LU7: Persuasion Industries

Introduction

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor market for PR praticioners will grow in the next 10 years about 24%. Public Relations is one of the fastest growing professional field in the US.

The economic paradigm is changing in this country. The United States used to be co country that manufactured products (made stuff in Barrack Obama’s words). Now the focus of US economy is shifting from manufacturing to the service sector. And Communication is the service par excellence.

Good news for you, communication students.

The persuasion industry generates

38,000 commercials,
The average prime-time hour of TV contains more than 11 minutes of advertising,
Plus, 100 to 300 ads in radio, newspapers, magazines,

Every single day, America citizens are exposed

18 billion magazine and newspaper ads
2.6 million radio commercials
300,000 TV commercials
500,000 billboards
40 million pieces of direct mail.

Plus, the US consumes 57% of world advertising ( although we hardly make 5% of world population). We spend over $ 165 billion a year on advertising and over $ 115 billion a year on product promotion (coupons, free samples, rebates). Persuasion industries make 2.2% of US gross national product.

This learning module should help you understand

1 – the actual dimensions of the persuasion industries in the U.S.,

2 – the theoretical foundation of persuasive communication,

3 – the difference between advertising and public relations,

4 – the origins and historical development of both professional fields

and

5 – how PR and advertising shape Mass Media contents.

Persuasive Communication

Mass Media are the natural channel for professional persuaders to reach their target audiences. When we consuming any type of media (print, audio, audiovisual) we are, consciously or unconsciously exposed to a variety of messages that try to influence the way we think and/or act. This is what persuasion is all about. In this learning module we learn more about how persuasion works – and how Mass Media deliver obvious or subtle persuasive messages.

Definition

Ervin P. Bettinghaus, important scholar in this particular communication field, defines persuasion as

“the conscious attempt by one individual to change the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors of another individual or group of individuals through the transmission of some message.”

Let’s analyze the most important elements in this definition.

First of all, there is always an intention in persuasive communication, a goal. And the goal of every persuasive attempt is to influence beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors of individuals or large groups of people.

It is not equally easy (or difficult) to influence beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.

Beliefs and values endure, are difficult to change because we acquire them in the process of socialization. In this process, they become part of our personality. Thus, persuasive messages seldom will focus on the beliefs of the target audience.

Attitudes, which could be defined as the readiness to respond to certain ideas, persons, situations or actions, are easier to influence. We can change our attitudes without questioning our value system.

Attitudes are also easier to influence than behaviors. Our behavior depends on many factors that the persuasive communicator cannot control. You may develop a positive attitude toward the luxurious car that you saw in a commercial. Still, even if the message was effective and you developed a positive attitude toward the car, you will not yield to the message because you may not be able to afford it. The attitudinal change always precedes the behavioral change.

Communication is the only tool we use in persuasion.

In persuasive communication there must always be some measure of freedom. Persuasion implies free will, free choice, on the side of the persuadee (the individual who is being persuaded).

If someone knocks you out and take your money, you cannot say: “he/she persuaded me to give the money”.

Neither can we talk about persuasion when there is pressure or extortion.

Persuasion can only be achieved on the basis of argumentation.

Mental Change

Finally, persuasion always involves a mental change (even if our final intention is to influence the behavior of our audience).

We have to distinguish three kinds of mental change:

1 – response shaping

This similar to learning

In this case, the audience is a tabula rasa: They don’t have any knowledge or any opinion about the subject at hand.

Thus, the persuader tries to SHAPE THEIR RESPONSE teaching them what to think about the new situation and how to behave.

2 – response reinforcing

If the people in the audience already have a positive or negative attitude toward a topic, the persuader may be interested in reinforcing this previous attitude.

Most of the persuasion nowadays is of this kind. For example Fund-raising, blood drives, etc.. The people know the cause and have a previous positive or negative attitude toward the subject

3 – response changing

This is, of course, the most difficult kind of persuasion.

The persuader expects the persuadee to switch from one attitude to another.

This is the most difficult kind of mental change to achieve, because people are reluctant to change.

It’s difficult to persuade someone to vote democrats, if he/she always thought democrats to be evil. Or to like communist. Or not to eat meat.

If you want someone to radically change his/her mind, you have to discover an

ANCHOR

An anchor is a strong belief that both, persuader and persuadee have in common. Anchors are absolutely necessary to create a common ground with the audience. Without this common ground, the audience will necessary reject our messages.

For example:

If I want to persuade you to quit smoking, I might use as an anchor the idea of health, or the importance of our life for our families.

If I want to persuade you to stop eating meat, I could use as an anchor, again, the idea of health, or the animal rights (if I know you agree with this idea).

Essential Factors in Persuasion:

Message Quality, Message Discrepancy, Source Credibility

To be successful in persuasion, you need to increase message quality and source credibility and reduce to a minimum the message discrepancy.

1 – Message Quality:

The quality of the message depends on HOW or TO Which EXTEND the message fits our target audience.

One of the first things that we have to take into consideration when we design our persuasive messages is the level of involvement of our audience.

The self-involvement is not just the interest in the topic, the degree of EGO-INVOLVEMENT tells us to how crucial the issue at hand is for the psychological, physical, emotional or economic integrity of the individual.

The level of self-involvement will determine how probable it is that the individual thinks or reflects about our message.

On the basis of this information we can take two different routes to persuasion,

1.1- Central Route:

We take the central route when the degree of Ego-involvement is high and thus, we expect a diligent consideration of issue-relevant arguments.

In the case of the central route, we appeal to the reason of our audience. We try to activate their cognitive potential.

1.2 – Peripheral Route.

We take the peripheral route when we can count on a low level of Ego-involvement. In this case, it is much more effective to appeal to the emotions of our target audience.

In the peripheral route, the source credibility is much more can also be much more relevant than factual information.

Examples:

Central route:

If you buy a house, you will have to shop for a convenient mortgage. The degree of ego involvement, in this case, will be very high. You will be paying the mortgage for the next 20 or 30 years. Therefore, it is probable that you spent time and cognitive energy analyzing the mortgage products of different banks.

