Today we visited the Royal Aeronautical Society, where that toy above was on display. We met with Clifford Beal of Strix Consultancy. He’s a Vermont man, by way of Sussex, who is a former editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly and has worked closely with Raytheon for years. Strix is essentially a boutique public relations firm, providing strategy and extra PR hands (primarily) to weapons manufacturers.
This was a great meeting. I took a lot of notes.
Beal talked about the need for building relationships, every boutique firm talks about this. But he has a few points that stand out from the rest.
“My clients create serious products that often have life and death consequences. That sets them apart from other industries.”
One of the challenges they face is that there are often hostile perceptions of arms manufacturers. Historically, he said, that changed briefly during WWII “because that was the good war,” and then reverted. Those perceptions have large and small implications. For example, Beal said that robotics and drones are words that aren’t used anymore. Instead, the acronym UAV is employed. Similarly, the term “cluster bombs” posses an “emotive language that removes credible debate.”
Beal said it can be difficult to conduct a PR campaign or share a message against such a bow wave of public opinion. (Sound familiar to anyone in PR?) But there are good arguments. The economics of scale involved in the weapons industry makes production cost prohibitive. There’s the legitimate self defense aspect that each sovereign government would maintain. And the U.S. and U.K., he says, have the toughest export regulations in the world.
“You can’t just ship to anyone.”
Another challenge, though, is that all of the aeronautic agencies clients are governments. They often have a limited need for public relations at the national level. Locally, that’s a different game. There are work force/private sector concerns, employee safety issues and, of course, the environment. The clients and audiences are demanding different things there. But at the national level the topics are things like costs to taxpayer, cost to profit and safety and reliability.
So we talked about the F-35 boondoggle right there.
Beal looks at from the idea of talking to people directly to help guide or even turn an opinion. This is about helping to influence outcomes, but he’s taking this from a macro level.
“The media is a megaphone to your audience, not an end to itself. It is a conduit to decision makes. When it is done right, it will provide your message from a different corner,” he said.
We got started on a topic of useful tools and he said, straight up, “I wouldn’t include press releases any more.”
And my guess is you’re going to hear more of that in the coming years.
The inverted pyramid and subsequent style still holds, but the delivery has changed. This is about storytelling, which is what we’ve been telling our students for some time now.
Obviously social media is a part of the recipe now, but Beal said that aeronautics agencies, generally conservative creatures, are behind in that realm. There are control issues over subject matter. That makes sense, particularly in those very sensitive areas in which they often work. Because of that, he said, it is often stage-managed and not spontaneous.
Beal is a big believer in a successful network of contacts. This makes sense, it his defined his last decade-and-change worth of work at Strix. But that’s on the B-2-B side. He talked about the B-2-J side, specifically.
“Journalists are now under much more (time) pressure. They’re not going to give you a lot of time if they don’t know you, or until it is a really big story.”
The networking, he said, “gives you an incredible amount of good will. Bring them along from the beginning of the story, not just during the crisis.”
And then we got into the part of the media that applies to people working in aeronautics or corporate banking or non-profit PR. We talked of the many media channels now available, and how that fragmentation presents a challenge. This is the professional material and the guys sitting at home pecking away.
“You have to cultivate, pay attention to them as well … Each channel has its own ways of doing things. You have to tailor your message for each of them.”
Hmmm. Where have I said that before?
That’s not just in how they present media, though, but in what they’re looking for and, of course, what they’re asking about. The trade publications, Beal said “are asking questions that execs might not want asked.” Those trade pubs, though, (Remember, the guy was the editor at Jane’s. He knows what is going on here … ) are “reaching two different levels, but you have to reach both to be effective.”
He talks about a colonel or a major who is reading all of these trade pubs and then flagging the important material for general officers, where some real impact is being made. So if you think of it as middle- and upper-management, you have a lot of people to hit in one message, if you want to be successful.
Also, Beal said, those trade pubs know weaknesses and are being primed by plenty of other potential sources. Broadcasters, meanwhile, are looking for news hooks. Papers, the high end products at least, are often the outlets that “influence decision makers. They are noticed at a high level.”
Generally, though, in journalism, he is encountered by the same industry problems that we regularly bemoan. There is a continual decline in resource knowledge and institutional history. There are, he said, fewer defense correspondents and far fewer war correspondents than once upon a time. So often he is having to peddle Widget 101 to a general journalist. Of course, from his point of view, there are plenty of potential PR wins in a circumstance like that.
We discussed the future outlook of the weapons making industry, including budget crunches, technology costs and increasing development time and technology transfer offset trading. He had a few pointed geopolitical ideas about that topic.
He also talked about entering global public relations, generalized the quality of media across different regions of the planet and, of course, closed with the timeless nugget of crisis communication.
“If something went wrong and it was your fault, say so. Say so.”
So, yes, if there are typos above. They’re mine. Sorry.
Here, now, is another model on display at the Royal Aeronautic Society. And it is not a Manriot plane, but actually the Fokker Spin.
