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Personal public relations: identity as a public relations commodity
Public Relations Review, 25(4):465– 479 ISSN: 0363-8111
Judy Motion
Copyright © 2000 by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Personal Public Relations: Identity as a Public Relations Commodity ABSTRACT: Public relations for individuals is steadily emerging as a significant area of practice, yet little research and theoretical development is currently undertaken in this area. Within this article public relations for individuals, referred to in this study as personal public relations, is examined. The research identified two approaches deployed by public relations practitioners: a formative mode and an advisory mode. The formative mode is an active constitution of a public identity, whereas the advisory mode is a communication counseling approach. The paper argues that the formative role is more closely aligned to the marketing techniques of promotion and selling, whereas the advisory role fits more closely with the public relations roles of communication counseling and relationship building. Potential guidelines for ethical personal public relations work emerged from the discussion. Dr Judy Motion is a senior lecturer in the Department of Management Communication at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.
PERSONAL PUBLIC RELATIONS: IDENTITY AS A PUBLIC RELATIONS COMMODITY Organizational and corporate identity scholarship is considered a respectable undertaking for public relations scholars. Yet, in contrast, Winter 1999
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public relations for individuals has remained a marginalized and neglected area of scholarship. Consequently, impression management1 and spin doctoring2 have been the principle areas for public relations scholars and practitioners to draw on. An alternative approach that is gaining in prominence is the marketing approach of branding that is deployed to promote individuals. Politicians, celebrities, and CEOs are being marketed in the same way as a product or service. This article provides an examination of the identity work that is being conducted for individuals. Such work has been termed “personal public relations.” Personal public relations is conceptualized as the constitution, positioning, and promotion of individuals to form a public identity. Providing a term to describe the work is an important step in making personal public relations a credible and acceptable area for public relations scholarship. To analyze the practice of developing public identities, explanations by New Zealand public relations practitioners have been drawn on. The article will first examine the strategic perspectives that New Zealand practitioners apply when they work with women politicians. It will then identify and discuss the phases of personal public relations. The article will conclude by charting the ways in which public relations practitioners presented themselves as ethical and with the deployment of personal rules of conduct as the ethical guide, rather than professional rules of conduct or codes of ethics.
IDENTITY SCHOLARSHIP Traditionally, public relations scholarship on identity has focused on image and impression management approaches and on organizational identity. To establish a theoretical base for the emergence and practice of personal public relations, each of these areas will be briefly discussed in turn. Creating a public persona or identity for an individual initially developed from the currently discredited fields of image and impression management. The tactics for achieving public acceptance within the image and impression approaches focused on aesthetics and the correct media performance. Distinctions between the two approaches blurred, and the terms were used interchangeably, but Grunig3 discerned the following distinction: image management is productive, whereas impression management is performative. Image management is concerned with the production and transformation of certain images, which are perceived to be predominantly esthetic and, therefore, superficial. Impression management was originally derived from Goffman’s4 work on presentation of the self, a dramaturgical approach in which actors try to create certain impressions. Impression management was defined by Rosenfeld, Giacalone, and Riordan as “the process whereby people seek to control the image others have of them.”5 Grunig,6 in particular, critiqued both image and impression management approaches from a public relations perspective because of what he perceived as the potential for deception and manipulation. Identity is a more acceptable term, and identity management is a more acceptable approach within public relations because iden466
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tity work is not perceived to be a superficial exercise, but rather is seen as dealing with authentic concepts and concerns. Theorizing on the concept of identity within public relations has so far privileged the organization. Scholars have either examined the corporate identity of the organization7 or the identity of individuals within the organization.8 The aim of the work in this article is to examine the public relations practices for communicating personal identity, which may have an organizational, an independent, or a pluralistic focus, depending on the promotional purpose. The notion that identity may be used as a commodity for promotional purposes is gaining credence in the literature. For instance, Paul du Gay claimed the objective of a distinctive identity is commodifying and adding value to the self.9 Cheney & Thøger Christensen acknowledged that “positioning strategies”10 are often necessary to gain visibility in a crowded marketplace. Fairclough considered that self-promotion was becoming part and parcel of self-identity.11 From these perspectives, identity is conceptualized as a commodity for promoting and differentiating the self in organizations or the marketplace. The notion of identity as a commodity, of integrating communication and marketing skills to promote individuals, is an emerging public relations practice.12 Therefore, the challenge for public relations practitioners and scholars is now to examine, debate, and theorize the praxis of personal public relations to combine the best practices from public relations and marketing.
METHOD The results of this study are from a larger study of women politicians and public relations practitioners who worked with women politicians. An initial difficulty was that most women politicians claimed not to use public relations consultants or explained that public relations practitioners often did not want to be associated with a particular political party or politician. As a result, for this study few names of practitioners were initially provided by the women politicians. To increase sample size, a letter was sent to all New Zealand women politicians requesting that they anonymously name public relations practitioners who had worked with women politicians. The names of a total of nine practitioners were then provided. Standardized, open-ended interviews were conducted with those nine New Zealand public relations practitioners over a 2-year period in 1996 and 1997. The interviews lasted for between 1 and 3 hours and were taped and transcribed. Representative excerpts from the interviews are presented to illustrate key dimensions of personal public relations practice.
STRATEGIC PERSPECTIVES Personal public relations, like other functions within the discipline of public relations, requires a planned process. Increasingly, public relaWinter 1999
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tions practitioners are deploying standard strategic management techniques, such as management by objectives, management by objectives and results (MOR) and program evaluation and research technique (PERT) to plan program and campaigns.13 Within this research project, practitioners who were interviewed considered that the advice they provided to individuals needed to be strategic in nature. For example, Norrie Simmons, the current President of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ), outlined the strategic approaches she employed when working with politicians: Because my experience with public relations has developed very strongly in that marketing area. . . of using marketing objectives, I think that my advice would be to use a standard business model of setting objectives and then defining what strategies are going to be used to achieve those objectives and what are the tactical activities that will be required to achieve those objectives. Then I would be strongly advising them to do other normal business things like budgeting for that program. . . they also need to timetable it, and finally some sort of evaluation technique.
In her explanation, Simmons employed a standard strategic approach to explain the steps she undertakes in personal identity work. The application of a particular business approach or formula is a strategy that may go some way to explaining how the individuals come to be thought of as products or commodities to be promoted and sold. Indeed, Knights considered that the representations that the strategy discourse produces “align most comfortably with the comparatively new discipline of marketing.”14 However, within personal public relations work both marketing and public relations techniques were employed. For example, Gordon Chesterman, a public relations consultant and ex-president of PRINZ, explained that he used a combination of communication and marketing strategies: There is no sort of secret 10 steps to being elected. . . take it back into the marketing context, it’s the feasibility study. . . . I mean we’ve often done research to find out whether the campaign’s acceptable. . . . You start with the basics, the communication of who are you, what are you, what do you do. . . . So we actually apply that principle to the individual, and you do the feasibility study; you know, it’s the market research. You can have long-term plans about increasing your awareness, and you arrange a number of steps to do that, but you’ve got to develop positive policies.
The integration of marketing and communication by public relations practitioners has been a source of concern for public relations scholars. Public relations scholars have expressed concern about what they perceive as “imperialism and encroachment”15 by marketing on the “conceptual domain and operational turf”16 of public relations. A weakness in criticisms leveled at marketing is that the distinctions between different marketing approaches are not acknowledged. One marketing approach is 468
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brand development, which requires an assessment of the product attributes and capabilities. In this approach, a politician may be considered as a commodity to be promoted and sold. Chesterman explained the process by using marketing terminology: You’ve got to actually have your package together; it’s like a product, is your packaging right, and is the content right? So if you’re selling Joe’s Soya Sauce is it in the right bottle, does the label look right, and does it taste good. . . . it’s like the product: if the product’s bad, packaging is not going to change it; people will buy once but not again.