When creating persuasive messages to sell this service, you need to take this fact into account. In this case, the central route will be more effective. You will need to provide your target audience with the factual information they will demand.

Peripheral route

As a good example of a product with a low degree of ego-involvement, we could take toilette paper.

It is rather unlikely that our target audience spend a lot of time analyzing the factual characteristics of the different toilette paper brands. The factor that triggers consumption in this case is brand recognition.

Therefore, when creating persuasive messages (advertisements or commercials) you will avoid including too much (unnecessary) information about the product. You would use positive emotional cues, such as warmth, softness, or smoothness to position your product into the mind of the prospect. Commercials for this particular product – you may have seen them – use pets, cuddly toys, or even babies to produce those emotional cues.

2 – Source Credibility

The credibility of the individual who delivers the persuasive message is also an essential factor in persuasion.

Credibility can rely on 4 different factors:

2.1 – perceived expertise,

(If a doctor recommends a certain medicament you will tend to belief him more than if the same message is delivered by a janitor).

2.2 – perceived trustworthiness

(If you find out that the same doctor is working for the company that produces the medicament, the he will not be so trustworthy).

2.3 – Attractiveness of the source

(this is the reason why so many attractive celebrities are used to deliver persuasive messages).

2.4 – Dynamism of the source

(the energy and dynamism are perceived as indicators of the confidence you have in your message)

The relative importance of these four factors will depend on the nature of the topic being discussed. Complex issues demand a high level of expertise. Risky issues demand trust. Emotional issues are better communicated by a likeable source. Dynamic sources do better when the audience is not strongly opposed.

Careful audience analysis early in the campaign planning process can help identify sources that are perceived to be credible. Importantly, audience analysis will also help identify which sources are not credible, avoiding the all too common mistake of having the wrong spokesperson.

3 – Message Discrepancy

The probability that the individual rejects message that are in contradiction with his/her beliefs and values is rather high. Therefore it must be our priority to avoid message discrepancy.

For this purpose, persuasion theorists differentiate between the latitude of neutrality, the latitude of acceptance, and the latitude of rejection. We have to make sure that our messages fall into the latitude of acceptance/neutrality. If they fall into the latitude of rejection, they will be ineffective – and most probably ignored.

The research step of our campaign should provide us with the necessary information to avoid the latitude of rejection. We need to know the positions that our target audience would never adopt.

An Example:

If during a fund raising campaign, you find out that your target audience is willing to give up to $ 20 (latitude of acceptance), it would be absurd to send messages asking for $ 1,000 (latitude of rejection).

More reasonable would be to ask for $30 – 50 (possible latitude of neutrality).

Strategic Communications

Many companies and organizations use Mass Media to strategically deliver persuasive messages to specific target audiences. The necessity to establish effective pipelines for reaching large audiences has generated two basic persuasion industries:

Advertising: The direct promotion of products and/or services.
Public Relations: Messages in public relations focus on the general credibility of the company behind those product and/or services. They try to build public trust.

To be effective, persuasive messages are created with a very specific target audience in mind. It is important to establish a common ground with that audience.

Persuasive Communication

Persuasive communication always works on the base of some assumptions:

People’s behavior is linked to their cognition.
How people process information can play a part in the types of messages they find persuasive.
A persuader’s credibility, authority, and attractiveness play important roles.

Leon Festinger developed during the 1950ies the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, which is frequently used to explain how persuasive communication works.

We normally use pre-existing cognitive structures (what Festinger calls schemata) to evaluate the issues we face. If the issue represents a contradiction inconsistent with the values or beliefs that defined our identity, we will experience it as dissonant. And this cognitive disonance will be the cause, according to Festinger, of distress. Thus, the individual tends to avoid such situations.

Festinger states that we act first, and then adapt our thinking to our previous actions in order to avoid dissonance.

Role of Mass Media in Persuasion

Mass Media are the vehicle professional persuaders use to reach their target audiences.
Authority.
Direct effects model: Largely disproven.
Effects are strong nevertheless.

Public Relations

Watch a Spin Doctor in Action

Stuart Ewen writes in his book PR! A Social History of Spin that we are living at the age of public relations. He is referring to the relevance that this communication dynamic that we call PR has in almost every single aspect of our society: politics, business, social values and concerns, mass media, etc.

The goal of this lecture is to help you understand Ewen’s statement.

And the first step is to analyze some definitions of our concept: Public Relations (PR).

1 – PR Definitions:

1.1 – I will first introduce two neutral definitions.

The first one was created by Grunig, James E. and Hunt, Tood, two relevant PR scholars, in his classic Managing Public Relations (1984)

“Public relations is the management of communication between an organization and its public.” (p.6)

The next neutral definition was crafted by Carl Botan in his article

“Public Relations as a Science. Implications of Cultural Differences and International Events” (1992)

“Public relations is the use of communication to adapt relationships between organizations and its publics” (p.20)

Some keywords to understand the meaning of those definitions:

Management: PR practitioners have the capacity to take decisions over personnel and budget (people and money). This is basically what a management function is.

Communication: PR is, first of all, a communication industry. Communication strategies and techniques are the instruments we have to achieve our goals.

Public or Publics: Publics, the plural form, is actually more accurate. One of the first steps in the PR process is to accurately define which the target audience of our messages will be. For successful messages need to be tailored to the characteristics of those audiences.

We differentiate between internal and external audiences.

Examples of internal audiences: In profit organizations, employees, or stockholders provide examples of internal audiences. In non-profit organizations, members, donors, volunteers are also considered internal audiences.

Examples of external audiences: Current or prospective customers of products or services, governmental officials, voters, mass media, comunity.

1.2 – These two definitions highlight the most obvious aspects of Public relations, but they do not help us understand which is the nature of the relationships that we are establishing with our target audience. Thus, we will need to keep exploring more definitions of PR.

The next two ones try to present the PR profession in the most positive light, both emphasizes the social function of PR.

Cutlip, Scott M. / Center, A. H. / Broom, G. M.

“Effective Public Relations” (1985)

“Public relations is the management function that identifies, establishes, and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the various publics on whom its success or failure depends”. (p.4)

Harlow, Rex F.

