Published 2013.11.12 CommPRO.biz

Let The Seller Beware!

Cohn & Wolfe, a division of international communications giant WPP, just released From Transparency to Full Disclosure, a study they commissioned to find marketplace hot buttons. They polled 3,000 consumers in Great Britain, China and the United States on what opens their wallet. Price and quality were the overall winners with honesty (AKA ethics) coming in third place, except in China where quality and honesty beat out price. 

The transparency part comes from consumers’ interest in the values adhered to by the companies they do business with. They want the goods they buy created and sold by folks striving to do as they would do, folks who put their customers, workers, vendors, their communities and the environment ahead of profits. They worry most about the food they buy, that it is what it’s claimed to be and that it is produced with the buyers’ safety and health foremost.

You know what they hate most? A cover-up. They understand that we all goof-up now and then, but they expect us to fess-up immediately and do right by those who may have been misled or injured as a result of the error. What’s more, they have a clear view of where the buck stops, it stops at the top. The Cohn & Wolfe study found that “84% of UK and US consumers and 90% of Chinese consumers believe that if you are the leader of a company you cannot claim ignorance about something bad happening in your business, showing that there are no excuses for today’s leader.” They summed it up succinctly: “CEO = Chief Ethics Officer.” A point missed by the leaders of too many corporate entities of late.

The results of this study read like “Basic Communications 101.” Isn’t this what we’ve been telling our leaders or our clients?” Isn’t this what has been shown as the most profitable business model? Isn’t this what attracts and builds the most talented team in communications or any business? Of course it is. It’s the kind of team we all want surrounding us. The kind of team we all want to be a part of. If you are a leader, if you are the Chief Executive Officer (AKA Chief Ethics Officer), what are you waiting for? If your CEO doesn’t understand how interchangeable that title needs to be, what are you waiting for?

It all comes down to “Why would you work for, or do business with a crook?” While that quote sounds like Will Rogers, it isn’t and it doesn’t matter who said it, it’s a simple truth; one that only a few shortsighted business leaders choose to ignore. Actually people expect more than someone who just walks a line between lawful and criminal. We expect the businesses we trust with our hard earned cash to do right by us, to do the right thing. When they misrepresent their offerings, or dance around the truth, they betray us. And usually we simply never do business with them again — never.

How Low Can You Go?

Just when you begin to think that the Murdoch Empire’s Limbo demonstration could not lower the bar any further, another disclosure adds to their record setting performances. We’ve known about their hacking into the mobile phone of murdered teen Milly Dowler in 2002. Rupert Murdoch himself made a very public apology for that one.

Now the London Coppers have told Sara Payne -who’s eight-year-old was murdered two years earlier in 2000- that her mobile was hacked by a private detective in the employ of Murdoch’s News Corp. And guess where Sara got that telephone? It was a gift from the sympathetic and ever-so-friendly then editor of The News of the World, Rebekah Brooks. The same woman who went on to head all of Murdoch’s British newspaper operations. The same woman who resigned a hair's-breadth before she was arrested. So we are left to ask, where did the private eye get Sara’s number? Is it possible that Ms. Rebekah knew nothing of all of this? Right!

Nasty business, smarmy, but maybe no laws were broken. Maybe. Leave the law breaking bit to new disclosures of a four-year News Corp cover-up. It turns out that an investigation in 2007 by a committee of the British Parliament triggered by a phone hacking guilty plea from a News Corp reporter did not get the whole story. News Corp saw to it that important disclosures were left out.

Murdoch’s minions had their law firm, Harbottle & Lewis, review a couple thousand emails looking “only” for any involvement by the reporter’s editors in his efforts to hack the mobile phones of the Royal Family. After much back and forth about its content, the prestigious law firm dispatched a one-paragraph letter saying they had found no evidence of any higher-up’s involvement in the hacking and the Committee was satisfied.

Now it turns out that while there may have been nothing in the emails to show that the phone hacking went above this one reporter, there were instances –lots of instances– indicating that the reporter was routinely paying police officers to provide inside information. In one instance he asked for a thousand pounds (about two grand US) to buy a stolen copy of the Royal Family’s private phone directory from a police officer.

A review of funds used by News Corp reporters shows receipts covering payments to police officers that round out to about a half billion in US funds over several years. Jon Chapman, a News Corp lawyer at the time, says that he did not realize that slipping payoffs to police officers was illegal. How could he? After all he is not a criminal lawyer and he must have missed that bit about bribing police when he was in law school. Apparently News Corp wouldn’t allow Harbottle & Lewis to go there. Since they were unwilling to flat out say they had found nothing incriminating, they kept their response narrowly parsed to cover only the level of knowledge related to the phone hacking. And the friendly Investigative Committee bought it.  

In the meantime, Rupert Murdock stands steadfast that he knew nothing of any of this; reminiscent of Sergeant Schultz in the CBS Sitcom, “Hogan’s Heroes”. While Murdoch may yet escape any personal responsibility, the culture and views he holds dear are indelibly stamped on every aspect of his worldwide organization. It is hard to imagine that these unsavory and perhaps illegal, ongoing tactics do not reflect News Corp’s founder.