RCMP brand management

When we think about the RCMP we often think about dutiful horses and honest men with mustaches. The Canadian Mounties have always had a pretty solid brand. The brand elements range from their unique outfits and the buffalo on the crest to the history and mythos that remains alive in the stories told about them and their brave deeds. It is also interesting to note just how much Canada’s branding both amongst Canadians and internationally relies on the images and stories of the RCMP.

The tragic case of Robert Dziekanski has proven to be a challenge for the brand managers in the RCMP. Type “Robert Dziekanski” into a search engine and you’ll get a bazillion hits. But what is also interesting is that there are so many relatively new articles on the web. Take this article, for example, about the fact that the RCMP officers are still being paid despite their wrongdoings.

Strategic communication

Dziekanski first hit the news in October of 2007. Here is one of the first written articles that was produced by the CBC about the situation. The language that reporters used to describe the event was important. It would set the frame through which Canadians, and the world, would first understand the issue. So the soundbites from the RCMP were crucial from a media management perspective. The initial frame was roughly that: 1. there had been a tragic event involving a foreigner, 2. Tasers had been deployed twice, 3. police officers had done their duty and followed procedure, 4. The foreigner had died, 5. the foreigner had been acting violently, 6. there was a toxicology report pending because substance use was suspected.

These bits of information were strategically chosen to present the role of the RCMP in a positive, or at least neutral, light. And twenty years ago, this would have probably been sufficient to protect the brand of the RCMP. Some articles would have gotten printed. Some interviews would have hit the six o’clock news. And some radio listeners would have lamented the tragic situation.

But brand management has become a little trickier in our modern context. It’s three and a half years later and articles are still being published about what is generally regarded as a deep injustice. And this presents an interesting challenge to a national institution that maybe hasn’t quite come to grips with the new context in which they’re attempting to manage their brand.

Initially everything seemed to be going okay for the RCMP messaging. Often I would hear people referring to the “incident”, not the “killing”, or they would say that Dziekanski had died after being shocked, not killed by the RCMP intervention. So the initial frame went a long way towards neutralizing the role of the RCMP in the tragedy. Admittedly, even today you can hear people say that Dziekanski was “killed by tasers used by RCMP”. So there are still some long-term benefits accruing by the initial framing of RCMP spokespeople.

But there are far more disadvantages to the slightly outmoded approach by the RCMP. And these disadvantages have been making the public concern about Robert Dziekanski case significant and lasting in a way that is hurting the brand value of the RCMP. Here are what I see as the main factors that the RCMP haven’t properly grappled with.

1. Video

The chances of someone getting videotape of police mis-handling someone twenty years ago is incredibly unlikely. My dad had a Super8 but there’s no way he would have wasted his precious tape on, what he would have probably seen as, a distasteful public moment. But photo, and video and audio devices now abound.

This is important, partly, because it has been the modus operandi of the RCMP to assert their authority and take the higher moral ground and therefore call into question the testimony of anyone challenging their own account of an incident. And the strength of the RCMP brand has historically made this work. But an RCMP lie can’t trump video.

2. Random access of data

When the news came to us via the radio or the television or in print, the average citizen could not go see what so-and-so said eight months ago. Taken together with the general predispositions and leanings of the news media the net result of this was a short public memory for lying. We still grapple with a short attention span for the truth, but the fact that people can still access the reports and interviews and soundbites from 2007 is, I think, a really important factor in modern speechifying and modern brand management. The RCMP lied repeatedly in an attempt to gloss over facts they didn’t want out in the hearts and minds of Canadians and the internet makes this something that is very difficult to run from. The slogan “time heals all wounds” makes more sense if you don’t have easy access to old facts or lots of facts all at once. Of course ultimately the truth still needs to become part of the public discourse. Despite the entitlement of the RCMP, the public has a right to know.

3. Increased distrust

This third point is even more speculative. But here it is. I think that slowly but surly the RCMP brand has been quietly eroding and the public has less willingness to turn away from injustice and incompetence. Less trust means less sympathy, more scrutiny and greater accountability. This hasn’t happened slowly. It’s taken decades for the Canadian public to wake up to this. The RCMP has an inflated sense of entitlement and you get the sense that they think they are too important for criticism.

