MarketingProfs Know-How Exchange : "All publicity is good publicity"

I worked in the entertainment industry for about a decade in LA and one of the mantra's was, "There's no such thing as bad publicity!"

Personally, I would have a tough time defending that "All publicity is good publicity" as an absolute. Think of a government official caught in a "compromising" position, or a corporation that's found to have done something that kills people.

In the US one of our oldest and largest accounting/consulting firms, Arthur Andersen, was destroyed by bad publicity from their role in the Enron scandal.

I agree these days when consumers are so educated, and are overhelmed by marketing - bad publicity can hurt you badly. Show business is an exception, because nobody beleives that publicity anyway.

Hi,

I don't agree with the hypothesis that 'All publicity is good publicity"

A few examples from India:

- A couple of years ago, Cadbury's choclates were found to have worms which damaged its reputation and affected its business badly. A major and expensive damage control exercise was undertaken with Indian superstar Amitabh bachhan coming in ads and reassuring consumers

- The cola companies(Pepsi and coke) have received a lot of negative publicity in the last couple of years. It did impact their sales

- Because of a rumour(publicity) about baba Ramdev's(a spiritual guru in india) about his medicines containing bone content, the sales and his brand image were adversely affected

- McDonalds sales in India were badlt affected when a man claimed that their french fries were laced with beef fat. Though there was huge publicity, yet it was bad publicity.

I hope these examples prove why i disagree with your hypothesis.

Hope it helps,

Sumit

To those who believe that..."All...is good...", they are taking an extremely arrogant position. I was speaking w/a colleague today about the very same thing.

Take Robert Downey, Jr...lots of bad, it hurt his career terribly. It seems, and Vev may verify, that in H'wood, you can get stoned, take heroin, crash your car into people, get terrible publicity, and you are hired by a company for $5M, the same year. And, you can do it again, the following year, and your stock value (if you went to 3 days in rehab), went sky high.

Isn't there something a bit arrogant about that?

Yet, the examples before mine much more strike the point.

Randall
WMMA

Hi Sally

I have worked in marketing & PR for many years. This saying was regarded a "known truth" when I started out but I am surprised that people still think that it might be true today.

It isn't.

Not all PR disasters hit the headlines but a classic example here in the UK was when Gerald Ratner of Ratners jewellery stores spoke at a conference. He admitted that many of their products were cheap rubbish. Within days the media picked it up and it became a hot topic everywhere. A good example would be that taxi drivers talked about it for days.

The company achieved more column inches and public conversation over about a month that it ever had in all its years of trading. The company name was on everyone's lips.

Result? It went out of business!

I have many more examples at a local level. I was once hired to fight a major national home builder who was destroying some ancient woodland to construct houses. Local residents enagaged me to run a PR campaign.

This was a "David versus Goliath" situation against a national brand name. I used that to my advantage by demonstrating that they didn't care about local people. The campaign received considerable publicity in the region and eventually went national.

Result? The publicity forced the company to reduce the scale of the development and minimise the number of trees felled. This cost them a great deal of money.

I would love to see your final dissertation. If you wish it published on my marketing and public relations blog (www.headlinepromotions.blogspot.com) I would be delighted to include it for you - or a link to anywhere else you publish it.

Good luck with the project!

John

Hello Everyone who has very kindly posted responses. These responses are fantastic but what i really would like is to get more specific as i am unsure on where to start or how i can possibly get 12,000 words out of this topic. My main area which im thinking about talking about s coca-cola and their failure water Dasani. Any other large companies that i could gain a great deal of information on or any theriores that might be relevant to the title would be very very very helpful!
Thank you for your time

In answering this question it might be useful to define who is the beneficial of this publicity.

For example, if you are assessing whether all publicity is good publicity for an individual or whether for an organisation, or maybe the media as a whole.

You could consider the media and publicity from an ethical stance.

If you are considering at an organisation you might look at annual reports and then maybe try and correlate them with any publicity incidents.