Chesterman likened promoting politicians to selling soya sauce— both the product and the packaging must be right. Implicit within the term product is the notion that it is something one produces and can change. If practitioners work with the notion of individuals as products, then the individual, not just the packaging, can be changed. The problem that would need consideration is whether the constituted individual could be fully actualized— be consistent in everyday life. The risk of such an approach is that it may serve to depersonalize the individual, destabilize identity and alienate the “consumer” (voter, media) from the commodified individual. Another marketing strategy is competitive positioning to compete and gain market share (or, in this instance, votes). Simmons explained that her firm highlighted a defining, or distinguishing, characteristic or feature to create a public identity for a woman politician: We would probably be trying to work out for that woman a way for her to stand out from the crowd, not necessarily at electorate level but perhaps at national level. We’d use that marketing term differentiate, and we would identify something that that person had and nurture and develop that for the person so that they can stand up on their issue, on their platform, and differentiate themselves.
In marketing terms, such a process is called differential advantage17 in which the aim is to enhance, rather than form, the public identity. Thus, marketing strategies and techniques render the self into a commodity to be branded; identity is a commodity to be used to differentiate the individual in the political marketplace for “public consumption.”18 Competitive advantage was another positioning strategy deployed. As Chesterman said, It’s like a product or a company. . . you’ve got to sell me on why you want to be mayor. . . Hey, we’re here to develop your campaign to move forward with you in an innovative way that’s going to get you the required share of the market and just translate that back to votes.
The language used by Chesterman created a new way for politicians to think about themselves. Politicians were being encouraged to assume a market identity and operate in market discourse. Winter 1999
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A question that arises is whether the discursive practices of these public relations practitioners contribute to a wider sociocultural change. Practices have shifted from a communication process of establishing relationships with voters to a market discourse of commodification and consumption in which the politician is a commodity to be sold to the consumer, the voter. The appropriation of the discursive practices of marketers and advertisers by public relations practitioners in their personal public relations role takes the focus from communication and puts it on promotion and selling. By commodifying individuals and employing marketing discourse these practitioners may be helping to create and reinforce a hegemonic view of the world in which the discourses and practices of the market dominate.
MARKET RESEARCH/CONFESSION This section deals with the research that is the first phase of personal public relations strategy. Practitioners explained that the initial task they required of their clients was an examination and articulation of self. Gordon Chesterman, for example, quizzed women candidates about their strengths and weaknesses: For example, I might say to a woman, what’s the upside of you standing—I mean you sell me on yourself; alternatively what’s the down side? You look at the traditional roles, married four times, 10 kids. I would say the same to a man as well. In other words, you are standing for public office; you’re telling me all the good things, now what are the bad things in your background that could come back to haunt you?
Chesterman questioned candidates about whether there was any further hidden information. “I have to ask, ‘is there anything that could cause a backlash on you publicly later on,’ and I ask all candidates that. Its like a product recall if you’ve got a faulty product in the market. ” Two facets of this comment need to be discussed. The first facet is the language that he used to frame his views. Marketing terms, such as product recall, faulty product, and market, were employed to liken political candidates to products and the political sphere to the marketplace. This type of market research could also be likened to issues management, which includes “identification, monitoring and analysis of trends in key publics’ opinions.”19 The second facet to discuss is the approach that Chesterman employed. The interview format may be likened to Foucault’s conception of the confessional. According to Foucault, “The confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth.”20 The confession functions to authenticate the individual by the discourse of truth that is articulated. In this instance, Chesterman required the truth about his clients past activities. The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a 470
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partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile.21
The role of the public relations practitioner is to judge the chance of success and minimize any possible damage that could be created. The confessional approach creates a power/knowledge relationship in which the practitioner becomes administrator of the “truth.” Maggie Eyre, a public relations practitioner who worked for the Leader of the Labor Party, the Right Honorable Helen Clark, considered that the only way to know the truth is to understand “your client— understanding your client’s living and breathing value system, understanding what makes him tick, you know. It’s knowing who that person is because I know Helen Clark in and out.” Eyre also employed a confessional approach, trying to learn as much personal information as possible: I would actually interview that MP on my own first, like I would give that MP a questionnaire, an eight-page questionnaire [asking] who are your favorite designers, what’s your favorite dish, what do you like cooking, just nonpolitical, and I would go through, and I would ask personal questions that are confidential between her and I, personal questions about her childhood, what school she went to, all sorts of things that might be of interest; it’s human interest. I would collate all this data, and then I would look at all the magazines and go, ‘ah, so sports magazines, food magazines, oh that’s a Women’s Weekly story,’ whatever, and then put the strategy on paper and present it to that politician.
A query that arises is why are personal questions asked if they are to remain confidential? The public relations practitioner’s role is actually to take the personal truths and find ways to sell them to the media. Eyre described how she “mediatized” a politician primarily by making the personal public. Thus, the individual was induced to confess personal matters, which were then reinterpreted into media stories. Foucault had argued that, with regard to the confession, the listener’s power “was not only to demand it before it was made, or decide what was to follow after it, but also to constitute a discourse of truth on the basis of its decipherment.”22 Through the confessional, Eyre converted the personal into a narrative to be commodified and mediatized. An alternative confessional technique that some practitioners employed was to ask the women to justify their motivation for a political career. For example, Catherine Saunders, a media publicist and public relations practitioner, stated that I’d want to ask why really. Why does she want to get into politics? What was the motivation? Does she understand what was ahead of her? Did she also understand that. . . I’m very close friends with a number of female politicians, and there is no question it’s still very much a very male dominated bastion of power and,. . . there is still without question, sexism. I think that I could safely say that Winter 1999
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in Parliament it’s worse than any of the corridors of commerce. So that would be the first thing. Do they really understand that they’re not going in on an equal footing?
Saunders attempted to ensure that her clients knew the hardships of political life. Sally Logan Milne, a public relations practitioner, also warned her clients: Why do you want to do this? Are you really sure that this is a good idea, because I don’t think it is. I don’t think going into Parliament is very sensible actually. I have a lot of respect for the people who do it, because it takes a long time to get to the point when you can actually have any influence at all. In order to get there, you have to make significant compromises of what you believe in.
Both Saunders and Milne also employed a confessional approach, but their aim was to first discourage and then caution their clients. They have a particular truth about political life that they share with women clients. The confessional operates as a research technique in which the public relations practitioners collect information about clients to learn “the truth” about their clients.
PRODUCING OR PACKAGING THE SUBJECT? Having heard the confession, the public relations practitioner then judges the presented self and operates on that self to constitute it as a particular public identity. Two key approaches to constituting the subject, the woman politician, emerged from the analysis of the approaches discussed by public relations practitioners. Public relations practitioners either actively constituted the public identity or proffered advice to individuals on how to constitute themselves. Therefore, personal public relations may be formative or advisory. Gordon Chesterman indicated that he played a formative role in constituting the public identity: When I have candidates coming in who have no idea what they’re standing for, I say well look here’s a couple of things: you could be against graffiti; we’ve got to do something about this, and how are we going to solve that; oh that’s a good problem; everyone believes graffiti shouldn’t be there. We want a nonpolluted river. Great, that’s a safe issue, yep, and we want to protect the trees in Piranha Park, yep, great. So you’ve got a number of safe issues. . . you’ve actually got to have some firm ideas or we package some policies for you.