Still angry

You know, it’s not clear to me, even now, that the Taser killed Dziekanski. I watched the tape and to me it looked like Dziekanski could have been killed by positional asphyxation – the knee to the neck cutting off the blood supply to the brain. I don’t think we’ll ever really know. I’m still angry. I know I’m not alone. But regardless of the precise reason, Dziekanski was killed by those four officers. I guess the fact that there has been no accountability for those officers is troubling.

If four unskilled citizens had walked in to that room and killed someone acting out, they would have been charged with manslaughter, regardless of their “good intentions” or the tools and methods used. But dress four men up in uniforms, and give them specialized training in the use of force, and for some reason they are less accountable. Which is odd.

If I hire a qualified mechanic to fix my truck and they destroy it, they’re liable. If I ask my buddy to fix my truck and he destroys it, I’m liable. The police officers that killed Dziekanski were professionals and they should be more accountable than four average citizens; not less.

The officers failed to properly assess and respond to the situation effectively. Then they used too much force. Then they failed to administer CPR.

Then the officers lied. Then their superiors and media relations officers lied. They lied about the cause of death. They lied about Dziekanski’s character. Then they lied about the video.

Then they lied about lying.

Background and theoretical framework to Pickton murders

On August 17th 2010, the Canadian office of Amnesty International wrote a letter to the Attorney General of British Columbia calling for a public inquiry into the police and government response to the missing women of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Amnesty International has been calling for justice for these missing women for many years. Now it appears there is evidence that the investigation was seriously botched. Now we are told, there will be an investigation, but there are concerns that it won’t be fair and transparent and the police and the provincial government will not be held accountable. Maybe, maybe not.

Regardless of how fair the investigation of the police and provincial government is, my interest in doing a discourse analysis of the National Post is of the bigger picture surrounding these murders. I am of the belief that violence in our Canadian culture is patterned and that the portrayal of violence in the media is also patterned.

The pattern I want to explore is the following. Violence is more likely to flow down the social hierarchy and less likely to flow up the social hierarchy. let’s call this the Unequal Violence Pattern (UVP). There is a corollary: when violence does flow up the social hierarchy, it is highly visible. When violence flows down the social hierarchy, it is less visible. Let’s call this the Unequal Visibility of Violence Pattern (UVVP).²

So for example, white Christian upper class men are near the top of the social hierarchy in our culture. So when a brown, immigrant man or woman is harmed by this kind of man, it is more likely to go unnoticed. No doubt, when some folks read this, they will react with incredulity. Others will simply agree. I understand that this is controversial to some people. But notice that if I phrase it even slightly differently, people will generally have far more understanding and agreement for this phenomenon: there is more justice for the upper class than there is for people of the lower class. This is quite a widely held belief that has considerable justification and that one would be hard pressed to deny.

My assumption here is that if white rich men were being killed in Vancouver, the police would have made it a priority and the killer would have been found very quickly. But by 2001, 60 women were known to be missing from the downtown Eastside and the police weren’t really doing much about it. It took advocacy by many social institutions, like Amnesty International, to force the police and the government to put more resources towards the Pickton files.

And I am of the belief that this phenomenon of unequal justice is simply one strand of the larger pattern of unequal violence. But is this belief justified? And how would I ever try to argue for this? How might I try to give evidence of this sort of thing? These are big questions.

If you have some feelings of resistance to my claims, then you have become a valuable resource to me. The reason is that I hope to be able to do a basic discourse analysis of the National Post coverage of the Pickton investigations in such a way that gives some convincing evidence towards my claims here. You can help me. Is my analysis interesting? Is it persuasive? I don’t expect to have a slam dunk. Such big questions require many more investigations than I can ever do in my hours off. But perhaps it will be provocative enough to get some resistors on board the project of being open to such an analysis. There is of course, many excellent researchers doing this kind of work. But science is always more fun, done at home.

The thing is that the National Post is the paper of choice for people near the top of the social hierarchy: white folks, with lots of money, mostly men and mostly Christian. So I expect that the reporting in this paper on issues of violence to people at the bottom of the social hierarchy

The method

I haven’t decided on the method yet! I think I will do a site search of the National Post’s website for articles with the word “Pickton” in it. Then I will search these articles of the most recent articles for instances of the word “race” or any of its cognates, like “racism” or “racialized”. Perhaps “systemic” or “oversight” are also good candidates. I thought I might undertake this analysis this afternoon. But it will obviously require some more thought and some more time.

Until next time.

For ad men, that’s pretty good.

