Oiling the Hoi Polloi

“We care about the small people.” Thus spake Carl-Henric Svanberg, trying last week to plug the gusher of bad press pummeling British Petroleum. He even cited President Obama as another dignitary willing to condescend to the Lilliputians of the Gulf Coast. One New Orleans resident spoke for all red-blooded Americans when he retorted, “We’re not small people. We’re human beings. They're no greater than us. We don’t bow down to them.”

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By day’s end, Svanberg was apologizing and BP was pleading mistranslation (apparently, the words small and people mean something different in Svanberg’s mother tongue, Swedish). But it was too late to reverse the damage done by CEO Tony Hayward, a man who opens his mouth only to change feet. Promising to honor “all legitimate claims” and asked for some examples of illegitimate ones, he replied, “This is America — come on.” He also told Congress it was “too early” to say whether there was “any evidence that anybody put costs above safety.” And most memorably, he whined, “I want my life back.”

Bob Dudley, Hayward’s replacement, is a native of Mississippi and a graduate of Southern Methodist University, so he’s not likely to commit the same gaffes. This changeover is badly needed, because we Yanks don’t take kindly to comments like Svanberg’s, which activate our egalitarianism, and attitudes like Hayward’s, which bring back memories of King George III and “Don’t Tread On Me.”

In other words, Americans are just as proud and touchy as everyone else.

Something to keep in mind whenever the debate over public diplomacy reverts to the default position of Let the private sector do it. The most obvious recent example would be Charlotte Beers, the former CEO of Ogilvy & Mather who became under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs in the aftermath of 9/11. Not the first Madison Avenue guru to try “selling America,” Beers did what came naturally: she put together a TV ad campaign highlighting the religious and other freedoms enjoyed by Muslims in America.

Ogilvy & Mather are good at what they do. Indeed, back in 2001 they brilliantly re-branded a certain oil company that, due to a bad accident and spill, was having image issues. Ogilvy & Mather replaced that company’s infelicitous shield-shaped logo with a green, blue, and yellow sunburst, and surround that pretty image with pretty words about how the firm was investing in wind, solar, and other eco-friendly energy sources.

You already know the name of that company, which was promptly lambasted for hypocritically “greenwashing” its image. Right now there’s a contest being held to re-design its logo yet again.

You also know what happened to Beers’s advertising campaign. It was not such a bad idea, except that it ignored the concerns of its audience. Most Middle Eastern Arabs already know that life is good in America. Their objections, right or wrong, are to the policies of the U.S. government. And the only way to deal with that type of audience is to address their concerns.

This does not mean caving in. The art of public diplomacy, very different from that of advertising, is to engage people over and over, to listen patiently to their complaints and objections, to show that you appreciate their point of view, and then to explain as clearly as possible why your government is doing what it’s doing. The private-sector equivalent would be to keep running the same ad campaign even though no one is buying. The point is not to move product, it’s to keep the lines of communication open.

If you think this is a useless exercise, just imagine how Americans would feel if, instead of finding a more suitable representative to talk to us in our own language, BP were to simply cut us off.