Weighing in on the PR of Kate
Headlines are screaming, PR Nightmare for Kensington Palace PR team who work for future King Wills and wife Kate, but as Public Relations professor, it’s a PR dream.
This whole Kate-gate fell smack dab during our crisis communications lessons in second semester and during our public opinion class for first semester students. AND, it’s a case study the whole class seems to be following. I’ve never seen my class so engaged.
After confirming it is a crisis threatening the very polished and perfect reputation of Kate, er Catherine, we discussed and determined what stage the crisis is in, agreeing Turner’s Six-Stage Sequence of Failure in Foresight (Turner, BA, 1976) is the most appropriate model.
Stage 2, we all agreed, was the announcement that Catherine was going to have surgery. Unnoticed was what was she going to have surgery for, why so long, and why no one saw her entering the hospital or people (other than Wills, once) going in to visit. The Palace PR likely could have stayed here, at this stage, if it had stuck to core messaging with a touch of transparency for added assurance.
Stage 3, and arguably when the s**t hit the fan and the crisis hit was the release of photo that rather quickly received a kill notice for it’s manipulation.
The Palace did not have to issue a photo. Sure historically on Mother’s Day, UK, it had, but there were other options: an old photo, just text or this year paying hommage to their mothers, Carol and Diana. Or nothing. Nothing is indeed a strategy. They themselves broke their own rule of privacy. And let’s be clear, Kate did not post it herself, nor did she manipulate it herself.
This is where everyone is placing blame: on the comms team. Every communicator — and student — knows that your job is not to embarrass your client, your boss, your future Queen. You think through all the angles, you risk manage strategy and messaging to an inch of it’s life. Trust me, Kensington Palace knows what they are doing.
How can I be so sure? This is a ‘self-inflicted’ wound crisis. Totally preventable. They know better. And here’s where the conspiracies have taken hold of the narrative. Every communicator knows, and is taught, get control of the narrative as quickly as possible in a crisis — the principle of full disclosure and the principle of quick response (Smith, p. 464), because in the absence of your narrative, the public, media and even your allies will fill in the information gap themselves, creating ghastly rumours that only make your crisis worse, and which gives it legs — in other words: It Won’t. Go. Away.
Also crisis 101: when a crisis hits, your audience and stakeholders need instructing information: what should they do. For Kate, it was, she’s going in for surgery, give her privacy. Not really crisis level. But, as the photo emerged and you broke your own instructing information to give privacy, people then need ‘adjusting’ information to answer: “What the hell is going on and how am I to cope with the ambiguity??” And here we are. Silence.
Strategic silence.
We also learn in crisis lessons about Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), basically a crisis response and how audience will react depends on two things: history of crisis (if no history, audience will forgive faster) and who is to blame (if not to blame, audience will forgive faster).
We talked about this in class. History of. How far back can we go on the history of Palace cover ups and deliberate manipulation of media and public? Students suggested Diana. I think it goes back centuries. I mean, didn’t Henry XIII kill a few of his wives, spinning it as their fault when really he was having issues procreating a male heir??
But for those non-history buffs, history of is Diana works, because that is when the cloak of secrecy began being revealed: when the truth oozed out with Diana’s candid interviews and biographies. Even more recently, the Palace control of narrative and ability to manipulate was exposed by Meghan and Harry: the Oprah interview, the book, the Netflix special. The curtain was opened by a biracial ‘outsider’ and Diana’s son who had ‘done the work’ to get past the trauma of losing his mother at such a young age and then paraded behind her coffin for the world to see. No one will ever forget that image, and of the card on the casket that read, in his handwriting, ‘Mummy’. Throw in the Netflix series, The Crown and we’ve all seen more of The Firm and how it operates than they would like us to know.
Knowing this salacious history (it is not at ALL what you see, said Meghan to Oprah), now puts into question the Firm’s integrity and credibility. We can’t fully trust what they say and why they say it.
The second part of SCCT take into account Attribution Theory. Every crisis needs someone to blame. If the crisis is an accident, or the organization was a victim or it was unintentional then the public may forgive faster.
As of March 20, one of the headlines I read, is Palace is blaming the public. Please, like your mess is OUR fault? Earlier, they blamed Catherine, or C. in the case of the post-manipulated photo social post, ‘I apologize for the confusion’. As if. That is, by the way, not an apology: it does not say, ‘I apologize for manipulating the photo and making it available to the media, as the Patron of the Photographic Society I should have known better’. No, instead an apology for the confusion.
Isn’t that, in fact, what the Palace wants to create….confusion…?
I would argue that they DID know better: both when the violated their own ‘privacy please’ and their ‘never explain never complain’ motto that tried to justify the manipulated photo.
Why are they blaming Kate? Catherine? C? Putting her initial on the post?