The book is called The Age of Persuasion, How Marketing Ate Our Culture. I’m totally enjoying it. But here’s what I’m talking about. In the preface, he reflects on the radio show he launched in 1995:

In the summer of 1995, I launched a twenty-five radio series, O’Reilly on Advertising, on CBC’s Radio One, eager to fill what I saw as a huge information void. Of the thousands of books, films, courses, and programs about advertising and marketing, few, if any, were created by people within the industry for people outside the industry.

Then turning to his more recent radio show, he adds:

This program has allowed me to fill another curious void: the thousands of works critical of the impact of advertising and marketing on modern life and culture are created, almost without exception, by people who have never worked within the advertising business.

Wow. If true, that is totally significant. it means that people who work in the advertising business don’t criticize themselves, the techniques of their trade or the affects they have on our communities. Ever. Wow. That is a huge criticism that O’Reilly almost, but not quite, made of advertisers. ²

The point I’m trying to angle towards is this. There is no one better suited to sell us on sales, than a salesperson. And advertising is sales. So there is no one better suited to sell us on advertising, than an advertiser. Well… maybe a salesperson. But do you get my point? Advertisers everywhere are advocates for their various clients now and then and once in a while. But advertisers everywhere are advocates for their jobs, their careers, and their industry, all of the time.

The question is, what are we buying?

In order to draw out this comparison, first consider that as of December 10th, reporters and opinion makers were still largely guessing that Tiger Woods wouldn’t lose any sponsors. Well he did. Many of them, I think. Companies became afraid of being associated with Tiger Woods. Wow. Now some didn’t drop him, they just suspended him, I believe. Probably, and I’m totally making this up, some of his sponsors just pretended to drop him and made him sign carefully crafted legal agreements and then forced him to adopt a 9-step process to rebuild his public image.

It is notable that sponsors dropped or suspended Woods in such a short period of time. If you do a site search for “Tiger Woods” on the Calgary Herald website you get a list of 165 articles. Now these articles are listed chronologically. And 12 of those articles occur before they reported on the infamous car crash on November 27th with this article: Woods’ wife rescues golfer from smashed up car. By December 3rd, the Herald published: Sponsors willing to give troubled woods a mulligan. By the 1oth of December the Herald had written: Sponsors begin to shun woods. By February 22nd there had been roughly 150 articles including: Dalai Lama weighs in on Tiger Woods. ¹

Some might argue that this is evidence that the Calgary Herald wastes time and resources writing about socially insignificant issues. Some would argue that the energy that the Herald puts towards this issue is evidence that they lack journalistic integrity. But these issues are not mine today. Perhaps I will quickly note, however, that since these articles are about Tiger Woods, they are actually affecting, even constructing, the public opinion about Tiger Woods. They report the news and they make the news all at once. But this is a digression.

The point, and the point of comparison, is that an individual’s billion dollar brand was tarnished so much that in the span of a couple of weeks, his sponsors had to either drop him, suspend him, pretend to drop him, or at the very least, hold tense stakeholder meetings and press conferences. Wow. Now try to imagine what could possibly happen to the Olympics in order for that to happen. It’s almost impossible to imagine. The brand is too diversified. It’s too secure. And partly, I would argue, the public opinion shapers, like the Calgary Herald, have too much invested in the Olympics and the Olympic machine. When the Woods scandal came out, the companies involved with Woods pulled their ads featuring him. But if there was Olympic scandal involving individuals or teams, they would just switch individuals and teams. There is nothing that could happen that could cause the Olympic brand, in toto, to crash that hard, that fast. Even if some athletes became embroiled in some kind of publicity disaster, there would still be thousands of others. And even if some entire teams, or a few countries of teams became publicly toxic, there would still be entire other countries of teams to cushion the brand.

Of course, knowing this, it’s no wonder that the IOC carefully developed, and then enclosed, and then protected that brand within a vast legal framework in order to sell it to the highest bidders. How better to support the cause of amateur sport and international peace & cooperation?

It’s a good study with significant social relevance. And Maclean’s Magazine wrote an article about it. ²

But the comments on this Maclean’s article tell the story of racism in Canada, as much as the research itself. This comment by “Julie LaFlamme” might constitute hate speech. Apparently she thinks all people with racialized minority names are immigrants. Wow. And apparently she thinks it’s acceptable to discriminate on the basis of race. Wow. And apparently Maclean’s thinks this kind of comment is acceptable. Heck.

