When BS enhances the credibilty of the opposition

Andrew Tucker in the paper he delivered at the IPPRC postulated that there are three varieties of trust that people feel towards organizations.

1.      Short term trust – i.e. based on measures like Fortune’s Most Admired – metrics that  look at financial performance and product quality.

2.      Medium term trust, which he calls reflexive mistrust  -- when you don't know someone well enough to trust, but I need to trust you somewhat to do my job or fill my need.

3.      And finally long-term trust based on customer loyalty and characteristics identified by Charles Fubrun et al.

I’m thinking that there’s another factor he should consider, something I’ll call reflexive trust. And that’s the situation when you so distrust another source because of their frequent obfuscation or spin that you begin to trust the opposition even though they have little credibility. I found myself listening to an interview on the BBC last night with a representative from Hamas and my usual skeptical response was flipped around. I found that I had more faith in what the Hamas representative had to say than in what was being said by the representative of the US Government. And that was because the US Government has been lying to us so consistently about events in the Middle East that it had totally lost its credibility, thus enhancing the credibility of the opposition. Organizations would be wise to heed this tale. Walmart, are you listening?: If you consistently obfuscate and lie and spin -- at some point, your very statements begin to enhance the credibility of your enemies.

Comments

[Andrew Tucker]

Katie,

In response to David's comments on whether it's better to follow academic expertise on evaluating trust or a "PR guru", methinks the gentleman doth protest too much!

In fact, David doesn't recognize that academics are now looking to PR practitioners as exemplars of where theoretical rubber hits the real-world road. As a political science professor specializing in how organizations can measure and manage their trust-based reputations, I came to the IPRRC to test whether academic work in this area (of which Barbara Misztal, I'm afraid to say, is very out of date) can help practitioners do their job. And, with due respect to Katie's IPR paper, I wrote my conference paper because her model doesn't take into account the best academic research currently available.

In my experience, business is keen to gain competitive advantage by learning from cutting edge academic research, but only if it can be implemented in a cost-effective way. That's why it make sense for academics and PR practitioners to collaborate on research agendas. It also makes sense to look a bit further afield than Wikipedia for your experts!

[KDPaine]

I totally agree with David's suggestion that we base trust measurement on science. That's why we published the IPR paper on Guidelines for Measuring Trust. http://www.instituteforpr.org/reputation_and_trust.phtml?article_id=2003_measuring_trust

[David Phillips]

Katie,

Why is it that PR people keep trying to re-invent the wheel.

It does us no good to be seen to be playing in areas where there is much more significant expertise.

When it comes to trust, is it better to follow the expertise of people like Prof. Barbara A Misztal or a PR Guru
http://www.le.ac.uk/sociology/staff/bm50.html?

Today it is so simple for our clients to find out about the world's top experts using resources like Wikipedia and to find the top experts in the world and thier work.

Want to find out about trust, stop by Wikipedia as a good place to start.

To attempt to provide PR evaluation of trust, it has to be based on sound science first all the rest is spin.