We often hear about the various public relations strategies that work, though to what degrees they work is up for debate. However, we rarely hear about the repeatedly used strategies that simply don’t work. Here are a few strategies that are often used as public relations and face-saving moves, all of which almost always fail.
Blaming Your Audience and Your Customers
This is a public relations strategy used quite extensively by the movie companies under Disney’s control. Whenever one of their movies or TV shows fails, they blame toxic fans, they blame fan babies and claim they want the world. They go on large social media rants that pull down and belittle the people they are trying to sell to.
The odd thing is that these messages rarely come from any of the “Money” people, they almost always come from the woke actors who star in the shows. Even when movies are sold as woke and then fail dramatically, it is almost always the actors and occasionally the writers who try to highroad the consumer and start attacking them on social media. Perhaps social media sneaked up on movie and TV producers in a way they didn’t expect, and perhaps if they had reigned in their actors at an early stage of the negotiation process, they could have stopped a lot of the reputation damage that these writers and actors have done on social media.
Trying To Excuse Behaviors
A common problem in the business world is where a company makes a PR blunder, and then they do more damage trying to fix it than if they had let the issue rest. Even some of the darkest marks on a company can be forgotten if the company allows them to go away. In many cases, the “Damage control” portion, the apology, the explanation, does more damage. It simply highlights the problem, reminds people of the problem, and gives them more to talk about.
Trying To Pass Behavior Off Without People Noticing
A common PR move is to simply slip things by your customers with the hopes they won’t notice. For example, when governments want bad news to slip by unnoticed, they will release it during a time when the media is preoccupied. It may be preoccupied with a prince/princess wedding, a celebrity death, or even a terror attack.
Passing bad things off without people noticing does sometimes work, but sometimes it doesn’t. For example, the game Crash Team Racing came out with the promise of no loot boxes or microtransactions in their game. Reviewers felt comfortable offering favorable reviews, and then once all the reviews were in, the developers Naughty Dog put microtransactions and loot boxes in the game.
This is not the first game to try this dirty trick, but the developer’s insistence beforehand about loot boxes and microtransactions were what really angered people. As a result, YouTubers and members of the Fandom Menace (a YouTube group) won’t let people forget what Naughty Dog did, and it turned Into quite a nasty PR problem.
If you are having PR trouble, get in touch with Star Media PR Group for some public relations strategies that actually work!