Chesterman was actively creating a political platform for candidates. He argued that people do not quite know how to identify “the voting buzzes” so he used research to determine the positions that candidates should espouse: We’d do the research, find out if that was acceptable, and if it was acceptable we’d go ahead and push it, but its got to be a safe thing; you’ve got to have 472
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sellable policies, but also at the same time believe in them. . . each case is so individual you cannot, in my view, have a campaign structure that’s a winner for every candidate because every candidate’s so different.
Chesterman saw his role as very much ensuring success. Research was used, not to learn public concerns, but rather to determine which issues were “ safe,” were saleable. In other words, the public relations’ objective is to get the person elected, even if it requires the formulation of what the person represents. In contrast, Sue Wood, a public relations consultant and an ex-National Party president, believed that the integrity of the person was paramount and that the role of the public relations practitioner was to add value: Its just about absolute integrity—you just must respect that person and what that person stands for. I mean, you add value; you don’t make the person; you add value raising their profile; you add value to the quality of their written material; you add value to their thinking in terms of how best to go about things, but you don’t make the person.
Constituting the public identity was an anathema for Wood. Instead, for Wood, the role of the public relations practitioner was as a communication expert offering advice on publicity and promotion, rather than as a political expert suggesting which platforms to adopt and what to relate. The term add value was marketing jargon that implied that Wood’s role was to enhance the salability of the product, in this case, the “salability” of a woman politician. Similarly, Sally Logan Milne expressed an extreme aversion to determining positioning and policy. Logan Milne recalled a woman politician being brought to her home by her male campaign manager some years ago who asked her about positioning: We had this very odd conversation. For about an hour we went round and round in circles until I realized that she was asking, actually asking, me what she should stand for, and I was just blown away because you shouldn’t be in politics if you don’t know what you stand for. I mean, all people like me should do is tell you how to communicate, not what to communicate, for Christ sake.
For Logan Milne, the public relations practitioner’s role was that of communication advisor, not communication designer. Logan Milne explained that she considered that politicians could change their views on issues, but not their “fundamental philosophy.” Her conviction was based on a fundamental assumption “that if one’s going to be in politics, one ought to have a fundamental philosophy for being there.” Logan Milne was communicating an ethic for political candidates that required them to have a political philosophy and an ethic for public relations practitioners that required them to act in an advisory, not formative, manner. The role that public relations practitioners play as personal public relations specialists has fundamental issues for democracy: if the role is perceived and practiced as Winter 1999
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formative, then public relations practitioners are actively engaged in determining political agendas and platforms. Some of the public relations practitioners advised politicians to find platforms, policies, or positions, but did not suggest specifics. Catherine Saunders’ advice to politicians was find a platform, make it your platform. But, passionately make it your platform. You can’t just willy nilly pick up some issue and say this will be mine. You’ve got to really want to do something. I mean that’s where I suppose the idealism helps at the beginning.
Again, the ethic of a personal philosophy and positioning was being communicated. For Saunders, the process of positioning was competitive. “You must single out platforms that aren’t others’, or platforms that you feel you could topple others’ on.” Saunder’s approach to positioning was based on a marketing philosophy of strategic differentiation. Although positioning was perceived to be a competitive strategy, Saunders cautioned “don’t let somebody manufacture you into something else.” Saunders posited another ethic for subject constitution, that of the “natural” politician. Ellie Weber believed that the role of a public relations practitioner was to highlight the positive by “either underplaying or managing the negatives.” Weber explained that her approach was to “look at what is it that they’ve got.” Thus, she perceived her role as enhancing the natural attributes of the individual seeking to become a politician and skillfully positioning the individual to the best advantage, working with what she perceived to already be there. Liz Greenslade, a publicist and public relations practitioner, also avoided changing the person, but recognized the importance of positioning as a means of gaining recognition or competitive advantage: I would suggest, certainly, that they look at issues which aren’t being dealt with by other politicians. Probably, you know, environmental issues. I think as women we have a different perspective and quite often I hear them talk about stuff in the house and, oh Jesus, they just are so blinkered in there. They haven’t had time to get out and talk to people, and so I’d certainly suggest they look at different kinds of issues which aren’t mainstream, you know.
Greenslade suggests an issues-based approach to positioning, in which women candidates identify current problems or topical trends that may help them to differentiate themselves, but the candidates must be committed to and “passionate” about the issues. Thus, public relations practitioners offered a variety of perspectives on positioning: some practitioners consider that the politician must have a personal philosophy; other practitioners advise on how to create and market a personal philosophy; and other practitioners create the personal philosophy. Two fundamentally different views of the practitioner’s role in personal public relations were narrated. For Chesterman the role is formative, whereas for Wood, Logan Milne, Saunders, Greenslade, and Weber the role is that of advisor. 474
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The formative role is more closely aligned with marketing principles of promotion and competitive positioning. In contrast, the advisory role aligns more clearly with public relations principles of communication counseling and relationship building. Incorporated within the two approaches are different views of what a political subject should be: Chesterman, who adopts a formative role, creates what may be termed “career politicians,” those who want the position or power, whereas Wood, Logan Milne, Saunders, Greenslade, and Weber, who adopt advisory roles, work with “issues or idealist politicians,” those who want to effect change. However, a strategic role was also played with issues or idealist politicians: the practitioners suggested that the politicians should be strategically selective in taking up issues to make self-positioning easier. Implicit within the roles that practitioners played was a set of guidelines that were used to assist personal public relations praxis.
ETHICAL GUIDELINES The personal public relations work that practitioners undertake may be guided by membership of PRINZ and conform to the PRINZ Code of Professional Conduct. However, public relations practitioners do not have to belong to PRINZ or conform to the Code of Professional Conduct. Yet the personal public relations work that they undertake creates dual ethical obligations: practitioners advise subjects on ethical conduct and monitor their own conduct. The practitioners who were interviewed described the ethics they employ for personal public relations work. For Gordon Chesterman, the issue of compromising personal values was avoided by the repression of his personal views: See, as a consultant I have no views. I have no public views on anything. I have private views. My private views are quite different from what I do in the public sector because I’m only actually hired as a counsel to help you put your point of view, and the only reason I wouldn’t work for you would be if I was violently opposed to what your proposition was.
As a practitioner who worked within the formative approach, Chesterman had two distinct ethics: professional and private. If his private views were seriously compromised, Chesterman would not work for clients. Leitch considered that “personal ethics will impact on but are not identical with professional ethics.”23 Sally Logan Milne explained simply “I’ve got a very highly refined view of ethics that people, all people, should be ethical.” Maggie Eyre considered that maintaining confidentiality was an essential ethic for public relations practitioners. Eyre believed that, because public relations practitioners garner a lot of personal information about the subjects they work with, the subjects are “really vulnerable.” She considered that sensitivity toward her clients meant that she could not discuss individuals in public. Integrity was an integral feature in the elaboration of the self as an ethical Winter 1999
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public relations practitioner. Catherine Saunders described herself as having “fairly strict tenets of honesty and integrity and being true to oneself.” Integrity was also a key factor for Liz Greenslade in her professional work. She stated, You have to be very aware of that balance between managing and manipulating the media. You’ve got to be very sure that you are working within your integrity. . . . You have to be very, very careful, I think, that you don’t misuse your contacts, your position. There’s confidentiality issues. . . I think if you come from a real place of integrity the people know.
