Keep the message simple
”Keep comms simple and honest to retain public confidence when the world turns upside down.”
Pricewrite Director Tim Price on the lessons of Covid-19
So what memories of Covid-19 pandemic will be left for future generations of PR practitioners?
There are plenty of films, books and family memories about the seismic events of our past – world wars, depression, and earthquakes. But surprisingly, there’s little to be found about living through the 1918-1920 flu pandemic.
Only one tale has come to me down the years from my relatives: how a distant cousin’s farming family survived. Running a small mixed farm three miles from the nearest town, by late 1919 they thought they had been spared. But then the ‘Spanish’ flu rolled into their valley, laying the entire population low. Within a day the entire family - father mother, four children and two labourers were at death’s door.
Before crawling to her bed, his wife managed to let the cattle and horses loose from their stalls and opened the big barn doors. It was 10 days before anyone was well enough to step outside – to find all the livestock alive in a sea of manure but the winter supply of hay gone. Amazingly, the family all survived. But they lost the farm.
You have to go back 350 years for a detailed account of living through a pandemic – to Samuel Pepys diaries from the London plague. After months of illness and despair, his entry for December 16, 1665 strikes a chord with our own situation:
‘To our great joy, the town fills apace, and shops begin to be open again. Pray God continue the plague's decrease! for that keeps the Court away from the place of business, and so all goes to rack as to publick matters, they at this distance not thinking of it.’
Inspiring Confidence
So what memories will Covid-19 leave behind?
A new insult: ‘lockdown hair?
The end of trendy city centre living?
Office block museums?
For everyone working in the PR business, Covid 19 has meant finding new ways to deliver the staple ingredient of our trade: inspiring confidence in the client, whether it’s a government, bank, or a brand of breakfast cereal.
For years, companies have viewed their carefully-prepared Crisis Management plans as the Holy Grail that will save them when the shit hits the fan.
Countless hours of seminars, hundreds of books, and endless meetings have been devoted to this magic elixir of successful communication. Sadly, I’m not aware of any Crisis Management Plan that covers the enormity of Covid-19. But the basis of a good plan provides the foundation of a comms strategy to tackle any upheaval:
Make the message simple
Be honest
Address customers’ concerns
Keep stakeholders informed
Make sure everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet
Organisations which have managed to reset the way they work and communicate have succeeded in maintaining public confidence.
Confidence tends to stick. People will forgive minor failings if they think their leaders broadly know what they are doing. But a glaring failure of honesty will shatter that confidence irrevocably – and that’s why future text books on crisis management will cite Dominic Cummings lockdown trip to Durham as the moment the public’s faith in the government’s pandemic response was lost.
The game has changed
As we (hopefully) emerge from the Covid-19 crisis, everywhere we hear the heart-felt phrase “when we get back to normal.”
It’s a forlorn hope. We all like to look back to a rosy-coloured past when life was perfect. The trouble is that nostalgia ain’t what it used to be -it gives us a distorted picture. The world is constantly changing so standing still means getting left behind whether you’re in a socially-distanced supermarket queue or a theatre facing bankruptcy.
Early on in the lockdown I happened on a quote from Darwin’s Origin of Species:
“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
It struck home as a pointer – not just for the species, but for countries, companies and communicators all struggling to see the way forward in a world where not only the rules but the game has changed.