Veteran public relations consultant Stan Higgins says public relations is not being accorded the space it deserves by corporates in Zimbabwe.
Higgins (SH) told Alpha Media Holdings (AMH) chairman Trevor Ncube (TN) on the platform In Conversation with Trevor that many people in the public and private sectors “think that PR is some magic wand that is waved and all is sorted out.”
He also spoke about his 40 years experience in Zimbabwe’s PR industry. Below are excerpts from the interview.
TN: Stan Higgins, welcome to In Conversation With Trevor.
SH: Thank you for the invitation. Great to catch up.
TN: Absolutely. I am looking forward to this conversation. You and I come a long way you know.
SH: A long time ago since you were very young.
TN: Young in the newsroom, a cub reporter and you were one of those people who were holding my hand, so thank you very much for that.
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- I think a lot of journalists are grateful too.
- The professional guidance that you have given them over years.
- Stan you will be celebrating 40 years in this field. When you look back, I am reminded that you have had highlights and lowlights, and we will get to one of those highlights.
- For you, what has been your worst public relations disaster you have had to deal with?
- Without obviously sharing or naming names as it were?
SH: Sure. You know one of the interesting things about public relations is that we try to keep people prepared.
Like the Boy Scouts, the motto should be “Be Prepared”, and we have tried very hard with all clients and I think all PR consultants work hard to try and make sure any client is prepared for a disaster.
So, when one comes along, one hopefully is ready for it, and in the case of my own experience we were ready for it, which I am pleased about.
One of our clients, and this goes back to the late 1980s, one of our clients was a leading beverage manufacturer right here in Zimbabwe and they had a problem.
At that particular time there was a fuel shortage, one of the early fuel shortages that we experienced.
They had night and day shifts.
For the night shifts they were hiring transport from informal operators to get their staff home after night shifts and to get there for early morning shifts.
The things we call kombis now, but in those days, they had different sorts of names, but it was informal.
Then one night on the way home with the shift work group there was a can of fuel in the vehicle and it was not in a jerry-can it was in a plastic bottle.
There was a fire from an explosion and I think eight people were killed in the vehicle.
The vehicle may have been a bit overloaded as well.
So, the company had this major drama on its hands of whether it was responsible for the deaths of its employees through contracting a vehicle, which quite clearly was contravening regulations.
So, it was quite an incident, so immediately the media were interested, immediately the authorities were interested, but also more importantly the families were interested.
We swung into operation, it was literally in the early hours of the morning, like 4am.
By the time work started we were ready to handle the media.
It was not good, I mean eight people had died, a serious situation, severe and problematic.
The company did well in terms of making sure the priority was always other employees and the families of the people who had passed.
There was also a need to explain what they were doing and why they were doing it to the authorities.
There was a learning curve to be had as there always is, in how we cannot do this again.
I am glad they generally handled it very well, but it was not easy because of this loss of life, and I think that is something that is always the worst.
You know if you have a crisis and it involves a financial situation, or a moral situation it is one thing, but when you are dealing with human lives it is really very important to make sure that the prime focus is on a) the regret of loss of life, b) making sure that those who survive both in the families and in the business are treated properly.
Also to make sure that one learns that one cannot do this sort of thing again.
There was a fairly significant shift in the way transportation was handled by corporates at that time, as they were not the only people doing this, because at the time the public transport was failing somewhat, and people were relying more and more on the informal operators of public transport.
So I think what happened was that people became a lot more mature about who they appointed to do their transportation, making sure they followed the rules, making sure that their vehicles were road worthy, that the drivers had the proper licensing and the proper defensive driving courses, that there was in vehicles, the right sort of medical and fire equipment etcetera and etcetera.
It was a learning curve, but it was a sad one on the back of that.
I would like to say though that the families responded very well, they were shocked and horrified.
They never pointed fingers, they were so traumatised that they really wanted comfort, they wanted assurances and you know large families the bread winner was gone.
So what could they do and I think the company did extremely well to make sure that people were looked after, people were consoled.
Of course, there are always people in a disaster situation who want to take advantage.
So, creeping into the media was the odd voice saying “But they did not do this or they did not do that, this and that were the problems”.
It was not so much media people, but more other people…
TN: The public.
SH: I have to say the media did extremely well.
