A Rolling Stone doesn’t gather Moss…

Supermodels and fashion icons have a solid reputation, meaning that it takes a lot for them to fall from grace.
Naomi Campbell, the trouble child of Haute Couture, has been at the top of her professional for 15 years, notwithstanding violent tantrums and court orders to go into anger management.
Sex, drugs and rock & roll has been an integral part of the high fashion lifestyle – diet pills addiction, cocaine use, alcohol accesses - you name it.

But in the case of Kate Moss, there is a limit to the damage a brand can take.
Naomi is sensitive about her brand and knows how to perform damage control.
Her latest fashion extravaganza for the victims of Katrina is a perfect example.

Kate has been a wild party child since the beginning of her career; even rehab and motherhood couldn’t tame her.
Kate’s freefall began after photos appeared in British tabloids showing her using drugs.
This was obviously too much “in your face” for the general public.
The fact that Scotland Yard is investigating the claims she has taken cocaine in public didn’t help as well. The newspapers worldwide had a field day reporting on Kate’s past and present peccadilloes, dubbing her “Cocaine Kate,” and using tacky headliners such as “high as a Kate.”
When more revelations were made public claiming Moss indulged in cocaine-fuelled lesbian three-in-a-bed sex, the invisible line between eccentric and unacceptable was crossed.

A supermodel doesn’t make her living from just trotting the catwalk and pouting for the cameras – she is a small business empire, raking in revenues from lucrative sponsorships. Moss’ annual income is estimated at ₤7 M. ($ 15.4M.)
And that’s where the crux is – to be the “face” of a strong brand like Chanel, Burberry or H&M, the model’s brand must be in sync with the corporate ones.
Quite a few companies put a “healthy and clean living” clause in their contracts with models and spokespersons to ensure that.

Once the media thoroughly trashed Kate’s reputation, several of her employers did some rethinking – afraid of “guilty by association”. The first to sever ties with Ms. Moss was the fashion label H&M, whose major customer groups are female teenagers and young women.
They cited that Moss’ behavior was “inconsistent with H&M’s clear dissociation of drugs.”
For a public company, that actively supports the drug-preventing organization Mentor Foundation, it was the only sensible thing to do.

Soon afterwards, Chanel revealed it would not be renewing her contract as the face of Coco Mademoiselle perfume, citing: “Chanel currently has an advertising campaign with Kate Moss that is due to finish at the end of October. The company has no plans to work with Kate Moss on advertising campaigns in the near future.”

A few hours after the Chanel statement, iconic brand Burberry announced that it would be "inappropriate to go ahead" with the contract in the light of the allegations. Burberry had intended to use Kate in a forthcoming publicity drive. The company sugared the bitter bill by adding that “Kate has always been a fantastic model and highly professional for Burberry,” neatly leaving the door open for future return and closed for lawsuits.

The Gloria Vanderbilt label dropped Moss stating, "We would have second thoughts about using her. We weren't aware of any issues prior to campaign.”
Fashion house Christian Dior and jeweller H. Stern followed suit.
At this moment, only cosmetic firms Rimmel and Coty, and jeweller Fred Paris haven’t taken a public stance yet.

Can Kate forge a comeback? It depends.
Moss’ problem is multifold. Her reputation is damaged by her association with lover Pete Doherty, a musician and heroin user. The public sees him as the evil genius behind her downfall. Dumping him and taking some time off to concentrate on her mother role would nicely cleanup her image.
She needs to rebuild her professional image as well – together with her personal publicist and the PR department of her model agency Storm.

Making a public display of denouncing drugs combined with some volunteer work wouldn’t hurt as well.
She made a first step in this direction by publicly apologizing for her drug use and stating:
“I take full responsibility for my actions. I also accept that there are various personal issues I need to address and have started taking the difficult, yet necessary, steps to resolve them.
I want to apologize to all of the people I have let down because of my behavior, which has reflected badly on my family, friends, co-workers, business associates and others.”

There are two more factors beyond her control that might work against her:
her age (31 is not young in her line of work) and her body type.
She broke into the fashion scene by embodying the “waif” look (or heroin addict look, depending on your point of view).
Once this look is considered passé, no matter how hard she will try, she will not be able to resume her career.
In the mean time, her PR people have cut their work out for them.