“Building a Public Relations Definition”.

In: Public Relations Review (1976)

“Public Relations is a distinctive management function which help establish and maintain mutual lines of communication, acceptance and cooperation between an organization and its publics; involves the management of problems or issues; helps management to keep informed on and responsive to public opinion; defines and emphasizes the responsibility of management to serve the public interest; helps management keep abreast of and effectively utilize change, serving as an early warning system to help anticipate trends; and uses research and sound and ethical communication techniques as its principal tools”. (p.36)

Some new key concepts in those definitions:

Mutually beneficial relationships: PR is an activity that will not only benefit the company or organization, but also the different target audiences we are dealing with.

To serve the public interest: Similar to what I just said. The PR activity fulfills an important social function.

Sound and ethical communications techniques: PR practitioners are (should be) committed to the ideal of ethical communication, which presupposes that communication can also be used unethically. We will see later on how.

As I said, these two definitions try to present PR in the best positive light.

However, it is evident that in many cases the public interest and the interest of your company or organizations may be in conflict.

Imagine this situation:

You are working for a big tobacco company and are asked to organize a communication campaign. You have following data available to start it:

Not even 8% of the smoking population changes the brand in their smoking life.
Not even 10% of smokers are able to quit smoking.

The first step in the development of the campaign would be to define your target audience. With those data, you will be addressing a very young target audience because you know that the probability that they change the brand or quit smoking is rather low. If the campaign is effective you will get long-term loyal customers.

In this case it is obvious that sometimes the benefit of the company is in conflict with the public benefit. You would be creating a dangerous addiction in people whose personality may not be completely formed yet.

Is it unethical to do PR work for a tobacco company?

(By the way, I strongly encourage you to watch the movie Thank You for Smoking, by Jason Reitman. In this movie you can learn some important lessons in PR. You can see some key scenes of the film in this link).

1.3 – Now I am going to give you two realistic definitions of what Public Relations is. I prefer those definitions because they will better prepare you for the reality of this professional field.

Interestingly, the authors of those definitions are not PR scholars, but PR practitioners with long experience in the field.

Edward M. Stanton describes the activity of the PR practitioner as:

“working with clients on strategy and messages, and then delivering these messages to target audiences in order to persuade them to do something that is beneficial to the client.”

Harold Burson, the chair of the firm Burson and Marsteller, together with Hill and Knowlton, perhaps the most important PR firm in this country – and this is to say in the world – defines his own work as follows:

“We are advocates, and we need to remember that. We are advocates of a particular point of view – our client’s or our employer’s point of view. And while we recognized that serving the public interest best serves our client’s interest, we are not journalist. That’s not our Job”.

New key words in those definitions:

Persuasion: PR is a persuasion industry. You will have to create messages and the objective of those messages is not to look for the mutual benefit, but to persuade a particular target audience.

Advocacy: I like the idea of presenting the PR people as advocates. Advocates have to defend their clients – even if they are aware that their clients are guilty. In case of Conflict between the Public interest and the interest of your employer you will have to choose: either to defend your employer, or to quit the job.

2 – Related Terms

In our next step, we will try to explain how Public Relations differ from related fields and concepts: journalism, marketing, and advertising, and propaganda

2.1 – Journalism and PR have always gone hand in hand – Most of the pioneers in this professional field had been working as journalists before they started their PR careers. And the main function of those pioneers was to serve as link between the company and the different corporations they were working for. As a matter of fact, they called themselves press agents.

Also nowadays those fields are strongly related. Still, there are some differences that you to need to understand:

Work – the PR-practitioner has to work closely with the media because this is the channel that we use to reach our target audiences. PR practitioners need to know how to write press releases, features stories, opinion pieces, etc. They should also be familiar with audiovisual strategies to produce audio or video news releases or public services announcements.

However, the scope of the professional activity of the PR practitioner is broader. PR agencies also offer counseling services, event planning, research programs, etc.

Objective – The job of the journalist is (should be) to inform his/her audience.

The PR Counsel tries actually to persuade this audience.

Audience – Journalists have a mass-audience (not well defined and anonymous). PR practitioners have to carefully select the segment of the population they want to address and to tailor their messages to the characteristics of those audiences. This will be a recurrent idea in this course.

2.2 – Marketing and PR are also closely related. PR is part of he so-called Marketing Mix, and thus, subordinated to the strategic goals of the marketing department.

We regard marketing as the activity to build and/or maintain markets for the organization’s products or services.

PR contributes to this generic goal creating a favorable opinion, a friendly environment toward the company.

2.3 – Advertising, as we learned in the previous lecture in this learning module, is also a form of persuasive communication, which is the reason why sometimes this professional field and PR overlap.

Advertising messages normally focus on a specific product or service. They directly tell the target audiences the advantages of those product or services.

The traditional function of PR is different. We do not directly talk about the excellence of particular products, but aim our messages to the creation of TRUST in the name behind those products.

Plus, Advertising normally pays for time (Radio, TV) or space (Newspapers, magazines) to place their messages. PR is a more sophisticated activity. PR practitioners try to get the attention of the media with special events. They also sent news releases to the media to get the attention of their target audiences without having to pay for it.

3 – Basic Knowledge and Skills

Now that we have an exact idea of what PR is, we should briefly go over the basic knowledge and skills a PR practitioner should posses.

3.1 – Strategic and Operational Management Knowledge:

Most of the definitions discussed in this lecture emphasize that PR is a management function. If you decide to start a career in this professional field, you will have to be able to develop strategies to reach established objectives.

You will also have to deal with budgets and people.

3.2 – Public Opinion

The title of the first book ever published on the subject PR was “Crystallizing Public Opinion” (by Edward L. Bernays). – This is also the best description of what PR is all about. You will have to know and to understand which is the nature of this social-psychological phenomenon, in order to be able to deal with it.

3.3 – Research, Public Opinion Research:

Market and Media Research – find out the different audiences.

Research is the basis of the communication strategies in Public Relations.

You have to find out the bias in Public Opinion, or the opinion in the public segment you want to influence.