They were very objective about the whole thing, and they took to examining what was right and wrong on the issue as well.
So, it remained in the public spotlight for a good two to three months.
It was an issue that did not die after the first day or two or the first week, but it really carried on.
Even in subsequent years on, anniversaries we would often get media people saying it has been a year or two years, what have you learned and what has happened.
That is important I suppose because the media is in part, to hold everybody accountable, not just government but also corporates.
TN: Stan do you get the sense that generally speaking in this country and maybe in the region, that PR is given the space that it deserves?
- Because I see PR disasters almost every day, and there is no accountability.
- Big corporates get away with murder because of the way they treat the public, the way they communicate with the public.
- Do you get the sense that this is something that is important as far as our business is concerned?
SH: I think your question is: does PR get the right space?
I think the answer to that is no.
A great many people in the public sector and private sector alike think that PR is some magic wand that is waved and all is sorted out, and it is not really like that at all.
A properly constituted public relations programme really starts with an examination of what is right or wrong.
We have in PR what we call the six point planning model.
When you do a PR programme you go through this methodically and you follow the rules.
TN: What are the six points?
SH: Step number 1: There is an analysis of the situation. Where is the organisation now? What is right? What is wrong?
What are the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and threats?
All of the sort of things that you need to do to examine exactly where you are.
So that you do not have a situation where the chief executive says this is our problem please deal with it and then you run away and deal with it.
It may be the problem but then again it might not be so it is always best for the PR people, whether in-house or consultants, to do a thorough examination. Step number 1 Analysis of the situation.
Step number 2: Definition of PR objectives. Where do you want to go from here?
You have now analysed where you are, what do you need to do as a PR programme to achieve an end result.
The end result is usually tied in with things like corporate plans and desirability.
Basically, in life like human beings organisations want to be liked generally.
They want to be known and they want to be liked and that is generally what the objectives are designed to do, to create a positive situation out of the possibility of a negative.
I have in the past done analysis situations where things are fine.
The organisation is popular, it has got good products, it is respected.
This is not always the case, pretty often there are little problem areas, big problem areas, sometimes there is really a lot of work to do to get from a very negative situation into a positive.
Step number 3 is then of course analysing what to do.
How are you going to get there, what are the methods you are going to use.
I think a lot of PR practitioners come to the table with a ready-made set of ideas, and say if you do this or that it will all be alright.
That is also wrong, it is not going to work like that.
A PR programme has to be tailor made to that analysis that is done and the PR objectives you have set yourselves.
You then need to look at the budget and the resources that are required, which is Step number 4.
Nothing happens without money, nothing happens without other resources, and very often organisations are prepared to do things, but not to the extent that they should.
That is fine if there is a budget capacity that does not allow for it, but I do think that of people are serious about what they want to do with the resources that need to be allocated must be allocated.
It is not always financial, very often we are going to be calling on management to spend much more time on PR activity than they would like or they have been used to, and that resource, the people spending time is just as important as any expenditure of money.
Step number 5 is to make sure you analyse what we call, in marketing we have what we call publics, market segments, in PR very similarly we talk about publics.
So you have to analyse who are the publics of this organisation.
They might be government and other regulatory authorities, consumers, customers, employees, neighbours in the industry that you are in etcetera.
It has got to be looked at very carefully because very often a communications programme that is developed by the PR consultants must address all of the different publics and it is not the same message, and it is not the same methods, they differ from time to time of course.
TN: And the sixth one?
SH: The 6th Step is to go back to the beginning, it is a review.
At a given point you have to review what has been done, was it worthwhile, did we achieve what we set out to do.
If we did, what do we do now, if we did not why and how can we move in a direction to still achieve those objectives or has the time now come to go in a different direction, are we looking at something else.
Of course, in this very dynamic corporate world of the 21st century things change and change quickly and businesses change.
I remember when I first started in PR, telecommunications organisations were non-existent.
There was the national telephone authority and that was it, it is very different now.
In those days there were half a dozen commercial banks, so the financial services sector is hugely different today to what it was then.
The dynamics have changed and a PR programme must change with those dynamics too.
- “In Conversation With Trevor” is a weekly show broadcast on YouTube.com//InConversationWithTrevor. Please get your free YouTube subscription to this channel. The conversations are sponsored by Nyaradzo Group.