PETA’s PR – dynamite or disaster?

During the fashion weeks in New York and London, PETA (People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals) performed its usual and predictable PR stunt: jumping on runways to protest the use of real fur in fashion and PR. The fashion shows went on smoothly – generating free media exposure for unknown designers such as Julien Macdonald.

Interesting enough, PETA’s PR has two sides: a positive and a dark one.
PETA has been able to create brilliant campaigns such as the “think ink, not mink” ad with Dennis Rodman and also snagging many a celebrity to publicly promote PETA’s cause. It made PETA a household name worldwide.

On the dark side, PETA's "Holocaust on Your Plate" campaign asserts that the eating of meat is the equivalent of the torture and slaughter of Jews by the Nazis. PETA juxtaposes photographs of emaciated concentration camp inmates in their tight-packed wooden bunks with chickens being kept in cages. In a despicable comparison, a photo of piled bodies of Holocaust victims is juxtaposed with one showing bodies of dead pigs. Considering the Jewish dietary laws, this can only be seen as a PR gaffe of the first order.

Moreover, PETA is also not against promoting violence: it provided funds to convicted animal rights terrorists, including $42,000 to Rodney Coronado (he was convicted of setting fire to a research lab at Michigan State). PETA also admits paying $1,500 to the Environmental Liberation Front, which (according to the FBI) is one of the nation's largest terrorist groups.

Who is the PR guru behind PETA? PETA's director of vegan outreach Mr. Bruce Friedrich, who readily admits that he has no PR background whatsoever. In a recent interview, he stated the following.
“Although I didn't have any formal training in PR and hadn't been doing animal advocacy professionally, I still had honed what I considered to be the strongest argument," he says.
"I also do have a background in advocacy, and I had been on my own advocating vegetarianism and veganism, and speaking in churches for almost 10 years.”

Friedrich and PETA share a strong belief that that their position is right, and will ultimately prevail.
Friedrich’s beliefs are based in religion. A devout Catholic, he says he believes that cruelty to animals is against his faith and justifies violence.
“I think it would be a great thing if, you know, all of these fast-food outlets and these slaughterhouses and these laboratories and the banks that fund them exploded tomorrow. I think it's perfectly appropriate for people to take bricks and toss them through the windows, and you know, everything else along the line. Hallelujah to the people who are willing to do it.”

PETA’s zigzag PR strategy took an interesting turn on 9/16.
PETA supporter Heather Mills-McCartney paid a visit to the headquarters of Jennifer Lopez’ Sweetface fashion label to protest against the use of fur in some of its designs. Heather left wincing in pain after her prosthetic leg became detached during a clash with security guards at Jennifer Lopez’ New York office.
Representatives from PETA strangely enough went out of their way to stress that Heather visited the premises of her own volition.
“Heather Mills-McCartney took it upon herself to go to the Sweetface offices yesterday,” confirmed a spokesman. “J Lo said in a recent interview, 'If somebody wants to educate me about fur they can do'. Heather wanted to be the person to do that.” One would expect PETA to be sympathetic toward a faithful champion that got injured in the line of protest.
From a PR standpoint, if PETA doesn’t clean up its act soon, they will never achieve what they aspire to: influencing the public opinion to become vegetarians.
What should they do? First and foremost, PETA should hire a PR professional with an impartial view of PETA’s mission. The next step is rebranding PETA as a caring and non-violent organization, followed by building and implementing a consistent PR strategy.

PETA knows how to create headlines, but sadly missed out on a golden PR opportunity – rescuing the pets in New Orleans.

How SOX impacts marketing

For sure you have heard about post-Enron legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) that regulate the accountability for corporate compliance and risk.
Until recently, it made the upper echelons of a company or organization accountable.
However, it is now making its way to the marketing department so marketing professionals must be prepared.

Marketing takes a sizeable chuck out of a company’s budget for marketing and PR activities that have an enormous impact on customers and shareholders alike.
It makes sense that Sarbanes-Oxley forces every marketing executive to ensure that the processes that they are responsible for have security, integrity and financial accountability.