This knowledge is also important for the evaluation of your campaigns, when you try to find out the outcomes of your campaigns.

3.4 – Mass Media:

The PR practitioner is also a Media-Specialist. Mass Media are the vehicle PR people use to reach their target audiences. They have to know exactly which is the difference between those vehicles, so that they are able to choose the right one. PR specialists also need to be perfectly aware of the Effects of Mass Media on individual and society.

3.5 – Persuasion:

PR is a persuasion industry. Thus, we must familiarize ourselves with different strategies to maximize the influence on attitudes and behaviors of our target audiences.

4 – PR Services

PR companies normally offer a variety of services. The most relevant of those services are:

4.1 – Promotion of Product and Services

As a part of the marketing communication mix, PR departments and firms help promote Product and Services. To this end, they use a plethora of instruments, such as news releases, brochures, media tours, etc.

4.1.a – Events Management

The most common strategy to promote product or to enhance the visibility of the company is the staging of special events. Some examples of those events are Press Conferences, Anniversary Celebrations, Symposiums, etc.

4.2 – Speech training

PR firms have specialist in speech writing and delivering. Frequently the prepare speeches for top managers and executives and also for politicians.

4.3 – Research and Evaluation:

Scientific research of Public attitudes and perceptions as well as media analysis are essential to design communication campaigns. Information is, also in PR, gold.

4.4 – Branding:

The process of creating a name that associates specific characteristics or virtues to the product, service or company.

4.5 – Crisis Communication:

Crisis communication is, no doubt, the most fascinating research field in PR. On the other hand, it is the worst time for the PR practitioner. When corporations get into the eye of the media hurricane, they need the assistance of professionals. Some PR firms specialized themselves in crisis communication. We will dedicate one of our leaning modules to the subject of crisis management.

4.6 – Intern Communication:

An important part of the PR activity is directed toward internal audiences. In the case of profit organizations, the goal of such internal PR actions is to motivate the own employees, to create a positive working atmosphere so that employees identify themselves with the objectives and values of the company.

4.7 – Community Relations:

In this case, the strategic goal is to create a friendly environment around the Company, so that it can get official and public support if, for example, the management wants to expand a factory or build a new one.

5 – PR Actors

We will mention the 4 basic actors in the world of Public Relations. We can establish following categories.

5.1 – private and profit seeking organizations

(any corporation you can name)

5.2 – private and not profit seeking organizations

(Red Cross, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, MADD, etc. Characteristic of this group is that they are financially independent from the state.)

5.3 – public and profit seeking organizations

(it is difficult to find examples of this group of organizations in the U.S. In Europe, many airlines, railway companies, banks, even tobacco companies belong to the state. In the U.S. there are some lottery organizations that belong to the state and try to generate revenues for it. If you can think of any organization that belongs to this group in this country, please let me know).

5.4 – public and non profit seeking organizations

(to this group belong all the governmental agencies, public universities, and institutions that are funded by the state).

Public Relations – The Profession

Models: Historical Development of the PR Profession

James Grunig, American Scholar in the field of strategic communication and mass media effects, summarizes in forth sentences the historical development in the professional field of public relations:

the public be fooled,

the public be damned,

the public be informed, and

the public be understood.

These four historical steps correspond to four different forms of understanding and practicing public relations. Public Relations is, as must be clear after the first weeks of this course, the professional management of communication to achieve strategic goals. Grunig’s historical framework will help us understand how the field of strategic communication has been evolving throughout the last two centuries. We will also learn some names, historical figures connected to every stage in the historical development. Their work will help us better understand the way strategic communication was managed at different times and in different contexts.

The Public Be Fooled

The phrase, the public be fooled, was coined by historian Eric Goldman in his book “Two-Way Street”, to describe the modus operandi of PR pioneers.

In the first decades of the 19^th Century, American magnates started to hire “press agents” in order to feed the press with stories about their companies. That was the origin of the Penny Press, which flooded the country with cheap newspapers, they cost only one cent of dollar, that were in constant need of news for their public. A lot of newspapers appeared and a group of intelligent and audacious people realized that they could reach huge audiences with the new Media.

It was a symbiotic relationship. On the one hand, the large corporations found a channel for practically free publicity. On the other hand, the newspapers gather material to fill their pages. Of course, the press agents used this venue to present the clients in the most favorable way.

They did not have any scruples, though.

The information they sent to the press was frequently distorted and embellished. The common understanding among those pioneers was that the public was stupid, and they acted in consequence. Of course, the poor reputation of the communication business nowadays is, in part, the result of the lack of any moral standards in the origins of the profession.

The name we will associate to this early stage is Phineas T. Barnum (1810-1891)

Barnum is the creator of the Barnum Circus, later known as Barnum and Bailey. Still, he is known today not for his circus, but for the extravagant communication techniques he used to promote it. As it was common in his time, he did not hesitate to cheat the public to make his show more attractive.

One of the most popular figures in Barnum’s circus was Joice Heth, the oldest woman in the world. She was presented as a 161 woman. Barnum claimed she had nursed George Washington. When Heth died in 1836, the autopsy revealed that se could not have been older than 80 years.

Barnum was also an early master of what historian Daniel Boorstin would call later pseudo-events, synthetic events staged with the only purposed of being reported and reproduced by mass media. Barnum staged with only this purpose the marriage of Tom Thumb, one of the midgets in this troop, and a popular attraction of his show. The marriage of the two midgets created a huge media uproar, which contributed to bring more people to the circus.

Barnum was the first one quoted saying:

“I don’t care if the newspapers attack me as long as they spell my name correctly.”

The idea that there is no such a thing as bad publicity is a myth, as we will learn in this course. Still, Barnum can be regarded as a visionary because he realized and exploited the power of mass communication as the most effective channel for persuasive messages.

The Public Be Damned

The sentence, The Public Be Damned, was the response of Cornelius Vanderbilt, railroad tycoon and one of the richest men of his time, to the growing pressure of public opinion. Warned by his advisors about the necessity of keeping in good terms with the public, the big man expressed his contempt with the now famous phrase:

The Public Be Damned.

