Earlier this year, when the Cracker Barrel fiasco happened, most people wondered just how blind management had to be to make such an egregious error and to do so as deliberately and as expensively as it did. Why didn’t their marketing and PR people sense something was wrong before the company took the leap? I knew.
In 2023, when the Bud Light brand famously committed marketing hari-kari by putting transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a bathtub surrounded by Bud Light cans, most people wondered just how out of touch the brand manager had to be to make such a massive mistake. Why didn’t their marketing and PR people sense something could go wrong and speak up before the brand took the plunge? I knew.
This isn’t a parody. Dylan Mulvaney is now the face of Bud Light. pic.twitter.com/cpygA74cG5
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 2, 2023
Of course, it got worse from there. Cracker Barrel may have learned from Bud Light. At least the restaurant chain was able to reverse course before it put itself out of business. Bud Light, on the other hand, never did any of the most basic things that a crisis management intern would know to do:
If you make a mistake, own up to it, apologize sincerely, and communicate your corrective actions. This is the core playbook, and Bud Light did none of it.
Groupthink
Not long after that story broke, I was in a social media discussion group with a cross-section of fellow crisis communications consultants and crisis managers. If you want a sense of where they were coming from on the Bud Light issue, here were the stated rules for the discussion group: No talking politics. The unstated rules were, if you said anything good about Trump, you’d get banned for talking politics. If you said something bad about Trump, you weren’t talking politics, just giving facts.
So, when the discussion of Bud Light came up, I posed a question centered on why the brand was resisting doing the most basic crisis management things we all knew any company in its position had to do to stop the financial bleeding.
The group ganged up on me and summarily said that Bud Light needed to double down and push the trans agenda until the world adjusted to it, not the other way around. Of course that’s not how it worked out, as we now know.
These are symptoms of a professional field with self-awareness problems. Alissa Heinerscheid was Bud Light’s vice president of marketing when the Dylan Mulvaney crisis erupted. She’s the very prototype of the successful PR executive today.
I identified the root cause of the problem at Bud Light. She is VP of Marketing and her name is Alissa Heinerscheid. @budlight No compensation is necessary for my services🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/Srfk2pII7A
— • Angry Frog ™ • (@angrifrog) April 10, 2023
The pendulum of the field has swung, from the good ole boys and their monolithic thinking as illustrated in the TV series Mad Men, which was set in the 1960s, to the now largely female PR office of today. I feel fortunate in that the bulk of my PR career came after the Mad Men era and largely before the current era. My personal experience is rooted in a more balanced demographic make-up in the field, where mutual respect ruled on matters of diversity of thought.
When I worked for one big agency, we always made it a point to bring a diversity of perspectives into our brainstorming sessions and planning meetings. We did this to check our messaging and plans, to identify our blind spots and fix things before problems became real problems. The processes we followed as a matter of course would have sniffed the issues out at Cracker Barrel and Bud Light in one brown-bag lunch meeting. The culture of the field at that time was such that you were expected to speak up if something didn’t seem right, not keep quiet.
The PR field’s problems today aren’t limited just to brand missteps. Significant numbers of PR people now have no idea how newsrooms work, they can’t write, and their lack of any formal ethical training or personal religiousness has left them devoid of any true understanding of ethics in systemic practice. Ethics are as relative as the client, and as relative as the “stakeholder” group.
As a result, they tend to take any information given them at face value without question. With this in mind, one adage that I’ve found myself preaching time and again within the field is, “If you accept a lie, you will tell a lie.” The point being, take nothing you get from a client or anyone at face value. Verify everything.
PR people today, like a sizable number of journalists, now favor censorship and have no real understanding of the First Amendment and what it entails.
Over the years, I have been active as a columnist and a leader on national committees for the country’s largest public relations professional association. During the Covid pandemic, I often obeyed my compulsion to speak up when I felt something was wrong. This put me at odds with a large number of fellow PR association members over freedom-of-speech issues usually. For two years, I had fellow members reach out to me directly, not simply to tell me they disagreed; they went a step further, telling me what I had a right to say and what issues I should remain silent about. Freedom of assembly (going to church) was one. Allowing for the discussion of alternative medical treatments was another.
My argument then as now is this. If you’re in the business of communications, you won’t have a job very long if there is only one side to every issue. Freedom of speech and the First Amendment form the foundation on which the PR profession rests. Without them, there is no PR or journalism profession.
Changing of the Guard
For the most part, the field’s leaders now look like the CEO of Cracker Barrel and the former brand manager for Bud Light. The organizational cultures they run are single-minded in their thinking. Diversity of thought is punished. All advice and messaging are subservient to the same narratives you find in the New York Times and Washington Post.
You may have heard that old saying, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Today’s PR field and its culture of groupthink see every problem as solvable not only by communication, but specifically by woke thinking, woke narratives, and only by woke people.
This has crowded out many creative thinkers, problem solvers, and, yes, those Christians who have the courage to show their faith. And while there are still a few men in the field, there aren’t many guys left. “Toxic masculinity” has been purged.
This is the field the Cracker Barrels and the Bud Lights of the world now rely upon to help them avoid shooting themselves in the foot, and to clean up the messes they create.
But is the American PR field equipped to do that? The PR teams that descend on organizations and brands under siege are essentially groups of like-minded people who can’t even see other points of view, let alone adopt to them or strategize against them.
They’re the kind of people who would tell Bud Light that even though it screwed up and is losing millions, losing market share, and laying employees off, “You’re doing the right thing. Do more of it.”
