Is it even possible?
Consider an entrepreneur, group, company that has something genuinely important to deliver or sell...
With the means to engage in public relations...
Launched on behalf of the truth about the service, product, or idea.
Yes, I know this is a completely foreign concept in our society, where
PR is deployed to peddle lies and deceptions from dawn to midnight---but
just suppose.
What's the first mistake good people would make?
My answer is based on my work with private clients. The top two
mistakes (it's a virtual tie) are: they think the truth will stand on
its own, like a statue in a park; and they believe being nice will
attract wide support.
The first notion is stunningly naïve. The second is based on fear of offending someone somewhere.
Statues mainly attract birds with a sense of humor. Nice is a pretty good sleep-aid.
I have a vivid image of a group going up against a collection of
plundering mega-corporations; the TV ad featured a young blonde walking
toward the camera across what looked like the floor of a bank. She
stopped ten feet away from the lens, her smile unwavering, and spoke a
dozen encouraging words in a language I would call Rainbow White Rice.
For the price of the ad, the group could have pushed out a few hundred attack ads on the Web. Oh well. Mustn't offend.
One of the basic errors here is: believing in maintaining order.
Forget it. Order is whatever the current configuration is. The mass of
opinion, belief, feeling, misconception, ignorance, all taken
together. The cloud of it. The network of it. The haze of it. The
general consensus of it.
That configuration doesn't know a new idea. It doesn't want a new idea. Therefore, it must be cracked, dispersed, blown apart.
This takes the willingness and energy to stage a hit on Order.
Not just once, but over and over. With no quarter asked or given.
Yes, at first there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, complaining, moaning, objecting, sobbing, and of course fearing.
Pushback from allies and opponents alike.
That's part of the deal. It's what happens when you apply pressure to
crack the egg of passivity. People want their order. They love their
order. They wear their order. They worship their order. They elevate
their order into a cosmic principle.
The word "breakthrough" is self-explanatory.
Of course, there are differences between selling a new product and
selling the fact that a massive corporation is destroying life. But
we're talking about degrees of the same thing. You are entering a
landscape that doesn't already contain what you have. You have to put
what you have in that landscape and establish it. The prevailing
landscape is order. You need to break in and break through.
"Well, I think we can slip our new idea in without causing a ripple. We
can package it between two slices of organic bread and leave it on the
table and watch the miracle happen, as the universe tells people it's
time to pick up the sandwich."
This is the Doofus Hypothesis. "Nothing is as powerful as a doofus whose time has come."
I know several wonderful projects in cities that are supporting
authentic health. They're winning---on a local scale. The people
involved work very hard, and they don't think they have time to engage
in public relations. Mistake. There are all sorts of actions they
could take to expand their domain, and in the process they would be
protecting their own future---because without real PR they'll stay right
where they are and begin to diminish and shrink and wear out and fade.
When you run in place long enough, shit happens.
There are a variety of activist groups in the world who are doing great
work, but they don't have a clue about public relations. They
will
fade. They've made one breakthrough to get where they are, but they
need to break through on successive levels. They took no prisoners
once, but they need to do it again.
Once you understand what intelligent and creative Attack are all about,
you see the value of genuine PR. You see it and taste it and feel it.
You not only do it because you should; you do it because you want to.
Want-to is a sword.
Here's a standard PR approach for doofuses who think they're clever.
Ask people what they want; then package what you have so it looks like
what people want. It's deceptive. And it doesn't work in the long
run. It doesn't break through. It doesn't change people's minds. They
will fail to see what you're offering. Instead, they'll see what they
already want, and that won't budge them an inch off the position they
already occupy.
Here's another one. Invoke a higher power as the authority for what
you're selling. We all know about that one. It does work, and it can
work for a very long time. But because it's based on an egregious and
fatuous lie, the people who keep launching the lie will turn into
grotesque and venal cartoons, and corruption will dribble and leak and
flood into their group. The ensuing destruction won't be a cartoon.
It'll be all too real.
Along a similar line, the old adage about repetition of message in
advertising is true; it has legs. But the people who keep launching it
lose IQ points like children in an old USSR classroom. They wake up one
day, and they're androids and robots. Once they had college degrees.
Now they're alcoholics who have to look at their drivers' licenses to
make sure they remember their names and birth dates.
Understanding intelligent and creative attack takes time and work. But
mostly it involves a shift of point of view. And a shift into a desire
that was always there.
I look at people who do Attack Lite, and I see people who want to
protect the position they already have. Nothing wrong with that, in
theory, but what they already have is eating them up day by day. Degree
by degree, blurred edge by edge, it's sucking the life out of them.
Their blood is drying up. They're fronting for their own unchanging,
personal status quo, and soon they'll be a piece of paper blowing away
in the wind.
There is another way to go, and it has both legs and wings.
Intelligent and creative attack.
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