Nearly every department and/or function within a company or organization is subject to a severe Sarbanes-Oxley audit.
Until recently, marketing has remained fairly unaffected, resulting in highly inaccurate financial reporting by most corporations.
But marketing departments are now also forced to become financially accountable.
This makes sense: the marketing communication budget is often quite substantial - with corporate management being responsible for the procedures for financial reporting.
Therefore, accurate and quantitative measurement of the marketing performance is required. To improve SOX compliance, a CEO or VP Marketing will demand that marketers use a chosen technology that forces marketing to tightly integrate with the company’s financial reporting.

How does SOX impact marketing and PR performance?
From "SOX on", marketers will play an instrumental role in the corporate compliance of the company.

Internal communications between marketing and the rest of the company or organization will improve, thus avoiding severe compliance risks, legal implications, and monetary risks.

The risk of erroneous representation will be reduced. This is important for those companies where marketing interacts with many different departments, such as R&D and Testing. Misrepresentation of a product or the company itself both internally and towards the public and press, can have severe repercussions. It can lead to brand and image damage - with financial and/or legal consequences.

Most importantly, it will put a stop to significant ad-hoc, unplanned operating expenses – no matter how justified.
These expenses are normally not accrued accurately, resulting in an error margin up to 10% in corporate profit & loss statements. Adequate financial reporting by the marketing staff will solve this problem.

For now, marketing and PR professionals might feel that they have to act "like accountants" and that their creativity will suffer, but in the long run the whole marketing discipline will benefit ensuring a high level of professionalism.

Going global with a corporate website

The majority of corporate websites are in English only, regardless of the location of the company. But what to do when the company wants to go global? Is an English website with a list of local contacts enough? And who will lead the complicated process of making the website and “face” of the company international?
The international marketing and PR professional is the one to handle this issue in a company.
There are several tough questions to ask and answer before even touching the website.

Does the company want to be global?
The answer is not as clear-cut as it seems. Companies are proud of their roots, and it’s a challenge for every international marketing and PR professional to implement “think global, act local”. It must be reflected in the website – the (potential) customers must get the feeling that they are joining or are part of an international family.

Where are the company’s (potential) customers located?
Especially Spanish, Italian, and French speakers don’t like to wrestle with English. They prefer their native-language version of the website. The same applies to a lesser extent to German and Portuguese speakers. Russian is the preferred language for most Central and Eastern European customers. Depending on the country, many African customers are fluent in French or Portuguese, but not in English. So how does one handle a multi-lingual website?

There are two options:
a) a full mirror site in the local language or
b) one to five pages containing condensed information about the company and its products in the local language (including contact information to reach the local representative).

What is the culture of the target audience?
This question is crucial - not only for the design of the website (colors, images) but also content wise (industry standards, features). Local case studies and success stories are a must; the “one-size-fits-all” concept doesn’t work.

Are sales generated through the website?
If this is the case, the website must allow the purchase of products from anywhere, at anytime. Online payment should be made easy – with instructions in the local language. Payment means such as locally issued credit cards must be accepted – too many (US) companies only accept credit cards issued by a US financial institution. Prices should be in the local currency or in US$ with an online exchange rate calculator.

Can the local markets be supported around the clock?
Support is crucial to keep customers. In case of online shopping, the helpdesk has to consist of native speakers. They should be reached by dialing a toll free local number.
In general, any company selling abroad must have local representatives or personnel for service and support if they want to build and maintain a lasting presence in that market.

How does the company show up in search engines?
At this moment, Google and Yahoo are still the main search engines.
Ranking depends on the location of the potential customer. Google.com shows a different ranking in the USA than in France, for example. Google and Yahoo also have local language versions that are often used as the default int that country. The local Google and Yahoo sites support several search modes: in the local language (only German text will show up), in the local country only (all pages in any language in Germany) and in English only (searches the web – results differ dramatically from country to country, since local preferences are embedded in the search tools).
Needless to say, in order to show up in local searches, having a local language website (or at least some website pages) is of paramount importance.

Does the company produce white papers or scientific documents?
In high-tech companies, it is not unusual for the CTO to address scientific forums and lecture at universities. These documents are a great tool to build confidence in the company’s technology. The best way of distribution to an international audience is by easy download (protected pdf) from the company’s website. English is the general scientific language, but the abstract should be in the local language for maximum impact.