Greenslade’s use of the term integrity is interesting because it moves away from the notion of professional conduct or ethics to more personal values. Also important is the implication that professional behavior ensures that relationships within a variety of spheres of influence are not jeopardized. Integrity is both a personal ethic and a strategic choice. Public relations practitioners considered that the main threat to ethical, professional behavior was the need to compromise personal ethics and values. Working with only those individuals who shared similar value systems was a technique for overcoming the pressure to compromise. Maggie Eyre believed that a lot of people were leaving public relations work because they had to compromise their values. Eyre explained that she would only undertake work that did not require her to compromise her values: I think that’s unhealthy to compromise your values. I don’t have to compromise my values with Helen Clark; I’m pro Labor you know. . . for me as a publicist, I won’t promote anyone at all unless I believe in him or believe in her or believe in the organization. . . . I think ethics and values are everything. . . .
For Eyre, personal public relations work was only possible if the political values were aligned. Sue Wood believed that values of fairness, courtesy, and respect should never be compromised: “I personally place a high value on courtesy and respect for other people regardless of what their views are.” The elaboration of self as an ethical public relations practitioner has comprised the following elements: confidentiality, sensitivity, integrity, fairness, courtesy, respect, and consistent values. Although these ethics emerged from practitioners who adopted an advisory role, they offer a foundation for an ethical code for formative or advisory personal public relations work.
CONCLUSION This article has offered a preliminary discussion of the strategic and ethical roles that practitioners undertake in personal public relations. Personal public relations was conceptualized as the constitution, positioning, and promotion of individuals to form a public identity. A strategic marketing approach was identified as the planning framework for personal public relations work. The 476
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article demonstrated that the use of a marketing discourse meant that the same approach that was used to produce, package, and sell products was applied to women politicians. To assume a market identity, individuals were commodified. The drawback of this approach is that it is a one-way view of communication that may serve to hinder the development of a relational, dialogical approach. However, it does provide a strong promotional focus, which enables individuals to identify competitive and differential advantages. Three key personal public relations tasks were identified. The research approach was likened to Foucault’s notion of the confessional as a technique for learning the truth from individuals. That “truth” was then used to either constitute or advise the individual. Thus, this analysis revealed two distinct forms of personal public relations: formative or advisory. Within the formative mode, practitioners actively form the public identity and dictate political platforms for politicians who were termed “career politicians.” In contrast, within the advisory mode, practitioners proffer advice, publicize, and promote the individuals choice of platforms and positions for politicians who were termed “issues or idealist politicians.” The article then charted the ways in which public relations practitioners presented themselves as ethical and the deployment of personal rules of conduct as their ethical guide rather than professional rules of conduct or codes of ethics. The ethical rules for personal public relations were expressed as confidentiality, sensitivity, integrity, fairness, courtesy, respect, and consistency. Thus, the public relations practitioners presented their role as ethical, but what that meant varied according to their personal perspective of ethics. An integrated marketing and public relations approach would offer both promotional and communicative possibilities for personal public relations work. The discussion in this article has provided a conceptual understanding of two roles in personal public relations. It may be that those roles are not mutually exclusive, but that practitioners may shift in and out of, or combine, them. However, it is crucial that as a marketing discourse and practice is integrated into personal public relations, the importance of communication counseling, building relationships, and generating goodwill, three essential public relations practices, are not subsumed or lost.
NOTES 1.
Paul Rosenfeld, Robert A. Giacalone, and Catherine A. Riordan, Impression Management in Organizations: Theory, Measurement, Practice (London: Routledge, 1995); Rachel Harris Caillouet and Myria Watkins Allen, “Impression Management Strategies Employees Use When Discussing Their Organization’s Public Image,” Journal of Public Relations Research 8 (1996), pp. 211–227. 2. Randy Sumpter and James W. Tankard, “The Spin Doctor: An Alternative Model of Public Relations,” Public Relations Review 20 (1994), pp. 19 –27. 3. James Grunig, “Image and Substance: From Symbolic to Behavioral Relationships,” Public Relations Review 19 (1993), pp. 121–139. Winter 1999
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4. 5.
6. 7.
8.
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
15. 16.
17.
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Erving Goffman,. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books 1959.) Paul Rosenfeld, Robert A. Giacalone, and Catherine A. Riordan, Impression Management in Organizations: Theory, Measurement, Practice (London: Routledge 1995), p. 4. James Grunig, op. cit. Elinor Selame and Joe Selame, The Company Image: Building your Identity and Influence in the Marketplace (New York: Wiley, 1988); Wally Olins, Corporate Identity: Making Business Strategy Visible through Design (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989); Sam Black, The Essentials of Public Relations (London: Kogan Page, 1993); Dennis Basil Bromley, Reputation, Image and Impression Management (Chichester, England: Wiley, 1993); Graham Dowling, Corporate Reputations: Strategies for Developing the Corporate Brand (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1994); Cees van Riel, Principles of Corporate Communication (London: Prentice Hall, 1995); Charles Fombrun, Reputation: Realizing Value from the Corporate Image (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). Phillip K. Tompkins and George Cheney, “Account Analysis of Organizations: Decision Making and Identification,” in Linda Putnam and Michael Pacanowsky (eds.), Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985), pp. 123–146; George Cheney and George N. Dionisopoulos, “Public Relations? No Relations with Publics: A Rhetorical-Organizational Approach to Contemporary Corporate Communications,” in Carl J. Botan and Vincent Hazelton (eds.), Public Relations Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), pp. 135–157; George Cheney, “The Corporate Person (Re)Presents Itself,” in Elizabeth L. Toth and Robert L. Heath (eds.), Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), pp. 165–183; Linda Hon, “Feminism and Public Relations,” The Public Relations Strategist 1 (1995), pp. 20 – 25; George Cheney and Lars Thøger Christensen, “Identity at Issue: Linkages between ‘Internal’ and ‘External’ Organizational Communication,” in Fred M. Jablin and Linda L. Putnam (eds.), New Handbook of Organizational Communication (Sage, In press). Paul du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work (London: Sage. 1996). George Cheney and Lars Thøger Christensen, op. cit., p. 16. Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Longman, 1995), p. 140. Michael Dunlop, “The Business of Communications,” paper presented to the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand Conference, Rotorua, NZ, April 1998. Fraser P. Seitel, The Practice of Public Relations (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall 1998). David K. Knights, “Changing Spaces: The Disruptive Impact of a New Epistemological Allocation for the Study of Management,” Academy of Management Review 17 (1992), pp. 514 –536. Martha M. Lauzen, “When Marketing Involvement Matters at the Manager Level,” Public Relations Review 19 (1993), pp. 247–259. Glen M. Broom, Martha M. Lauzen, and Kerry Tucker, “Public Relations and Marketing: Dividing the Conceptual Domain and Operational Turf,” Public Relations Review 17 (1991), pp. 219 –225. Graham J. Hooley, John A. Saunders, and Nigel F. Piercy, Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning (London: Prentice Hall, 1998). Vol. 25, No. 4
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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.
Bob Franklin, Packaging Politics: Political Communications in Britain’s Media Democracy (London: E. Arnold. 1994). Robert L. Heath, Strategic Issues Management: Organizations and Public Policy Challenges (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), p. 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (trans. by R. Hurley) (London: Penguin, 1981) (Original work published 1976). Ibid, p. 62. Ibid, p. 67. Shirley Leitch, “Professionalism in New Zealand Public Relations,” International Public Relations Review 18 (1995), p. 29.
