Walmart used to annoy me with its horrible labor practices, draconian rules, and blatant manipulation of the media, but now its gone past annoyance to bafflement. Every time there's another Walmart headline I just scratch my head and say "what are they thinking?"
The latest was the firing of their VP of Marketing because she allegedly went for rides in an Aston Martin and accepted dinners from Agencies pitching their business. As some one who used to do agency searches, I do understand that these crimes rank right up their with torture and sex molestation -- well maybe closer to jaywalking and littering ( the scene from Alice's Restaurant comes to mind.) But my beef isn't with the fact that both Julie Roehm and the agency that just won the Walmart business were fired for such heinous offenses. It's Walmart's complete and utter hypocrisy. Their message is: we're all about ethics. Which might be believable for a nanosecond, except that the agency behind the biggest ethics scandal to hit the blogosphere in awhile (and presumably the PR person who okay-ed those fake blogs) are still happily employed. In fact, elsewhere in today's news is one about about how ex-politico and now Edelman exec Michael Deaver is attempting to help Walmart repair its image. Perhaps they should start with consistency between words and actions.
I'll say this about the WalMart-Edelman fiasco: It sure made for a great lesson for my PR students this past semester. Where would we be without the sinners?
Like you, Katie, I've always found everything about WalMart a tad outrageous. And by this time I've come to see the hypocrisy as integral to the corporate culture. I had some real hope that Edelman might change things for the Bentonville gang -- or at least walk away when they found that change impossible. We'll see.
One thing I always enjoyed about having my own PR firm (in a past life) was the freedom to say "no" to clients like this. That's a value I think we share.
Posted by: Bill Sledzik | December 13, 2006 at 10:48 AM