Comment by “Julie LaFlamme” to MacLean’s article on 22 May 2009:

So this is a surprise? Funny I thought that if a company was paying its employees a fair wage, submitting their taxes on time, and generally behaving in an acceptable way, it could consider the type of employee it would choose to hire also based on the ability to fit in with the culture of th business ( how many .A.S.P.s do you see working at retail establishments in Chinatown?)
If people don’t want to hire immigrants, why should they be obligated to interview them? This is taking political correctness just a little too far. Why should an immigrant get a job over a natural citizen, whose parents & grandparents have built the country up.
I am so tired of catering to immigrnats – who seem to think nothing of trying to bring their conflicts & screw-ups from their old homes here with them.
Hopefully those who work in immigration will grow a set & start doing their jobs screening undesirables who end up being citizens of convenience, not contibutors to our society.

Well the answer to that question is too long ¹ for this post. So instead what I’ve tried to do here is outline a few of the challenges facing the modern journalist by summarizing six challenges of publishing in this modern context.

Six challenges

First of all, newspapers are a businesses. They have clients. And their clients are businesses that want to advertise. But they lose these clients when the newspaper promotes views and says things that don’t align with the bottom line interests of said clients. So an oil company based out of Calgary, for example, has a fiduciary duty to be opposed to policies that limit their profitability. That in turn means that they can’t spend money on advertising with broadcasters or publishers that promote policies that hurt their profitability. And that means that journalists have to write in ways that don’t make their editors choke on their ties.² I call this the challenge of compliance.

Second, this is happening in an internationalized context where newspapers are losing market share and profitability because of “the google”, or the “interweb”. So the pressure on journalists to say something of more interest and value than say, a blogger, is immense. I call this the challenge of attention.

Third, issues are complicated. Climate science is complicated. Social policy is complicated. Police brutality is complicated. Did so-and-so “die”? Or were they “killed”? This is sometimes a very tricky business. And given the possibility that someone with money or an agenda might sue you for libel, it’s easier to just write about the sports. In a complicated world it can be very hard to find out the truth or reasonable approximations of it. I call this difficulty, the challenge of integrity.

If finding the truth and understanding complex situations is difficult, try doing it on a timeline. And that’s the kicker: publishing for a newspaper means saying something on time. The traditional newspaper has a press that runs on a rigid schedule for economic reasons and reasons of scale. And because newspapers, and the old people that read them, hate trees and don’t understand the interweb-thingy, they still produce content on this rigid schedule. This is the challenge of production.

Fifthly, the pressure for journalists to understand a situation, produce some engaging copy, say something non-threatening for their advertisers, not get sued by a person in the story, get it to print on time all the while bearing the weight of the future of the newspaper, is intense. The financial future of all the staff is on their shoulders and the weight must be spine-crushing. After all, if Canwest fails to avert their bankruptcy and the whole empire tanks, the Aspers won’t lose their retirement savings or their house. Contra a common capitalist myth, it’s actually the employees that bear most of the real risk of the Canwest empire crumbling. Employees that have moved their families and invested in mortgages or are carrying the debt of their journalism degrees can’t afford for Canwest to go broke. So all of the myriad staff that it takes to design and print a newspaper, distribute it and find advertisers all rely on the content produced by the reporters. That’s a lot of pressure. The reporters are accountable to their fellow employees in a major way. I call this the challenge of positive-thinking-will-hopefully-keep-this-boat-floating-until-we-all-pay-our-mortgages.

And finally and perhaps most significantly, journalists need to worry about their own jobs. I actually don’t know this for certain. But this is the word on the street. Journalists, apparently, are losing there jobs. And, apparently, it’s not just Canwest that has been losing employees. So it turns out that reporters need to keep their editors very very happy. So, in deference to the first challenge, I also call this the challenge of compliance.

In Summary

1. The challenge of compliance (for editors)
2. The challenge of attention
3. The challenge of integrity
4. The challenge of production
5. The challenge of positive-thinking-will-hopefully-keep-this-boat-floating-until-we-all-pay-our-mortgages.
6. The challenge of compliance (for reporters)

This guy knows things about the future of journalism. Actually, he also has some good tips on just writing a blog. ³

Then I scored the articles, on a scale of -10 to +10, on the following criteria:

How many soundbites are from libertarian, big-business think tanks? How many soundbites are from published scientists who work in the field of climatology? How many soundbites challenged the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by humans? How many soundbites encouraged or supported the notion that Canada ought to meet it’s carbon emission reduction goals? How many soundbites create confusion about the fact of climate change? What is the educational and informational value of this article? Is it evidence based?

