Amidst all the New Year optimism it seems churlish to complain, but the holiday season happens to overlap PR planning season, and PR planning season is almost always a good time to complain. It's not that I dislike planning for my clients. Planning is a rewarding and productive exercise when done sensibly, which is to say with an eye on strategy and goals rather than on minutiae and over-engineered schedules that disintegrate at the first poke of a stick. But one thing that you learn when you do a lot of planning for a lot of clients is that corporations are livestock.

You will have spotted the metaphor. Of course corporations are not actually livestock, or we would be fattening them on grain, stunning them with pneumatic bolts to the head and processing them into Hooters "more than a mouthful" burgers. In fact, many years ago in Singapore Imagethief had a client from the financial services industry that he briefly considered stunning with a pneumatic bolt to the head, but this was for entirely different reasons.

Bear with me, because I am going to torture the metaphor for a while. What I mean is that corporations often behave like livestock when it comes to public relations. They herd. Every company likes to think of itself as the hard-charging alpha-bull leading that herd into pristine new pastures, but in fact most are just ambling along with the crowd and dreaming of having the biggest horns. Our job, as PR cowboys, is to pry our particular cow far enough from the herd that it can be spotted from a distance, but not so far out that it is devoured by wolves.

This herding is the product of two ingrained things: similar approaches to risk management in many PR departments, especially in Asia; and a tendency for those PR departments to all grab onto the same big ideas at the same time. It's the latter that's bugging me now. 2008 is on the way and virtually every company that Imagethief has helped with its 2008 China PR planning has asked for the same two things: Make us Olympic and make us green.

These, it seems, are the big ideas for China PR in 2008. Fine, I can understand that. The Olympics will be simply huge in China in 2008, and sustainability is a major government buzzword right now. But as a public service I would like to offer the following thoughts:

Ignore the Olympics
If you're not an Olympic sponsor or directly connected with the Games in some way, forget the Olympics. It's not that there is anything wrong with the Olympics, it's just that I guarantee you that every organ grinder and his monkey is currently hatching an Olympic communication plan. The noise level will be deafening and the burnout factor high. Considering an ambush marketing campaign? Remember that the Olympics are a touchstone for Chinese national pride and ask yourself how your Chinese audience is likely to perceive party crashers.

Wouldn't you rather be the company that launches an interesting, creative program into the void that will exist when all the Olympic hype dies down? People will need something to take their minds off of the $40 billion hangover.

Of course, if you're a sponsor, you can ignore everything above and go crazy.

Don't talk green if you're not actually green
Imagethief is pleased by the amount of interest companies are paying to the environment. I am one of those pessimists who feels the world is going to Hell in a handbasket, and that China is in the part of the handbasket that will enter Hell first. (Early last week, when the air was at its most brimstone-laden, I was pretty sure we had already arrived.)

But for heaven's sake, if you're going to talk about being green and sustainable (one of Imagethief's top buzzwords of '07!), you'd better actually be doing something green and sustainable. In a big way. Hey, it's peachy that your company recycles waste paper, uses compact fluorescent lights and mandates that all computers be shut off at night rather than left on standby. Those, however, are basic expectations, like stopping at red lights when schoolgirls on crutches and ducklings are crossing the road. Don't send out a bunch of self-laudatory press releases about this kind of thing. Especially if your company is a shipbuilder, auto maker, aluminum smelter, etc.

In 2007, Imagethief only wants to see (or, heaven help him, write) "sustainability" press releases from companies that are:

  • Reinventing a major business or manufacturing process so that it is demonstrably more efficient
  • Changing products in a fundamental way so they are significantly greener
  • Leading industry-wide initiatives to address some environmental problem that affects their entire industry.
  • Working directly to resolve one of China's many significant environmental problems
Please do all the other small stuff as well. Just don't ask me to phone reporters about it.

There's no way to escape 2008 being the green, Olympic year. The herd will be mighty and thunderous. But that doesn't mean you have to be in the middle of it.

Cattle

The Olympics are just over yonder green hill...

Update:

At the same time I was writing this, BusinessWeek predicted a "green crisis" in 2008. Predictions are cheap at this time of year, but it echoes my sentiment that any company making any green claims had best be able to back them up solid:

There will be a backlash in the green movement after it becomes clear that many of the companies claiming to be green are in fact nothing of the sort. Businesses that proclaim they are "carbon neutral" will find that such proclamations no longer carry much weight among far more skeptical media and consumers.

Yep.