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Judy Motion
Copyright © 2000 by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Personal Public Relations: Identity as a Public Relations Commodity ABSTRACT: Public relations for individuals is steadily emerging as a significant area of practice, yet little research and theoretical development is currently undertaken in this area. Within this article public relations for individuals, referred to in this study as personal public relations, is examined. The research identified two approaches deployed by public relations practitioners: a formative mode and an advisory mode. The formative mode is an active constitution of a public identity, whereas the advisory mode is a communication counseling approach. The paper argues that the formative role is more closely aligned to the marketing techniques of promotion and selling, whereas the advisory role fits more closely with the public relations roles of communication counseling and relationship building. Potential guidelines for ethical personal public relations work emerged from the discussion. Dr Judy Motion is a senior lecturer in the Department of Management Communication at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.
PERSONAL PUBLIC RELATIONS: IDENTITY AS A PUBLIC RELATIONS COMMODITY Organizational and corporate identity scholarship is considered a respectable undertaking for public relations scholars. Yet, in contrast, Winter 1999
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public relations for individuals has remained a marginalized and neglected area of scholarship. Consequently, impression management1 and spin doctoring2 have been the principle areas for public relations scholars and practitioners to draw on. An alternative approach that is gaining in prominence is the marketing approach of branding that is deployed to promote individuals. Politicians, celebrities, and CEOs are being marketed in the same way as a product or service. This article provides an examination of the identity work that is being conducted for individuals. Such work has been termed “personal public relations.” Personal public relations is conceptualized as the constitution, positioning, and promotion of individuals to form a public identity. Providing a term to describe the work is an important step in making personal public relations a credible and acceptable area for public relations scholarship. To analyze the practice of developing public identities, explanations by New Zealand public relations practitioners have been drawn on. The article will first examine the strategic perspectives that New Zealand practitioners apply when they work with women politicians. It will then identify and discuss the phases of personal public relations. The article will conclude by charting the ways in which public relations practitioners presented themselves as ethical and with the deployment of personal rules of conduct as the ethical guide, rather than professional rules of conduct or codes of ethics.
IDENTITY SCHOLARSHIP Traditionally, public relations scholarship on identity has focused on image and impression management approaches and on organizational identity. To establish a theoretical base for the emergence and practice of personal public relations, each of these areas will be briefly discussed in turn. Creating a public persona or identity for an individual initially developed from the currently discredited fields of image and impression management. The tactics for achieving public acceptance within the image and impression approaches focused on aesthetics and the correct media performance. Distinctions between the two approaches blurred, and the terms were used interchangeably, but Grunig3 discerned the following distinction: image management is productive, whereas impression management is performative. Image management is concerned with the production and transformation of certain images, which are perceived to be predominantly esthetic and, therefore, superficial. Impression management was originally derived from Goffman’s4 work on presentation of the self, a dramaturgical approach in which actors try to create certain impressions. Impression management was defined by Rosenfeld, Giacalone, and Riordan as “the process whereby people seek to control the image others have of them.”5 Grunig,6 in particular, critiqued both image and impression management approaches from a public relations perspective because of what he perceived as the potential for deception and manipulation. Identity is a more acceptable term, and identity management is a more acceptable approach within public relations because iden466
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tity work is not perceived to be a superficial exercise, but rather is seen as dealing with authentic concepts and concerns. Theorizing on the concept of identity within public relations has so far privileged the organization. Scholars have either examined the corporate identity of the organization7 or the identity of individuals within the organization.8 The aim of the work in this article is to examine the public relations practices for communicating personal identity, which may have an organizational, an independent, or a pluralistic focus, depending on the promotional purpose. The notion that identity may be used as a commodity for promotional purposes is gaining credence in the literature. For instance, Paul du Gay claimed the objective of a distinctive identity is commodifying and adding value to the self.9 Cheney & Thøger Christensen acknowledged that “positioning strategies”10 are often necessary to gain visibility in a crowded marketplace. Fairclough considered that self-promotion was becoming part and parcel of self-identity.11 From these perspectives, identity is conceptualized as a commodity for promoting and differentiating the self in organizations or the marketplace. The notion of identity as a commodity, of integrating communication and marketing skills to promote individuals, is an emerging public relations practice.12 Therefore, the challenge for public relations practitioners and scholars is now to examine, debate, and theorize the praxis of personal public relations to combine the best practices from public relations and marketing.
METHOD The results of this study are from a larger study of women politicians and public relations practitioners who worked with women politicians. An initial difficulty was that most women politicians claimed not to use public relations consultants or explained that public relations practitioners often did not want to be associated with a particular political party or politician. As a result, for this study few names of practitioners were initially provided by the women politicians. To increase sample size, a letter was sent to all New Zealand women politicians requesting that they anonymously name public relations practitioners who had worked with women politicians. The names of a total of nine practitioners were then provided. Standardized, open-ended interviews were conducted with those nine New Zealand public relations practitioners over a 2-year period in 1996 and 1997. The interviews lasted for between 1 and 3 hours and were taped and transcribed. Representative excerpts from the interviews are presented to illustrate key dimensions of personal public relations practice.
STRATEGIC PERSPECTIVES Personal public relations, like other functions within the discipline of public relations, requires a planned process. Increasingly, public relaWinter 1999
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tions practitioners are deploying standard strategic management techniques, such as management by objectives, management by objectives and results (MOR) and program evaluation and research technique (PERT) to plan program and campaigns.13 Within this research project, practitioners who were interviewed considered that the advice they provided to individuals needed to be strategic in nature. For example, Norrie Simmons, the current President of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ), outlined the strategic approaches she employed when working with politicians: Because my experience with public relations has developed very strongly in that marketing area. . . of using marketing objectives, I think that my advice would be to use a standard business model of setting objectives and then defining what strategies are going to be used to achieve those objectives and what are the tactical activities that will be required to achieve those objectives. Then I would be strongly advising them to do other normal business things like budgeting for that program. . . they also need to timetable it, and finally some sort of evaluation technique.
In her explanation, Simmons employed a standard strategic approach to explain the steps she undertakes in personal identity work. The application of a particular business approach or formula is a strategy that may go some way to explaining how the individuals come to be thought of as products or commodities to be promoted and sold. Indeed, Knights considered that the representations that the strategy discourse produces “align most comfortably with the comparatively new discipline of marketing.”14 However, within personal public relations work both marketing and public relations techniques were employed. For example, Gordon Chesterman, a public relations consultant and ex-president of PRINZ, explained that he used a combination of communication and marketing strategies: There is no sort of secret 10 steps to being elected. . . take it back into the marketing context, it’s the feasibility study. . . . I mean we’ve often done research to find out whether the campaign’s acceptable. . . . You start with the basics, the communication of who are you, what are you, what do you do. . . . So we actually apply that principle to the individual, and you do the feasibility study; you know, it’s the market research. You can have long-term plans about increasing your awareness, and you arrange a number of steps to do that, but you’ve got to develop positive policies.
The integration of marketing and communication by public relations practitioners has been a source of concern for public relations scholars. Public relations scholars have expressed concern about what they perceive as “imperialism and encroachment”15 by marketing on the “conceptual domain and operational turf”16 of public relations. A weakness in criticisms leveled at marketing is that the distinctions between different marketing approaches are not acknowledged. One marketing approach is 468
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brand development, which requires an assessment of the product attributes and capabilities. In this approach, a politician may be considered as a commodity to be promoted and sold. Chesterman explained the process by using marketing terminology: You’ve got to actually have your package together; it’s like a product, is your packaging right, and is the content right? So if you’re selling Joe’s Soya Sauce is it in the right bottle, does the label look right, and does it taste good. . . . it’s like the product: if the product’s bad, packaging is not going to change it; people will buy once but not again.