Conclusions

All scores range from -10 to +10, where a positive score is a good article and a negative score is a bad article. This score is than multiplied by the word count to factor in the relative volume of the article. The scores are then added. If the sum total is a positive score than the Calgary Herald has been publishing good and informative articles. If the sum is negative, than the Herald has been publishing bad articles.⁴

Only three article scored in the positive end of the spectrum. Interestingly, the articles that were better in terms of their content were generally the shortest articles. There is one exception to this: the first article (and the shortest at only 117 words) scored a minus five. The average article length was 578 words. After factoring for the article length, the final average value of the articles from the Calgary Herald on the topic of climate change, on a scale of -10 to +10, is -4. Which sucks.⁵

The total negative points by the seven bad articles came to: -27369
The total positive points by the three good articles came to: 5404
The grand total is: -21965
The average value of each article is: -2197
The average article length: 578 words
The average value of each article: -4

Take climate change for example. The fact of climate change, by itself, is not perceived as a threat by Big Oil and their bottom line. But public opinion and the subsequent possibility of government taxation and regulation is a perceived threat by Big Oil and their profit margin. So organizations like the Conference Board of Canada, C.D. Howe and the Fraser Institute step forward to disrupt public opinion.

The first step is to get air time. To do this they call up their media buddies with the National Post or Cross-Country Checkup. Either by getting quoted directly or by influencing the analysis of the overworked, job-threatened and under-educated reporter, the underlying message and the framework for that message gets public exposure.

The second key ingredient is to pretend to be trustable. This happens through the use of expert titles and heavy reference to the number of researchers and academics employed by the think-tank. Crucially, they’re usually economists or communications people, but they never say this. The representative will generally pretend, and Rex Murphy will pretend along with him, that they are all experts in climate change science. Add to this the years of branding by the National Post and Cross-Country Checkup that they’re impartial and authoritative news sources serving our democracy and you get a potent recipe for believability. And this brings me back to why I think Rex Murphy is a jackass. He creates a call in show, branded for everyday Canadians, but brings in well paid representatives from right-wing think tanks to represent the wealthiest and biggest businesses in the country. He poses as a show for the people. But it’s not.

With this access to a trusting public ear the key message has propogated: climate change and it’s causes are uncertain. The underlying message has been confusion. The result is a public opinion that we shouldn’t jeopardize our mortgages and our jobs and our habits of consumption. This brings me to the December edition of FOCUS and a great article by Gene Miller. Rex Murphy has perhaps too eagerly defended Big Oil and too eagerly added his voice of dissent to the environmental movement. Rex calls the movement Big Green. Miller says:

“Big Green?” Those the ones associated with Big Feminism, Big Peace, Big Anti-Land Mines, Big Racial Equality and Big Anti-Child Slavery?

…you sound like the South before Lincoln, or the British before Gandhi. You sound like the flatearthers in Calgary. You sound like some gaseous table-pounder bellowing about how good-paying jobs in the oil-patch now are worth more than some speculative issues that maybe our great grandkids will have to deal with—woo-woo stuff like the bankrupting relocation of coastal infrastructure around the globe, global loss of freshwater, global loss of arable land, global desertification, the migration north of a couple of billion people, and the end of national boundaries and the nation-state. Deal or no deal, Rex?

Actually, we won’t be getting our energy from Alberta within 25 years anyway (my guess); and red deer will wander through the silent, empty office canyons of downtown Calgary. (Take oil out of the Calgary economic equation and the city folds like a suit from Kresge’s.) The world by then will be operating on a mixed-source energy regime that conspicuously excludes oil.

Miller is great. Partly what makes his article such a great example of a solid communications strategy is that he first focuses on the environmental and moral considerations of ignoring global warming. He then reconsiders his argument from an economic perspective for the sake of those that only understand these issues through the lens of economy. Stephen Harper and Rex Murphy seem to think that the economy has greater reality than our environment or climate. Miller, acknowledging their psychological impediments, attempts to parse his message in a way that they will understand.

Special thanks goes out to the Balkan Babes for letting us use their performance of the traditional song “Majka Rada”, from their album, Divna.