When dealing with public relations, ethics is definitely something to be aware of, especially when it comes down to deciding between right and wrong. Public Relations is known by most as a way “for companies, organizations or people to enhance their reputations” (Wisegeek.com). With PR professionals constantly communicating with the media, to present the clients in the most favorable way possible, they must know what is considered to be ethical and what’s morally wrong. There have been numerous times when a company has ruined its reputation due to a situation and never had good PR to gain its reputation back. Once a company loses the trust and respect with the public, it’s always hard to regain it back. With every situation that companies face, there’s either good PR or bad PR.
Bad PR tends to have two factors that go
along with it. When the company makes a mistake that becomes newsworthy, it is
usually the poor action that the organization takes and the poor
communication
surrounding the action of the company that causes them to have a bad PR crisis.
In Amazon’s case, the company did not take action until they saw all the angry responses on the social media sites. Therefore, they didn’t see what they had done wrong until it was too late. It was surprising to most people how Amazon missed the opportunity to react to such a crisis and how they handled the whole situation. Amazon did learn a lesson after all of this: “ If it happens too often and you show a disregard or disrespect for the online conversation, then you’re going to be at a big disadvantage” (Grabowski).
After this happened, it made a lot of people question Amazon and wonder if they had homophobic running their website. I searched the word “homosexuality” on the Amazon website and the first book that pops up is “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality”. Coincidence? Who knows?
With so many Bad PR cases, people forget about all the good PR cases that professionals deal with as well. The example that automatically comes to mind when I think of good PR is the Tylenol crisis of 1982. McNeil Consumer Products, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, was left with a big crisis to deal with when seven people on Chicago's West Side died mysteriously. It was later determined “that each of the people that died had ingested an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule laced with cyanide” (Kaplan). It didn’t take long for the news to become known to all. It caused people around the nation to panic. Thinking quickly, “these poisonings made it necessary for Johnson & Johnson to launch a public relations program immediately, in order to save the integrity of both their product and their corporation as a whole” (Kaplan). Johnson & Johnson was recognized and praised for their actions and were a good example of a company that “effectively demonstrated how a major business ought to handle a disaster" (Knight). The way that Tylenol handled the crisis can best be described with Kant’s ethical theory. Kant defined good will as the “uniquely human capacity to act according to one’s principles, not our of an expectation of potential consequences.” Tylenol was doing the right thing versus doing things right. They knew what was best for their consumers, putting what was best for the company aside.
With Public Relations, deciding between right and wrong is part of the everyday process when working with clients. Public relations professionals depend heavily on certain codes of ethics held by major professional associations. It is the job of the PR professional to know when something is ethically or morally wrong and it’s their responsibility to take action and decide what’s best for the company. When something goes wrong in an organization, ethics come into play because it then comes down to deciding on how to communicate information with the media and the public without doing harm to the company or lying to the public. So whether people believe it or not, ethics do exist in the world of pubic relations. I feel without ethical theories to go by, public relations just wouldn’t be the same.
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