So the class looked at where the palace is with response strategies:
Usually, their go-to is the ‘Diversion Response’: detract from the real issue by throwing another scapegoat to the media. The nothing-to-see-her-look-over-there’ strategy. And, as we saw circa Meghan and Harry, those two provided an easy diversion target. That target is no longer there.
Is Kate the new target? But she’s the future Queen. But protect the future King at all cost. Blood over title and all that.
They tried a little bit of defensive response post photo with justification, “as an amateur photographer….”. But that was suspect. It held until AFP compared them to Korea and Iran and said it would re-examine ALL photos.
As of today, with the blame put on the public, they seem to be on the offence but the consistent strategy they are working with is strategic ambiguity and strategy inaction.
Everyone knows they just need to issue simple proof of life at this point. They know this. At a certain point of crisis, the organization, the firm needs to turn to the crisis response strategy of rectifying behaviour and offer corrective action. And in this case it’s simple.
Just ask the other palace, Buckingham, in charge of the current King and Queen. Moscow papers say King is dead. Within hours, ‘he is not’. A statement. Kate no where to be found but here’s three fake and suspect images that are fuzzy when everyone carries a high-res camera in their back pocket? Please. Within minutes, they could have issued a, ‘that’s not her,’ message and stuck to their primary message of ‘respect her privacy as she heals’. Meanwhile, ailing King Charles, who has cancer, is seen the same day, in full colour, high res images in public.
The two palaces are clearly NOT on the same page. Deliberate? Likely. The more King Charle’s team does to quash rumours and show him as healthy the worse they make Will and Kate’s team look. With no Meghan to blame (though they tried and ended up with a perfect, loved-up colour photo of the couple blasting over social media, adding insult to injury) they need another diversion, another source to blame.
The media are attacking the comms team. It happens a lot, an easy target and rest assured, when this is over, the team will be dismissed and blamed and they will have done their duty to take a bullet. But that’s a lazy blame. Make no mistake, we are being manipulated.
“The secret of successful manipulation was in understanding the motivations of people and in using research to identify the messages most likely to produce the attitudes and behaviors desired by an organization.” (John R. Fisher, “Public Relations and War: Socially Responsible or Unethical,” Journal of International Business Disciplines , vol. 4, no. 1 (November 2009), 54–67).
Edward Bernays, often considered the father of PR, said the above quote. Kensington Palace understands perfectly well the motivations of people are to inherently NOT respect the privacy of their Royals, even if told. (Exhibit A: Diana, Exhibit B: Meghan, Exhibit C: Any parent ever who has told their kid told NOT to do something, only to see them turn around and do it). Social media makes that ALL the easier. That and cell phones with cameras and a world where mistrust of institutions are at all all time high and the media must still sell papers to survive.
So what messages were most likely to produce attitudes desired by The Firm: saying the opposite of what they expected. Especially after the King announced his illness and openly said it was cancer. “But if he can tell us what’s wrong, why can’t Kate….?” That and issuing a fake photo.
In other words, it is my view, they are intentionally creating chaos. I’m convinced we’re all being played. Create enough chaos and misinformation a la Trump and the truth can easily be covered. We live in a world where conspiracy theories and conjecture by we, the public, ARE the cover up!! And sure enough, March 21 headlines read, ‘Kate and Will are just accepting they have to live with social media chatter.’ The new scapegoat is….US. Which by the way, falls under strategy of ‘attack the accuser’ usually crisis strategies reserved for accusations of sexual harassment and the go-to for Trump.
They know exactly what they are doing.
Other lessons, not just related to crisis comms but PR in general: consistency is key. Lesson for my first semester PRs. Kate is recovering yet dabbling in photoshop? Kate is recovering yet carrying a grocery bag? On and on, the level of inconsistencies is so stark even the non-conspiracy theorist, myself included, can conclude with certain, “something is rotten in the state of England”.
Credibility of source is also integral to PR strategy, and at play here. Why are we trusting an image put out by TMZ? Media are losing credibility. AFP says Kensington Palace is never to be trusted after the photo manipulation. That is huge. Kate, who has spent decades putting in the work, shutting up and putting up, being a good royal, with never a hair out of place or lipstick askew, or awkward expression, or messy bun or sleeves rolled up; whose life’s work has literally been to be create an image as a credible, believable and most importantly, respected ROYAL, has had that wiped out with one, highly manipulative PR team, who knew what they were doing and did it for reason.
What is worth destroying one’s reputation to protect another’s? I suspect we’ll never know.
Final thought, because I don’t want to entertain all the various storylines out there. I think the Harry visit that lasted 45 minutes is key here as well.
For the record, we do NOT train our students to be master manipulators but rather, to be trusted strategic advisors. All of my students knew ‘the right thing to do’. They know what should have been done and what needs to be done because we teach ethics. By saying this is a PR nightmare and blaming the comms team is an easy and quite frankly lazy out to explain the inconsistencies and silences.
The key here is not the WHO but the WHY?
Now I have papers to grade.
P.S. Required following: @popapologists on IG and Podcasts.