Fishburn Hedges

26.10.2011 | (1 comment)

Dear Susan Rice

You are the Managing Director of Lloyds Banking Group Scotland.  You were quoted today in the Financial Times commenting on a good new initiative you have championed, with all the banks pledging to commit to a new ethical code of conduct and a new “Chartered Banker Professional Standards Board”.  The idea is to impose new commitments, and complement the many other initiatives to get the banks back on track, by changing banks’ culture and reinforcing positive behaviour.  

You comment: this is “not a PR exercise”.  If it is not, what on earth is it?

Let me try to define a typical PR exercise:

Understanding what audiences, from customers to watchdogs, really think of you, from their perceptions to their practical experience 

• A willingness to address and close any gap between expectation and reality
• Ensuring your performance, day in and day out, matches up to your promise
• Owning up to past mistakes and attempting to rectify them
• Effective and credible communications, convincing people that this time you mean it
• Selling it to colleagues who have to embody this new “ethical” approach with determination and leadership.

I could go on, but is this not precisely what you are trying to do?  The FT piece opens with “Three years after the financial crisis ruined banks’ reputations…”.  This is a reputation management programme, and rightly so.  Don’t be ashamed to admit it.  Yes, your initiative is about behaviour change, but so is much of what we do in PR.  But it’s also about simply repairing badly damaged relations with your publics.

I wish you well.  I also wish we as a profession could reclaim the phrase “PR exercise” as a positive and not something always prefaced by “of course, this is not…”. 

Posted by John Williams

 

on 26.10.2011

MORICE MENDOZA :-
Good points all. Maybe an exciting PR idea for the banks in 2009/10 would have been to join together to create a social investment fund of their own making to provide training (possibly in the green economy as described by Chris Huhne today) - and more importantly hope - to young people struggling to find work. (if this happened and I missed it, apologies). They might then have showed a more humane side and avoided further reputational damage. Pie in the sky? Don't see why - a tiny proportion of the bonus budget would have been enough. All that was required was an ability to think about society beyond the City, understand it, care about it and try to contribute in a positive way. They could still do it but it would now seem reactive and would lose much of its power - though still worth doing. Would it be seen as a PR exercise or would it demonstrate that the banks are part of our society not divorced from it.