He did not think the public could claim its right to be informed or enlightened. Still, American society was changing, and a very important factor in this change was the influence of mass communication.

Magnates, such as Vanderbilt himself or John Rockefeller, had been for years the favorite prey of a group of journalist and intellectuals socially engagé and morally indignant: the muckrakers.

The term was used for the first time by Teddy Roosevelt in 1906. The intense journalistic activity of the muckrakers in many ways left its mark on the American society at the turn of the 20^th century. They made the public aware of social inequities and discriminations and galvanized the large American middle class, which constituted their natural readership. Their way to understand journalism was militant, radical, combative and uncompromising. With unusual aggressiveness, the muckrakers denounced governmental and corporative corruption.

In their view, such corruption was becoming endemic and threatened to destroy the American political and social system. Upton Sinclair, together with Ida Tarbell the most relevant writer of the muckrakers, describes the process with following words:

“See, we are just like Rome. Our legislators are corrupt: our politicians are unprincipled; our rich men are ambitious and unscrupulous. Our Newspapers have been purchased and gagged; our colleagues have been bribed; our churches have been cowed. Our masses are sinking into degradation and misery; our ruling classes are becoming wanton and cynical.”

The activity of the muckrakers made clear the importance of public support also in the private corporate world. The public became aware of its power. The effect of muckraking journalism opened the eyes of the corporate giants, who realized that their success – not less than the political success – rested on public opinion. With no favorable and friendly environment, any company, even the apparently most powerful, could fail. The omnipresent and almighty public opinion also decides the fate of big business.

Muckraking journalism was a warning signal that the press had become one more of the powers that be. The awareness of this power was further reason why the practice of professional communication exploded in the first years of the 20^thcentury.

In this toughest stage of historical development, strategic communicators had mostly to fight against the attacks of the muckraking press.

The Public Be Informed

In the first decades of the 20^th Century, Corporations had already learned the lesson and started to develop effective strategies to keep the public informed about their activities and policies.

Those years were decisive in the foundation of this professional field. The first practitioners came from the press. The first professional communicators had all been working as journalists before becoming corporate journalists and image manufacturers. Before Edward L. Bernays coined the term “public relations counsel”, they were known as press agents.

The most relevant of those early press agents was, no doubt, Ivy Ledbetter Lee.

Lee was probably not the first individual who sensed that economic success depends on a good relationship with public opinion, but he was the first who systematically applied this certitude to the management of organizations.

Lee was born on July 6^th 1877, in Cedartown, Georgia. He grew up in a cultivated environment, in which sophisticated intellectual disputes were frequent. His father was a Protestant circuit preacher who especially enjoyed getting involved in scholarly debates on the evolution theory. His mother was an autodidactic intellectual. Although she married at the age of 13, she reached a notable intellectual stature. Above all after her husband’s death, Lee’s mother traveled frequently through different states and achieved a certain reputation as lecturer.

Ivy Lee graduated with honors from High School in St. Louis, where he also was the leader of the Debate Society. In 1894, Lee enrolled in Emory College, where he discovered his journalistic vocation. For the two years he spent at Emory, he worked as editor of the college department of the Atlanta Constitution.

In 1894, Lee transferred to Princeton University, where he continued developing his journalistic skills. He wrote for the daily Princetonian and was the editor of the Alumni Princetonian. Future president of the US Woodrow Wilson was one of the fellow students and friends of Ivy Lee at Princeton. His journalistic activity and, above all, his ability in public debate gave Lee visibility during this time. His academic records, however, were never outstanding.

After graduating at Princeton, Lee rushed into the world of journalism. He wrote articles for Associated Press, Philadelphia Press, and Chicago Record, and finally worked as reporter for the New York Journal. When he left this Journal, Lee wrote for the New York Times and New York World, where he obtained solid knowledge of economy and the mysteries of Wall Street.

In 1903, tired of the journalistic activity, Lee left the New York World and discovered his real passion. Two days after he left the World, he became involved in a campaign in favor of Mayor Seth Low, who, by the way, was not reelected. Lee’s early acquaintances would reappear later in his life. Low chaired the committee commissioned by Wilson to reach a settlement between the Colorado coal operators and the miners in 1915.

After this first experience, and while working for the Democratic National Committee, Lee met George Parker, who was in charge of publicity at the committee. Parker hired Lee, but very soon, convinced of the potential and the talent of his pupil, proposed the two start a publicity agency together. Thus, “Parker and Lee” was born. This agency was not the first one, but unquestionably was the one that shaped the development of the public relations professional field. According to Scott Cutlip, Parker and Lee represented two radically different ways to conceive the publicist activity. Parker was the traditional press agent, a mere middleman between organizations and the press. Lee brought into the profession an unusual sophistication. More than just to transmit information to the press, the press agent had to use information to mold the perception of the public. Lee himself explained it this way:

“When I started this business, it seemed to me there were two courses open to me. I could tell my clients what they wanted me to tell them. That, of course, would please them. But it would never get me very far. The other course was to tell them what I thought irrespective of their opinion. If my judgment was right, they would come to respect it. If I were wrong, I’d soon find it out. In either case, I’d eventually find my level.”

The agency presented itself as news source characterized by three values: “Accuracy, Authenticity, and Interest”. In fact, they fabricated ideal portraits of the corporate leaders who hired them.

In 1906, the anthracite coal operators consortium hired Parker & Lee to publicize and support its arguments during a long-standing conflict with the union, as well as to condemn the strike in front of the public. Working on this assignment, Ivy Lee created a small art piece: his declaration of principles. Just for this short statement, which was sent out and published in different newspapers, Ivy L. Lee could claim a unique place in the history of strategic communication. The New York Times would refer to the declaration some years later as “something new to the business of publicity”.

This is not a secret bureau. All our work is done in the open. We aim to supply news. This is not an advertising agency; if you think any of our matter ought properly to go to your business office, do not use it. Our matter is accurate. Further details on any subject treated will be supplied promptly, and any editor will be assisted most cheerfully in verifying directly any statement of fact … In brief, our plan is, frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.

