Three Lessons from PR’s Failure to Win on CSR, Social & Content
The footballing cliché runs that teams must score when they are dominating the game. PR consultancies often manage early possession, but then struggle to find the back of the net. It happened with CSR and with social and now with content, too – a failure to convert early-mover advantage into sustained leadership. We let others...
Content, Communications & The Art of Absence
John Cage’s 1952 recording of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence was the musical expression of Duchamp’s belief in the role of spectator as well as artist; in the subversion of the conventional. You can watch a version of it here. David Bowie is another artist who properly understands the power of absence –...
The Four Heels of Achilles (and how to avoid the Dinosaur Trap)
Despite my long-held belief in the transformative power of communications for collective and societal good, these are worrying times for the profession of PR. While the evolved form of Public Relations, Public Engagement, remains central to the restoration of trust and the advancement of the true sustainability agenda, there is a real danger that this...
The Rat, the Squirrel and Chimes of Freedom Flashing
It has been something of an odd couple of weeks, with some of my professional peers either brazenly speaking of lying (PR Week, February 3rd), or offering somewhat antediluvian points of view about what PR really is and how we go about our everyday business. Having recorded the BBC’s The Bottom Line with the erudite...
Too Much Stuff
Harvard Professor John Quelch has warned marketers in his study Too Much Stuff that in the global economic slump “The mass consumption of the 1990s is fast fading in the rearview mirror. Now a growing number of people want to declutter their lives and invest in experiences rather than things”. Quelch has identified a new...
Pinocchio Is a Boy Who Now Wants to Turn Back to a Toy
I was sitting on a train on my way to talk about Wellbeing yesterday and by coincidence listening to Rufus Wainwright’s wonderful poignant Want One album. Listening to the words of Vibrate the song seems to be about how life seems to be roaring ahead and yet things get no better, or perhaps worse –...
