it happened is an important lesson in
engaging people on sustainable business.

The key figure in this story is Edward
Bernays. Not someone I was particularly familiar with until Adam Curtis’s
brilliant Century of Self on BBC4 a few years ago. Bernays was the nephew of
Sigmund Freud. He combined his uncle’s work on unconscious desires with
thinking on crowd psychology to influence the masses. His basic idea was that
human behaviour is driven more by emotion than by logic and that by harnessing
that emotion at a group level you could get people to do what you wanted them
to do. In his book, Propaganda, he said: “If we understand the mechanism
and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the
masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”

He developed his approach during the first
world war when he was helping the American propaganda effort. In peacetime he
saw the opportunity to convert this expertise in mass persuasion to the
markets.

Having understandably renamed his approach
Public Relations (PR), one of his first major campaigns was getting women to
smoke. At the time it was socially unacceptable for women to be seen with a
cigarette. That meant half the number of potential customers for The American
Tobacco Company. So Bernays arranged for a group of rich debutants to light up
simultaneously during the 1929 Easter Day Parade. He saw that it was news, not
advertising, that would get the message to the people and told the press that
there was going to be a protest that day on “lighting the torch of
freedom”. It was this phrase that hit the headlines – squarely positioning
smoking with female independence and liberty. From that moment on, smoking was
seen as a sign of freedom for women, and grew as a result. This was a classic
appeal to the emotional rather than the rational. It is quite clear that
smoking does not make you free (probably a more appropriate slogan for the
washing machine or the pill), but the association made women feel powerful, and
it stuck.

Today we are well-versed in buying things
because they say something about us, or make us feel a certain way, but it was
a complete transformation in the 1920s when most selling was done on the basis
of information and function. Bernays spent a lifetime helping companies connect
with the “irrational emotion” of their customer. Many of Bernays’s
techniques, such as press releases, product placement and tie-ins are still
prevalent today. He pioneered a whole new way of doing business.

There are all sorts of questions around this
sort of mass persuasion – the act of converting active citizens into passive
consumers (and aiming to control them in the process) doesn’t support a more
sustainable approach and some of the methods are opaque and manipulative.
Bernays is far from a sustainability hero given his contribution to the
consumption challenges that we now face. But we can certainly learn from him.
Taking ideas and products from niche to mainstream is a key step on Forum’s Six
Steps to Significant Change. It helps to create the tipping point and is often
where sustainable business initiatives stumble. That is essentially what Bernays
did.

Companies are now facing major challenges,
such as resource scarcity and climate change that are radically changing the
way we do business. We need a fresh business revolution – one where companies
seek to shape their world for the better, and profit from it. To do this we
need to engage the masses – in creating closed-loop products, in changing
consumption patterns and the like. And we need to do that in a way that
connects with people as people, as Bernays did. A good example of this is
Nike’s Better World video, which creates an emotional attachment and inspires
you to do something different through sport. This is a change at least as big
as the one that Bernays instigated with the birth of PR. He created
consumerism, we now have to use his techniques to translate that into
“consumer citizens” that reward sustainable businesses and are
involved in creating a better future.

Stephanie Draper is director of change
strategies at Forum for the Future

Source: www.guardian.co.uk