The declaration of principles is the first attempt to create a code of ethical standards for the communication practice. It was issued not just as a mission statement for the Parker & Lee agency. The document had more pretensions. In those few sentences, Lee explained what and how professional communication ought to be. Precursory in the declaration was not as much the ethical reflection, as the vision of the role of honesty in the process of constructing corporate identity. The old corporative communication strategy that treated the public as annoyance to be loathed would end up, in Lee’s vision, damaging any company’s bottom line.

Lee carried to an extreme his policy of transparency when he was working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. After an accident in which several passengers died, Lee not just gave the journalists the information about the details and casualties, but also gave the journalists access to the fateful site. This way to manage a crisis, which now is recommended in every Crisis Management textbook, was at that point rather bold.

Ivy Lee, who sold himself as a man of deep culture, was, according to Stuart Ewen, more interested in collecting books than in reading them. He seems to have been familiar with the theories of Gustave Le Bon, the French author and pioneer in the field of social-psychology. Le Bon emphasizes in his work the cognitive limitations of “the crowd”. This shapeless phenomenon is unable to elaborate complex ideas or to distinguish between the objective and the subjective. The crowd, according to Le Bon, acts on the basis of “images”, and these images are the result of the reduction of the natural complexity of things. The images that set the crowd in motion condense certain aspects of reality, but they are not the reality. Still, those images fill the popular mind with “illusions”, and these illusions constitute the inner world of the crowd. Le Bon’s illusions forms the reality inside our mind that later Walter Lippmann would call pseudo-environment. The art of controlling the crowd, which was what most intrigued Lee, was based, according to Le Bon, in the ability to generate illusions through the use of symbols to which certain values or strong emotions are attached in the crowd’s mind.

The last years of Ivy Lee’s professional activity were stained by scandals. The public distrust against Lee intensified again when the press disclosed that he had been working for the Soviet government. Supposedly, Lee was involved in the production and distribution of a series of pamphlets to improve the image of the Soviet Union among the American Public.

The mistrust became hatred when the public knew that Lee had been advising the very German NAZI party on the possibility of winning over US public opinion. In order to preserve the secret of this consulting job, Lee used as a front the US division of the German Company IG Farben. Lee was called to testify in front of the House on Un-American Activities in 1934 because of this affair. He never admitted having distributed NAZI propaganda in the USA, but he could not deny having advised the German government on how to improve its relations to the US. To this end, Lee met several times with Adolph Hitler, his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbles and other NAZI officials.

Lee never made a public statement in connection with this affaire. We will never know if it was because he had nothing to say or because he thought that the fight was not worth it. Lee died a few months later, in November 1934, of a fulminant brain tumor.

In his final assignment, Ivy Lee transgressed the informative transparency that he honored in his declaration of principles. This fact, by the way, does not reduce the value of the declaration, or of the principles established in the historical document, which still represents an ethical landmark in the practice of strategic communication. Only because of this declaration, Ivy L. Lee would deserve to go down into history as one of the fathers of the profession. Albert Oeckl, German scholar in communication, considered the declaration the birth of the professional field.

Lee acknowledged the importance of the public in the American political system. The public perception of a company was, in his vision, the conditio sine qua non for its financial survival. Lee realized that the relationship with the anonymous but omnipresent public was the main weakness of the capital.

The press was at the turn to the 20^th century the only mass medium. Lee’s experience as a journalist soon persuaded him of the key role of the press to achieve his goals. The press would eventually become the main channel to transmit messages to the public. Lee knew first hand the news values, what really makes news, as well as the preferences, trends, vices and inclinations of the newspaper editors. The press might shape the way we comprehend reality through its selection power. What does not appear in the media will never enter our awareness. Therefore, most of Lee’s publicity endeavors were aimed to control the information that was going to appear in the press.

There are several instances of Lee’s ambiguous approach to his profession. Repeatedly, Lee expressed his faith in an enlightened public opinion. He stated that “the American people, intelligent, just and generous to a cause that appeals to them, want facts and figures.”

With such statements, Lee obviously wanted to flatter the public. Still, he frequently did not treat the public as an intelligent entity.

His strategy rather followed what Petty and Cacioppo designated as peripheral route to persuasion. He was using a special type of heuristic, the satisfied-ego heuristic.

When Lee exalted the intelligence of his audiences, he expected that the mere exaltation would be enough to avoid a critical analysis of the delivered information. He was using a special type of heuristic, the satisfied-ego heuristic. Such an attempt to mislead the public would be in contradiction with the explicit praise of its intelligence.

Emphasizing that the public would not be influenced by means of easy emotional artifices, Lee expected that they would never question the facts he released, either. Yet, Lee was neither rigorous with the information he delivered to the public, nor scrupulous with the fashion it was delivered. The appeal to the intelligence of the public loses credibility when those who expressed it are, at the same time, trying to deceive the public.

When Lee stressed the importance of informative transparency, he was more interested in the credibility that flows from the transparency than in the honest dealing with information itself. When he appealed to the intelligence of the public, he was counting on the effect of the mere cajolement to neutralize criticism. Ivy Lee, a man with a complex and sophisticated mind, lent his complexity and sophistication to the practice of strategic communication. Many business- and statesmen were captivated by this new approach to the world of communication. Lee’s legacy is an unknown depth that makes this profession one of the columns of modern society, which is extraordinarily complex, too.

The Public Be Understood

In the next historical stage, communication professionals started to study their target audiences. They realized that the more they knew about them, the better they understood their publics, the more effectively they could establish relationships with them.

James Grunig called this new communication approach Scientific Persuasion.

And this basically means that the communication professionals apply behavioral and social sciences in order to more effectively persuade individuals or Mass Audiences.

Research became the key moment in every communication campaign. It was necessary to gather information about the target audience before the campaign started.

There are two forms of research: formative and evaluative.

Formative research is used to obtain information about our target audience. This will allow us to better defined our public and more effectively tailor our messages to the factual characteristics of our target audience.

Evaluative research is done at the end of the campaign in order to find out to which extent the campaign was successful. To assess the effectiveness of persuasive messages, the researcher measures whether there was a significant change in the attitudes or behaviors of the target audience.

