RGA — PR & Marketing Communications

The critical importance of being objective

Written by Rick Grant on November 21st, 2009

We’re very fortunate here. While we consult with some great companies on their PR efforts, we also write for some of the top industry trade publications, not as independent experts but as journalists. This keeps us connected to our roots, ensures that we never stop thinking like the editors we serve and makes us better at helping our clients come up with story pitches that will work for the industry’s best editors. It’s also an exercise in remaining objective.

When you love your clients and you genuinely admire the efforts they put into their product development and marketing, you naturally want to help them spread the word. But stories that are all spin, that are written based on conclusions worked out in advance without consideration for the facts will not serve the long-term best interests of the client.

To their credit, our customers don’t complain when we ask them why. Why did you develop your products this way? Why does it meet the market’s need? Why are you selling it this way? Why are you better than your competition? These are the same questions we ask experts from companies that are not our clients when we write about them for industry publications. We need the answers to create meaningful stories that will ring true with readers, because they are true.

These thoughts come to mind as I read a story in the New York Times about “hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.”

According to NYT:

“Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.”

How sad. In college, I worked side-by-side with physicists working on what was then the largest cloud chamber in the world. They faced many challenges as they worked to control the temperature and humidity of every square centimeter of a 3-foot diameter aluminum column that rose up three stories from the basement of the Physics Building. They hoped to create clouds in a very controlled environment, mostly so we could pollute them and see what happened.

Many of the things they tried didn’t work. There were plenty of skeptics saying they would never get it done. Even so, they continued their work steadfastly, competing against themselves and using the data to tell them how close they were coming to their goal. They never attempted to trick the data they were getting into defeating their skeptics. What real scientist would do this?

Global Warming is a politically charged issue that could have a very real impact on our future survival. We need to find out what’s going on and what part we play, if any, in the changes we’re observing in our environment. It’s not a contest to be won by a particular political party or scientific camp. It requires scientific objectivity, not allegiance to a foregone conclusion that may have nothing to do with the truth.

Being objective can be one of the hardest things a business manager–especially a marketing manager–is asked to do. We ask our clients to do it every day and we make sure we don’t let them down by drinking the Kool-Aide before we know what the facts are. That’s how we ensure that our advice always adds value.

Would we be able to do this if we didn’t work with the industry’s best companies? Probably not. Like I said, we’re fortunate.