Chesterman likened promoting politicians to selling soya sauce— both the product and the packaging must be right. Implicit within the term product is the notion that it is something one produces and can change. If practitioners work with the notion of individuals as products, then the individual, not just the packaging, can be changed. The problem that would need consideration is whether the constituted individual could be fully actualized— be consistent in everyday life. The risk of such an approach is that it may serve to depersonalize the individual, destabilize identity and alienate the “consumer” (voter, media) from the commodified individual. Another marketing strategy is competitive positioning to compete and gain market share (or, in this instance, votes). Simmons explained that her firm highlighted a defining, or distinguishing, characteristic or feature to create a public identity for a woman politician: We would probably be trying to work out for that woman a way for her to stand out from the crowd, not necessarily at electorate level but perhaps at national level. We’d use that marketing term differentiate, and we would identify something that that person had and nurture and develop that for the person so that they can stand up on their issue, on their platform, and differentiate themselves.
In marketing terms, such a process is called differential advantage17 in which the aim is to enhance, rather than form, the public identity. Thus, marketing strategies and techniques render the self into a commodity to be branded; identity is a commodity to be used to differentiate the individual in the political marketplace for “public consumption.”18 Competitive advantage was another positioning strategy deployed. As Chesterman said, It’s like a product or a company. . . you’ve got to sell me on why you want to be mayor. . . Hey, we’re here to develop your campaign to move forward with you in an innovative way that’s going to get you the required share of the market and just translate that back to votes.
The language used by Chesterman created a new way for politicians to think about themselves. Politicians were being encouraged to assume a market identity and operate in market discourse. Winter 1999
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A question that arises is whether the discursive practices of these public relations practitioners contribute to a wider sociocultural change. Practices have shifted from a communication process of establishing relationships with voters to a market discourse of commodification and consumption in which the politician is a commodity to be sold to the consumer, the voter. The appropriation of the discursive practices of marketers and advertisers by public relations practitioners in their personal public relations role takes the focus from communication and puts it on promotion and selling. By commodifying individuals and employing marketing discourse these practitioners may be helping to create and reinforce a hegemonic view of the world in which the discourses and practices of the market dominate.
MARKET RESEARCH/CONFESSION This section deals with the research that is the first phase of personal public relations strategy. Practitioners explained that the initial task they required of their clients was an examination and articulation of self. Gordon Chesterman, for example, quizzed women candidates about their strengths and weaknesses: For example, I might say to a woman, what’s the upside of you standing—I mean you sell me on yourself; alternatively what’s the down side? You look at the traditional roles, married four times, 10 kids. I would say the same to a man as well. In other words, you are standing for public office; you’re telling me all the good things, now what are the bad things in your background that could come back to haunt you?
Chesterman questioned candidates about whether there was any further hidden information. “I have to ask, ‘is there anything that could cause a backlash on you publicly later on,’ and I ask all candidates that. Its like a product recall if you’ve got a faulty product in the market. ” Two facets of this comment need to be discussed. The first facet is the language that he used to frame his views. Marketing terms, such as product recall, faulty product, and market, were employed to liken political candidates to products and the political sphere to the marketplace. This type of market research could also be likened to issues management, which includes “identification, monitoring and analysis of trends in key publics’ opinions.”19 The second facet to discuss is the approach that Chesterman employed. The interview format may be likened to Foucault’s conception of the confessional. According to Foucault, “The confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth.”20 The confession functions to authenticate the individual by the discourse of truth that is articulated. In this instance, Chesterman required the truth about his clients past activities. The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a 470
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partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile.21
The role of the public relations practitioner is to judge the chance of success and minimize any possible damage that could be created. The confessional approach creates a power/knowledge relationship in which the practitioner becomes administrator of the “truth.” Maggie Eyre, a public relations practitioner who worked for the Leader of the Labor Party, the Right Honorable Helen Clark, considered that the only way to know the truth is to understand “your client— understanding your client’s living and breathing value system, understanding what makes him tick, you know. It’s knowing who that person is because I know Helen Clark in and out.” Eyre also employed a confessional approach, trying to learn as much personal information as possible: I would actually interview that MP on my own first, like I would give that MP a questionnaire, an eight-page questionnaire [asking] who are your favorite designers, what’s your favorite dish, what do you like cooking, just nonpolitical, and I would go through, and I would ask personal questions that are confidential between her and I, personal questions about her childhood, what school she went to, all sorts of things that might be of interest; it’s human interest. I would collate all this data, and then I would look at all the magazines and go, ‘ah, so sports magazines, food magazines, oh that’s a Women’s Weekly story,’ whatever, and then put the strategy on paper and present it to that politician.
A query that arises is why are personal questions asked if they are to remain confidential? The public relations practitioner’s role is actually to take the personal truths and find ways to sell them to the media. Eyre described how she “mediatized” a politician primarily by making the personal public. Thus, the individual was induced to confess personal matters, which were then reinterpreted into media stories. Foucault had argued that, with regard to the confession, the listener’s power “was not only to demand it before it was made, or decide what was to follow after it, but also to constitute a discourse of truth on the basis of its decipherment.”22 Through the confessional, Eyre converted the personal into a narrative to be commodified and mediatized. An alternative confessional technique that some practitioners employed was to ask the women to justify their motivation for a political career. For example, Catherine Saunders, a media publicist and public relations practitioner, stated that I’d want to ask why really. Why does she want to get into politics? What was the motivation? Does she understand what was ahead of her? Did she also understand that. . . I’m very close friends with a number of female politicians, and there is no question it’s still very much a very male dominated bastion of power and,. . . there is still without question, sexism. I think that I could safely say that Winter 1999
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in Parliament it’s worse than any of the corridors of commerce. So that would be the first thing. Do they really understand that they’re not going in on an equal footing?
Saunders attempted to ensure that her clients knew the hardships of political life. Sally Logan Milne, a public relations practitioner, also warned her clients: Why do you want to do this? Are you really sure that this is a good idea, because I don’t think it is. I don’t think going into Parliament is very sensible actually. I have a lot of respect for the people who do it, because it takes a long time to get to the point when you can actually have any influence at all. In order to get there, you have to make significant compromises of what you believe in.
Both Saunders and Milne also employed a confessional approach, but their aim was to first discourage and then caution their clients. They have a particular truth about political life that they share with women clients. The confessional operates as a research technique in which the public relations practitioners collect information about clients to learn “the truth” about their clients.
PRODUCING OR PACKAGING THE SUBJECT? Having heard the confession, the public relations practitioner then judges the presented self and operates on that self to constitute it as a particular public identity. Two key approaches to constituting the subject, the woman politician, emerged from the analysis of the approaches discussed by public relations practitioners. Public relations practitioners either actively constituted the public identity or proffered advice to individuals on how to constitute themselves. Therefore, personal public relations may be formative or advisory. Gordon Chesterman indicated that he played a formative role in constituting the public identity: When I have candidates coming in who have no idea what they’re standing for, I say well look here’s a couple of things: you could be against graffiti; we’ve got to do something about this, and how are we going to solve that; oh that’s a good problem; everyone believes graffiti shouldn’t be there. We want a nonpolluted river. Great, that’s a safe issue, yep, and we want to protect the trees in Piranha Park, yep, great. So you’ve got a number of safe issues. . . you’ve actually got to have some firm ideas or we package some policies for you.
