For your organization or business, what is more important marketing or PR?
Many organizations that are dominated by a PR mindset. This is especially prominent in nonprofits, educational institutions and government. Technically, marketing is the essential and central purpose of sound business. Peter Drucker wrote, “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
The academic definition of marketing includes product development, logistics and locations, pricing strategies and integrated marketing communications. Auxiliary to promotion broadly and advertising exists the PR function. If you let the dog lead the sled you will never arrive at your destination.
Dana Perino, cohost of the Fox News show The Five, believes in the preeminence of PR communication experts. However, as a self-proclaimed expert based on her resume of PR experience, with Bush 42 PR disasters in her wake, she purports to tell Donald Trump a master marketer how to message events like firing Jim Comey.
Like the homeland security travel ban, Perino believes that the constitutionality, facts and legality of the case matter less than the optics. This is typical DC Washington swamp talk. She equates the same blunders to Trump’s firing of Comey that she does the majority of his actions.
Perino says “He said it wrong, he acted too quickly, he tweeted too fast, he’s too impulsive.” She assures us that Trump didn’t gather together cabal of decision-makers and experts to vet the process. She seems to know that he didn’t have a firm communication strategy in place. Even though Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders knocked it out of the park as the sacrificial lamb at the sacred White House Press Briefing ceremony. Trump discussed this thoroughly with many of his advisers including Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Rob Rosenstein, Reince Preibus and yes even the dark Sith Lord Steve Bannon. There is a limit to the benefits of group decision-making. Once that limit is reached a decision should be made. Trump obviously understands this principle in practice, something PR and political people do not.
Bannon may be Trumps most important strategic confidant and apparently, he was opposed to firing Comey this week. But the Trump knows that the buck stop here, and he acted decisively to do what we all knew had to be done. He is the CEO that fires the incompetent manager that everyone whispers about, yet believes will continue to get by.
The media are projecting onto Trump faults that don’t exist. The self-proclaimed experts are claiming referee status and calling out of bounds and fouls when there are none. They have lost their credibility and they no longer have the right, obligation or privilege to tell us who is failing to meet their standards and for what reasons.
Consider the message that Trump communicated: your time has come. He put a thumb in the eye of the Democrats and the media. He met with the Russian ambassador on Wednesday because he did not collude with them. Trump is in charge and moving forward.
The media doesn’t control the timeline for these events. The deep state will be rooted out.
And the media can guffaw all they want about it. Firing Comey opens the possibility of fixing and reforming the FBI which now acts as a central hub to facilitate leaking, unmasking and massive surveillance of US citizens. God willing, we may even put some crony criminals in jail. Hillary Clinton just took a big gulp and choked down some more meds.
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