The practice of professional communication as scientific persuasion was first introduced by Edward L. Bernays.

Bernays is without doubt the most important name in the history of strategic communication. Born in Vienna on November 22, 1981, psychoanalysis ran in his blood, so to speak. Bernays was the double nephew of the father of this scientific discipline, Sigmund Freud. Bernays’s mother was the sister of the famous psychiatrist, and Freud’s wife was the sister of Bernays’s father. He was familiar with his uncle’s theories about the effect of the subconscious as a hidden source of human motivation. And such theories deeply determined his approach to public relations.

In his book Crystallizing Public Opinion, he defined professional communication as applied social sciences. Public Relations was, in his opinion, a systematic form of scientific persuasion. Bernays was the first person who delivered a lecture on public relations at academic level. It happened at the University of New York, and the title of the lecture was “On the principles, practices and Ethics of the new profession of public relations”.

He started working for show business. The first American tour of the worldwide celebrated tenor Enrico Caruso was organized by Bernays, as well as a turbulent campaign to make the American public familiar with the Russian National Ballet and its most refulgent star, the dancer Valery Nijinski. His very first job as a publicist gives us a clear idea of Bernays’s methods and mental structures. He helped promote a Broadway show based on a French play written by the naturalistic author Eugène Brieux. Damaged Goods, the title of the play, was about a man who suffered syphilis and, in spite of his illness, got married and became father of a child who inherited the disease. Syphilis, as well as the rest of sexually transmitted diseases, represented another taboo because they were associated with indecent life styles. Bernays sensed that in order to be successful, he would have to dissipate the shadow of the social ban on this topic. The promotion campaign did not focus as much on the play or the author, as on the necessity of public enlightenment in this controversial topic. Bernays emphasized the urgency of educating the public in order to control the individual and social damage such diseases were generating.

The campaign, as well as the show, were very successful. A key element of this success was Bernays’s ability to get the endorsement of the most important names of the social, political and industrial life at the time. Among others, he persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr., Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt Sr., Mr. and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dr. William Jay Schieffelin to sign up on the Fund Committee created on the occasion of the première. The social function of the play was more stressed than its artistic merit. This case also serves as an example of the symbiosis between strategic communication and society, because even if the final intention of the campaign was to promote a play, the positive effect on society is indisputable. To fight against that irrational taboo might in fact have contributed to control the devastating effects of syphilis. Still, the campaign represents another excellent example of the moral ambiguity that characterizes Bernays’s work. Behind the façade of social enlightenment, Bernays was actually ensuring the financial success of his product, in the case the theatrical show.

During World War I, Bernays joined the Committee for Public Information directed by George Creel. He was even one of the members of the committee who was selected to handle press relations on behalf of the U.S. mission during the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war. Bernays had the opportunity to discover some of the dangers of the profession. The committee was subject to bitter criticism when the Congress accused its members of trying to hamper the activities of the press.

Bernays was for many years – he died in 1995, at the age of 103 – a constant, but not always visible, presence in American life. Bernays advised the moguls of financial America, as well as relevant figures in the political arena during more than six decades, but often he was behind the scenes, trying to shape the way people thought and felt.

His most significant contribution to the history of strategic communication was, no doubt, the Torches of Freedom campaign.

On March 3^rd, 1929, during the New Yorker 5^th Avenue Easter Sunday Parade, a number of young and attractive women strolled through the street ostentatiously smoking cigarettes. Those women were offending an unwritten law: Smoking in public settings was a behavior still prohibited for women in the second decade of the 20^th century. Such behavior, those women knew, was going to be perceived as scandalous.

Of course, this manifestation was a sensation in New York. The feminist leader Ruth Hale had called the women to join this special demonstration. The women smoking resolutely in New York monopolized the attention of the press. Pictures and stories related to the event, as well as reactions in favor and against were published in the most important newspapers of the US. Also the European Press echoed the event and the ardent discussion aroused by it. The event, as reported by the press, had all the appearance of spontaneity. Yet, the spontaneity was just this: appearance.

The mastermind behind the scenes was Edward L. Bernays, great wizard of publicity events. Bernays had never been especially interested in the emancipation of women until that moment. It was one of his jobs that moved him to approach this pressure group. His job, the great passion of his life, was at that specific moment of his life to sell cigarettes, Lucky Strikes cigarettes – to be exact.

Bernays realized that the market segment of female smokers offered huge development potential. Still, to be able to exploit this segment, it was necessary to fight against a taboo. One of the motivating forces behind collective behavior is imitation. People tend to imitate behaviors and ideas that others adopt or express in public, above all if the individuals who express those ideas or adopt such behaviors enjoy certain social prominence. Imitation is unlikely to happen, if not impossible, when any taboo prevents us from performing certain acts in public. And the idea of women smoking in public settings represented a taboo deeply rooted in the American frame of mind at that time.

Bernays knew that he would have to change the way people felt, but his goal was not to achieve this change. The change in the public mind was just a means, a necessary step to promote a product. In order to influence the public opinion, Bernays used a technique that would shape the modern conception of public relation: the creation of pseudo-events. The term pseudo-event was created in 1961 by the historian Daniel J. Boorstin to designate those publicity actions designed and staged for the only purpose of being reported in the media. Bernays realized the necessity of mass media in order to reach his natural audiences. But he did not just act as a transmitter of information. Bernays created events that the press would transform in news and present them to the public from the point of view of the creator of the event. Thus, Bernays raised the profession of strategic communication to the category of “social engineering”.

Bernays’s idea of using the women’s emancipation movement to increase cigarettes sales originated from a conversation with the psychoanalyst Dr. Abraham Brill. Brill’s specialty was the mental mechanism that generates inhibition. Dr. Brill, who had been a disciple of Sigmund Freud, made Bernays understand that the social ban on women who smoked in public would damage the cause of the American Tobacco Company for two reasons. First of all, the taboo hinders the visibility of the behavior and will make impossible any snow-ball effect. Second, many women had internalized that smoking – not just in public – was a dishonest or indecent act for women and transferred the ban to their private spheres. The metaphor used to promote the Easter Parade action also emerged from Brill’s head. In one of his conversations with Bernays, Brill uttered the thought that cigarettes were unconsciously associated to the superior role of men in society. Therefore, when a woman decides to light a cigarette, she was at the same time lighting a “torch of freedom”.