Chesterman was actively creating a political platform for candidates. He argued that people do not quite know how to identify “the voting buzzes” so he used research to determine the positions that candidates should espouse: We’d do the research, find out if that was acceptable, and if it was acceptable we’d go ahead and push it, but its got to be a safe thing; you’ve got to have 472
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sellable policies, but also at the same time believe in them. . . each case is so individual you cannot, in my view, have a campaign structure that’s a winner for every candidate because every candidate’s so different.
Chesterman saw his role as very much ensuring success. Research was used, not to learn public concerns, but rather to determine which issues were “ safe,” were saleable. In other words, the public relations’ objective is to get the person elected, even if it requires the formulation of what the person represents. In contrast, Sue Wood, a public relations consultant and an ex-National Party president, believed that the integrity of the person was paramount and that the role of the public relations practitioner was to add value: Its just about absolute integrity—you just must respect that person and what that person stands for. I mean, you add value; you don’t make the person; you add value raising their profile; you add value to the quality of their written material; you add value to their thinking in terms of how best to go about things, but you don’t make the person.
Constituting the public identity was an anathema for Wood. Instead, for Wood, the role of the public relations practitioner was as a communication expert offering advice on publicity and promotion, rather than as a political expert suggesting which platforms to adopt and what to relate. The term add value was marketing jargon that implied that Wood’s role was to enhance the salability of the product, in this case, the “salability” of a woman politician. Similarly, Sally Logan Milne expressed an extreme aversion to determining positioning and policy. Logan Milne recalled a woman politician being brought to her home by her male campaign manager some years ago who asked her about positioning: We had this very odd conversation. For about an hour we went round and round in circles until I realized that she was asking, actually asking, me what she should stand for, and I was just blown away because you shouldn’t be in politics if you don’t know what you stand for. I mean, all people like me should do is tell you how to communicate, not what to communicate, for Christ sake.
For Logan Milne, the public relations practitioner’s role was that of communication advisor, not communication designer. Logan Milne explained that she considered that politicians could change their views on issues, but not their “fundamental philosophy.” Her conviction was based on a fundamental assumption “that if one’s going to be in politics, one ought to have a fundamental philosophy for being there.” Logan Milne was communicating an ethic for political candidates that required them to have a political philosophy and an ethic for public relations practitioners that required them to act in an advisory, not formative, manner. The role that public relations practitioners play as personal public relations specialists has fundamental issues for democracy: if the role is perceived and practiced as Winter 1999
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formative, then public relations practitioners are actively engaged in determining political agendas and platforms. Some of the public relations practitioners advised politicians to find platforms, policies, or positions, but did not suggest specifics. Catherine Saunders’ advice to politicians was find a platform, make it your platform. But, passionately make it your platform. You can’t just willy nilly pick up some issue and say this will be mine. You’ve got to really want to do something. I mean that’s where I suppose the idealism helps at the beginning.
Again, the ethic of a personal philosophy and positioning was being communicated. For Saunders, the process of positioning was competitive. “You must single out platforms that aren’t others’, or platforms that you feel you could topple others’ on.” Saunder’s approach to positioning was based on a marketing philosophy of strategic differentiation. Although positioning was perceived to be a competitive strategy, Saunders cautioned “don’t let somebody manufacture you into something else.” Saunders posited another ethic for subject constitution, that of the “natural” politician. Ellie Weber believed that the role of a public relations practitioner was to highlight the positive by “either underplaying or managing the negatives.” Weber explained that her approach was to “look at what is it that they’ve got.” Thus, she perceived her role as enhancing the natural attributes of the individual seeking to become a politician and skillfully positioning the individual to the best advantage, working with what she perceived to already be there. Liz Greenslade, a publicist and public relations practitioner, also avoided changing the person, but recognized the importance of positioning as a means of gaining recognition or competitive advantage: I would suggest, certainly, that they look at issues which aren’t being dealt with by other politicians. Probably, you know, environmental issues. I think as women we have a different perspective and quite often I hear them talk about stuff in the house and, oh Jesus, they just are so blinkered in there. They haven’t had time to get out and talk to people, and so I’d certainly suggest they look at different kinds of issues which aren’t mainstream, you know.
Greenslade suggests an issues-based approach to positioning, in which women candidates identify current problems or topical trends that may help them to differentiate themselves, but the candidates must be committed to and “passionate” about the issues. Thus, public relations practitioners offered a variety of perspectives on positioning: some practitioners consider that the politician must have a personal philosophy; other practitioners advise on how to create and market a personal philosophy; and other practitioners create the personal philosophy. Two fundamentally different views of the practitioner’s role in personal public relations were narrated. For Chesterman the role is formative, whereas for Wood, Logan Milne, Saunders, Greenslade, and Weber the role is that of advisor. 474
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The formative role is more closely aligned with marketing principles of promotion and competitive positioning. In contrast, the advisory role aligns more clearly with public relations principles of communication counseling and relationship building. Incorporated within the two approaches are different views of what a political subject should be: Chesterman, who adopts a formative role, creates what may be termed “career politicians,” those who want the position or power, whereas Wood, Logan Milne, Saunders, Greenslade, and Weber, who adopt advisory roles, work with “issues or idealist politicians,” those who want to effect change. However, a strategic role was also played with issues or idealist politicians: the practitioners suggested that the politicians should be strategically selective in taking up issues to make self-positioning easier. Implicit within the roles that practitioners played was a set of guidelines that were used to assist personal public relations praxis.
ETHICAL GUIDELINES The personal public relations work that practitioners undertake may be guided by membership of PRINZ and conform to the PRINZ Code of Professional Conduct. However, public relations practitioners do not have to belong to PRINZ or conform to the Code of Professional Conduct. Yet the personal public relations work that they undertake creates dual ethical obligations: practitioners advise subjects on ethical conduct and monitor their own conduct. The practitioners who were interviewed described the ethics they employ for personal public relations work. For Gordon Chesterman, the issue of compromising personal values was avoided by the repression of his personal views: See, as a consultant I have no views. I have no public views on anything. I have private views. My private views are quite different from what I do in the public sector because I’m only actually hired as a counsel to help you put your point of view, and the only reason I wouldn’t work for you would be if I was violently opposed to what your proposition was.
As a practitioner who worked within the formative approach, Chesterman had two distinct ethics: professional and private. If his private views were seriously compromised, Chesterman would not work for clients. Leitch considered that “personal ethics will impact on but are not identical with professional ethics.”23 Sally Logan Milne explained simply “I’ve got a very highly refined view of ethics that people, all people, should be ethical.” Maggie Eyre considered that maintaining confidentiality was an essential ethic for public relations practitioners. Eyre believed that, because public relations practitioners garner a lot of personal information about the subjects they work with, the subjects are “really vulnerable.” She considered that sensitivity toward her clients meant that she could not discuss individuals in public. Integrity was an integral feature in the elaboration of the self as an ethical Winter 1999
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public relations practitioner. Catherine Saunders described herself as having “fairly strict tenets of honesty and integrity and being true to oneself.” Integrity was also a key factor for Liz Greenslade in her professional work. She stated, You have to be very aware of that balance between managing and manipulating the media. You’ve got to be very sure that you are working within your integrity. . . . You have to be very, very careful, I think, that you don’t misuse your contacts, your position. There’s confidentiality issues. . . I think if you come from a real place of integrity the people know.
