Weighing in on Palace PR: Part 2
I felt the need to weigh in once again on Palace PR post cancer-announcement, which is not only devastating, it also proves all the theories and conspiracies wrong, and started the blame game.
I stand by all my PR lessons in the prior post. Except for one. I thought we were being manipulated by the Palace PR team. How could they possibly be so incompetent? So I justified their incompetence as a deliberate ploy to mislead. It was incompetence.
Part of my reasoning for this is the job Buckingham Palace posted just prior to Kate’s video for a Communications Specialist paying only $44,000 Canadian a year. (Note: timing was terrible on this). That is a tad higher than entry level these days. That is also what I call, a task-taker job — do what you are told. Write this, answer that, monitor those. For a strategic communicator who would have/should have been able to navigate two senior royals with cancer, the pay would have been commensurate with experience, expertise and the ability to function as a trusted, strategic advisor.
This is the role we train our students for: trusted advisors.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, the crisis began not with the announcement of Kate’s surgery but the publishing of the manipulated photo: the violation of their very own instructions to ‘respect privacy’. Reminds me of when Celine Dion once “retired” and then she was everywhere and someone wrote: “How can we miss you if you won’t go away?” How can we respect privacy if you share a personal picture of her and her kids? How can we trust you when that photo is photoshopped?
It was that moment that they created a ‘self-inflicted’ crisis. These happen all the time.
As called for, the ‘corrective action’ was Kate coming on video to reveal she has cancer, to offer an explanation. It was sad it had to come to that and the video became their only option to stop the chatter.
Now it’s imperative that the Palace undergo what is essential in any crisis, after corrective action: Organizational Learning. A careful examination of what went wrong, what went right, what needs to change, how can we learn from it so we don’t have to go through this hell again. Let’s hope they are doing this. Here’s a starter list:
First, build your communications team to be strategic. Pay them well and make sure they have access to lifelong professional development and networking. Throw away the Victorian playbook. If the answer to any question is, ‘because that’s the way we’ve always done it,’ suggest you rethink the way things are being done. It’s 2024. What’s going to happen when the Palace is hit with a cyber attack (and it will, just as it will with any organization now being told, it’s a matter of when, not if). You saw the chaos created by manipulated photos and allegations of A.I. ….will you be ready?
To that end, dust off your crisis communication plan (every organization should have one) and give it a massive overhaul.
Second, don’t blame the public. That’s like Boeing blaming DEI initiatives for their airplane failures over the past year or so. Oh, wait…they did. You don’t blame the public for the reaction that you yourself generated.
The very discipline of public relations is to be the bridge between the public(s) and the organization and to always act in the public interest. Every professional PR organization functions with a code of ethics and integrity. To be that bridge is to understand the public and why they are behaving as they are: in this case, crafting and sharing conspiracy theories and demanding the truth.
Helpful here is ‘uses and gratification theory’. Simply put this theory states that everyone has individualized uses for their media: my husband uses Instagram to get exposed to artists and their work; I use it to follow politics, pop culture and my friend’s life events. People had different uses for the Super Bowl: some watched it for the actual game and this year, we saw a whole new audience watching to see if they could spot Taylor Swift. Then there are different gratifications we get from our media consumption: information, inspiration, education, a sense of community, entertainment, socialization.
In the case of the royals, I would put people’s use for social media in two camps: information seeking and conspiracy/theory sharing. Gratifications, I would argue, primarily fell into two categories as well: schadenfreude — we watched the Royal PR machine destroy Meghan and chase Harry and Meghan to California, now do Kate; and genuine concern for the Princess and Future Queen.
Let’s just stick with the latter: genuine concern. Because understanding this AND the fact that public response to a crisis depends on the organization’s history of (which had been decimated as manipulative and in kahoots with British tabloids) AND the role of emotion in crisis (in this case, concern turned into anxiety and then anger), a simple approach could have prevented a cancer diagnosis from turning into a PR nightmare and a gross violation of privacy.
That approach, as I wrote in the last post: consistency. A principle of key messaging. Same message, over and over again. Ad nauseam. Every day if you have to. When I was working for a corporation years ago and the media were calling for comment on a business decision that created community uproar, I always responded, “we are simply the mortgage holder.” I had it written in big bold letters beside my phone. When it started feeling weird, I would call up the crisis consultants I had hired and they reminded me to say the same message, nothing more. And it worked, eventually the interest in our role just fizzled out; and the spotlight turned to the developer to whom we had issued the mortgage.
And you know what? THAT IS WHAT KENSINGTON PALACE IS NOW DOING.
The second one, in quotes, gets A+. The Prince and Princess — so it acknowledges they are in this together as a couple and family — touched, and most importantly, “are grateful for the understanding of their request for privacy at this time.”
Now say this over and over again, until it fizzles. Don’t do anything that contradicts the primary call to action: PRIVACY. Do as you say.
I especially like the “grateful for the understanding” rather than the more commanding “we request privacy”. It’s like saying, “thank you for your patience” when you’re late. It almost politely shames those who are NOT respecting privacy and gets those who are thinking of ways to set up photographers outside their home to think twice.
Over and over again.
I have one more recommend that could be added, when appropriate. The Palace needs to repair it’s image as being manipulative (photoshop), it’s loss of credibility (APF notice) and to win back ‘the hearts and minds’ of both royal lovers and royal agnostics alike.
Make it a call to action. With two senior royals battling cancer, ask people to channel their well wishes into donations to local cancer charities. Use it as an opportunity educate on the work of these charities in the areas of research, support and awareness of early detection and symptoms. As I said in my last post, in times of crisis, people want instructing information (they have that now) and adjusting information. A call to action to donate can help people feel they are doing something to support the Princess.
When the time is right.
Every crisis is a learning opportunity — and in my case as a PR prof — into a lesson I wasn’t necessarily planning. Class dismissed. ✌🏻