Bernays’s figure has been losing prestige with the passing of time. Although his importance in the American history of the 20^th century is undeniable, every story or anecdote that has to do with him has the unpleasant flavor of manipulation. The book written by his official biographer, Larry Tye, who had access for the first time to the documents Bernays donated to the Library of Congress, greatly contributed to establish the black legend. Tye portrayed Bernays as an incorrigible manipulator. Other authors have also emphasized Bernays’s ridiculous eagerness to achieve public recognition. Even at the time of his most frenetic professional activity, Bernays must have been subject to mockery among publicity and media fellows because of this urge.

In the 1960s, when the harmful effects of tobacco were too obvious to be denied, Bernays became involved in anti-tobacco campaigns. He used his old methods of mass persuasion to combat the habit he had helped thrive. He was again a precursor, for he joined the anti-tobacco crusade when it was still starting. This is perhaps the most admirable trait of Bernays’s personality. He was not able to control public opinion, as he often praised himself of, but he had the fine instinct to recognize trends, even when they were in embryonic state, and exploit them for his own interests. In this regard, nobody has ever matched Edward L. Bernays.

James Grunig and Todd Hunt distinguish in their book “Managing Public Relations”, one of the classics in the PR field, 4 different PR Models, i.e. 4 different ways to conceive and practice PR. Those 4 models correspond, according to both authors, to the 4 stages in the historical development of that profession.

The four models are:

Press Agentry / Publicity Model
Public Information Model
Two Way Asymmetrical Model
Two Way Symmetrical Model

Click here to see an overview of the 4 models:

1 – Press Agentry/Publicity Model (The Public fe Fooled / The Public be Damned)

The first PR model, which corresponds to the first stage in the historical development of the profession, is a One-Way communication model. That means that the roles in the communication process are clearly and rigidly defined: There is a sender and a receiver of messages. The communicator does not look for any kind of feedback.

The main purpose is defined as propaganda by Grunig and Hunt, with all the pejorative connotations that this word has (and that we have learned in the first part of the course), that is, as manipulation, as the concealed attempt to influence the behavior or the ideas of people.

The information is not true, has not to be true. Actually, it is frequently distorted or exaggerated to achieve the persuasive intentions of the propagandist.

Finally, the current areas of Business where this PR Model is already used, according to Grunig and Hunt are:

Sports, Show Business, Product Promotion, etc, which represents only 15% of the contemporary PR practice.

No research at all was used to design the communication campaigns at this stage.

2 Public Information (The Public fe Informed)

The Public Information is also a One-Way communication model: there is a source of the information and a receiver, and both are clearly defined and differentiated.

However, in this case there is a commitment with the truth. The information contained in the messages crafted by the PR practitioner is (should be) true and accurate.

Research is not relevant in this model, either. In some cases, PR practitioners did some readership analysis to find out which newspapers or magazines their target audiences read.

The purpose of this model is the simple dissemination of information. PR people started to write press release and send them to the different media outlets to be published. This way, they were using the raising print media as the channel to reach their target audiences.

Nowadays, this PR model is still broadly applied. According to Grunig and Hunt, almost 50% of contemporary PR follows this concept. You can find it in many governmental and non-profit organizations (public universities, YMCA, Red Cross, IRS, Admistration for Children and Families).

The key moment in the development of this PR model was the publication by Ivy L. Lee of his Declaration of Principles in 1903, already discussed in the previous section.

3 Two-Way Asymmetric (The Public be Understood)

The purpose, in this PR model is Scientific Persuasion. And this basically means that the PR practitioners apply behavioral and social sciences in order to more effectively persuade individuals or Mass Audiences.

This is the first of the so-called Two-Way communication models. Organizations search here for a certain kind of FEEDBACK. However, there is no balance between the sender of messages and the receiver.

Basically, the feedback is limited in this model to the target audience research. There are two forms of research: formative and evaluative.

Gruning and Hunt talk about “unbalanced effects” in the Two-Ways Asymmetric communication model. This means that, even though feedback is essential in the model, the roles of sender and receiver are still rigidly defined. The feedback from the target audience is only used to improve the effectiveness of persuasive messages, not to better understand the nature and necessities of the public.

According to both authors, the Two-Way Asymmetric model is applied in 20% of the contemporary practice of Public Relations. You can find this concept in most competitive business and agencies. It is also the PR model adopted by all professional PR firms.

The practice of PR as scientific persuasion was first introduced by Edward L. Bernays.

Bernay’s most popular – and controversial – campaign was the so-called “Torches of Freedom“

4 Two-Ways Symmetric Model:

In the last PR model, the Two-Way Symmetric, the purpose is not persuasion, but mutual understanding between organizations or between an organization and its publics. They pursue the public interest as well.

There is a balance between both parts in the process of communication. The roles of sender and receiver are not rigidly fixed. The model contemplates two different groups of communicators with the ability to generate messages that will contribute to a better understanding between the parts involved.

Grunig and Hunt designed this model as ideal, i.e. they did not describe what PR actually is, but what it should be. As it was made clear in the first learning module of this course, it is rather utopian to think that the PR practitioner is mostly concerned with the public interest.

In spite of this, both authors believe we can find actual examples of this concept in the professional field of PR (around 15% in regulated business and agencies).

The name James Grunig associates to this PR model is the one of his mentor Scott Cutlip. Cutlip was the first full time PR scholar in this country. He wrote key books on PR theory and history and a plethora of articles about different aspect of the PR practice. Scott Cutlip was also the first author who did public relations for the public relations professional field, i.e. he always tried hard to present PR in the best possible light. Some of his most relevant works are:

Effective Public Relations
Pubic Relations History
The Unseen Power
Fundraising in the United states

Readings:

Advertising – by S. Biagi

Audiovisual Material:

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