Greenslade’s use of the term integrity is interesting because it moves away from the notion of professional conduct or ethics to more personal values. Also important is the implication that professional behavior ensures that relationships within a variety of spheres of influence are not jeopardized. Integrity is both a personal ethic and a strategic choice. Public relations practitioners considered that the main threat to ethical, professional behavior was the need to compromise personal ethics and values. Working with only those individuals who shared similar value systems was a technique for overcoming the pressure to compromise. Maggie Eyre believed that a lot of people were leaving public relations work because they had to compromise their values. Eyre explained that she would only undertake work that did not require her to compromise her values: I think that’s unhealthy to compromise your values. I don’t have to compromise my values with Helen Clark; I’m pro Labor you know. . . for me as a publicist, I won’t promote anyone at all unless I believe in him or believe in her or believe in the organization. . . . I think ethics and values are everything. . . .
For Eyre, personal public relations work was only possible if the political values were aligned. Sue Wood believed that values of fairness, courtesy, and respect should never be compromised: “I personally place a high value on courtesy and respect for other people regardless of what their views are.” The elaboration of self as an ethical public relations practitioner has comprised the following elements: confidentiality, sensitivity, integrity, fairness, courtesy, respect, and consistent values. Although these ethics emerged from practitioners who adopted an advisory role, they offer a foundation for an ethical code for formative or advisory personal public relations work.
CONCLUSION This article has offered a preliminary discussion of the strategic and ethical roles that practitioners undertake in personal public relations. Personal public relations was conceptualized as the constitution, positioning, and promotion of individuals to form a public identity. A strategic marketing approach was identified as the planning framework for personal public relations work. The 476
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article demonstrated that the use of a marketing discourse meant that the same approach that was used to produce, package, and sell products was applied to women politicians. To assume a market identity, individuals were commodified. The drawback of this approach is that it is a one-way view of communication that may serve to hinder the development of a relational, dialogical approach. However, it does provide a strong promotional focus, which enables individuals to identify competitive and differential advantages. Three key personal public relations tasks were identified. The research approach was likened to Foucault’s notion of the confessional as a technique for learning the truth from individuals. That “truth” was then used to either constitute or advise the individual. Thus, this analysis revealed two distinct forms of personal public relations: formative or advisory. Within the formative mode, practitioners actively form the public identity and dictate political platforms for politicians who were termed “career politicians.” In contrast, within the advisory mode, practitioners proffer advice, publicize, and promote the individuals choice of platforms and positions for politicians who were termed “issues or idealist politicians.” The article then charted the ways in which public relations practitioners presented themselves as ethical and the deployment of personal rules of conduct as their ethical guide rather than professional rules of conduct or codes of ethics. The ethical rules for personal public relations were expressed as confidentiality, sensitivity, integrity, fairness, courtesy, respect, and consistency. Thus, the public relations practitioners presented their role as ethical, but what that meant varied according to their personal perspective of ethics. An integrated marketing and public relations approach would offer both promotional and communicative possibilities for personal public relations work. The discussion in this article has provided a conceptual understanding of two roles in personal public relations. It may be that those roles are not mutually exclusive, but that practitioners may shift in and out of, or combine, them. However, it is crucial that as a marketing discourse and practice is integrated into personal public relations, the importance of communication counseling, building relationships, and generating goodwill, three essential public relations practices, are not subsumed or lost.
NOTES 1.
Paul Rosenfeld, Robert A. Giacalone, and Catherine A. Riordan, Impression Management in Organizations: Theory, Measurement, Practice (London: Routledge, 1995); Rachel Harris Caillouet and Myria Watkins Allen, “Impression Management Strategies Employees Use When Discussing Their Organization’s Public Image,” Journal of Public Relations Research 8 (1996), pp. 211–227. 2. Randy Sumpter and James W. Tankard, “The Spin Doctor: An Alternative Model of Public Relations,” Public Relations Review 20 (1994), pp. 19 –27. 3. James Grunig, “Image and Substance: From Symbolic to Behavioral Relationships,” Public Relations Review 19 (1993), pp. 121–139. Winter 1999
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4. 5.
6. 7.
8.
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
15. 16.
17.
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Erving Goffman,. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books 1959.) Paul Rosenfeld, Robert A. Giacalone, and Catherine A. Riordan, Impression Management in Organizations: Theory, Measurement, Practice (London: Routledge 1995), p. 4. James Grunig, op. cit. Elinor Selame and Joe Selame, The Company Image: Building your Identity and Influence in the Marketplace (New York: Wiley, 1988); Wally Olins, Corporate Identity: Making Business Strategy Visible through Design (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989); Sam Black, The Essentials of Public Relations (London: Kogan Page, 1993); Dennis Basil Bromley, Reputation, Image and Impression Management (Chichester, England: Wiley, 1993); Graham Dowling, Corporate Reputations: Strategies for Developing the Corporate Brand (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1994); Cees van Riel, Principles of Corporate Communication (London: Prentice Hall, 1995); Charles Fombrun, Reputation: Realizing Value from the Corporate Image (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). Phillip K. Tompkins and George Cheney, “Account Analysis of Organizations: Decision Making and Identification,” in Linda Putnam and Michael Pacanowsky (eds.), Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985), pp. 123–146; George Cheney and George N. Dionisopoulos, “Public Relations? No Relations with Publics: A Rhetorical-Organizational Approach to Contemporary Corporate Communications,” in Carl J. Botan and Vincent Hazelton (eds.), Public Relations Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), pp. 135–157; George Cheney, “The Corporate Person (Re)Presents Itself,” in Elizabeth L. Toth and Robert L. Heath (eds.), Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), pp. 165–183; Linda Hon, “Feminism and Public Relations,” The Public Relations Strategist 1 (1995), pp. 20 – 25; George Cheney and Lars Thøger Christensen, “Identity at Issue: Linkages between ‘Internal’ and ‘External’ Organizational Communication,” in Fred M. Jablin and Linda L. Putnam (eds.), New Handbook of Organizational Communication (Sage, In press). Paul du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work (London: Sage. 1996). George Cheney and Lars Thøger Christensen, op. cit., p. 16. Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Longman, 1995), p. 140. Michael Dunlop, “The Business of Communications,” paper presented to the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand Conference, Rotorua, NZ, April 1998. Fraser P. Seitel, The Practice of Public Relations (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall 1998). David K. Knights, “Changing Spaces: The Disruptive Impact of a New Epistemological Allocation for the Study of Management,” Academy of Management Review 17 (1992), pp. 514 –536. Martha M. Lauzen, “When Marketing Involvement Matters at the Manager Level,” Public Relations Review 19 (1993), pp. 247–259. Glen M. Broom, Martha M. Lauzen, and Kerry Tucker, “Public Relations and Marketing: Dividing the Conceptual Domain and Operational Turf,” Public Relations Review 17 (1991), pp. 219 –225. Graham J. Hooley, John A. Saunders, and Nigel F. Piercy, Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning (London: Prentice Hall, 1998). Vol. 25, No. 4
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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.
Bob Franklin, Packaging Politics: Political Communications in Britain’s Media Democracy (London: E. Arnold. 1994). Robert L. Heath, Strategic Issues Management: Organizations and Public Policy Challenges (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), p. 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (trans. by R. Hurley) (London: Penguin, 1981) (Original work published 1976). Ibid, p. 62. Ibid, p. 67. Shirley Leitch, “Professionalism in New Zealand Public Relations,” International Public Relations Review 18 (1995), p. 29.
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