In mid-June, AMC CEO Adam Aron announced his movie theater chain would not require patrons to wear masks when they reopen in July in an effort to avoid “political controversy.” Still, controversy ensued. After significant pushback and criticism from a range of stakeholders, AMC reversed course only a day after the initial announcement.

This episode speaks to the broader challenge facing decision-makers tasked with reopening and running companies in the “new normal” because of COVID-19. Not only must leaders balance safety and financial impact, but they also must recognize that – as views of this pandemic become increasingly politicized – their positions and statements on the topic will be viewed through a political lens. And while the majority of corporate positions won’t become headline-making controversies, it is increasingly critical to understand the ways in which partisanship influences beliefs about companies.

As part of our ongoing research into the impact of COVID-19 on corporate reputation, Purple Strategies surveyed Americans about their opinions on reopening the economy and their beliefs about the opposing views of two outspoken business leaders on the issue: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

What we see from the results is that, while messages are evaluated through a political filter, the reputational impact on brands is not so clear cut.

On the face of it, perceptions of Musk and Cuban are nearly identical:

•  29% think each has an excellent reputation, while about 10% rate their reputation as poor;

•  About a quarter of the Informed Public think each has been doing an excellent job leading their organizations through the pandemic, and;

•  About a third believe each cares a lot about their employees.

And, these views hold pretty true across party lines, with Musk holding a bit more favor among Republicans and Cuban a slight advantage among Democrats.

But, when we introduce each leader’s position – and importantly, the rhetoric they used to express those positions – we see Americans retreat to their partisan corners.

• Mark Cuban: “Whatever the White House is doing for the president and vice president, that’s the protocol I want to use for my employees. And if I can’t adhere to that, then why would I put them at risk?”
• Elon Musk: “Reopen with care and appropriate protection, but don’t put everyone under de facto house arrest.”

Among all respondents, views are nearly evenly split, with around half endorsing Cuban’s position and half supporting Musk’s. But when we take a closer look, we see the political divide is clear. Only 1/3 of Democrats agree with Musk, while 2/3 agree with Cuban (31% and 69% respectively) – and the inverse is true among Republicans (67% for Musk and 33% for Cuban). This trend continues in responses to related questions, with Democrats preferring companies be more cautious in their approach while Republicans expect that companies do what they can to provide for the safety of workers and customers, without expecting that they go beyond government guidance.

One would expect these partisan preferences to also be reflected in a change in views of the brand each executive leads – or at least, that’s what we expected based on years of analyzing pre-/post- message testing results.

But this isn’t what happened.

Despite messaging alignment (Dems for Cuban and GOP for Musk), the Mavericks get a reputational bump in post-message testing while Tesla loses steam – and this is true across party lines.

Not too surprisingly, the Mavericks see a reputational increase among Democrats of nearly 10%. More surprisingly, though, we see nearly the same percentage of Republicans shifting their views in favor of the team, from rating the Mavs’ reputation as poor or unknown to neutral or positive. Not only do we see the Mavericks increase their reputation across parties, we also see Tesla lose reputational equity across parties. After exposure to Musk’s reopening message, Republicans cool their views of Tesla from thinking it has an excellent reputation to holding a more neutral opinion (-6%). This is true to a greater extent among Democrats (-14%).

It’s hard to say for sure why Republicans’ pro-Musk/anti-Cuban views didn’t translate to increasingly positive views for Tesla or negative views of the Mavs. What we do know is, whether you’re red, blue or purple, everyone agrees that people should feel safe doing their jobs. And, maybe when it comes down to it, as much as Republicans agree with Musk’s “let’s get back to work” mentality, they recognize that such a position impacts real people, which means that position needs to be balanced with sufficient assurances to protect employee health and safety.

As phased approaches to opening non-essential businesses continue to roll out across the country, the reality for many Americans is not when they will go back to work, but what work will look like when they do. Americans want to know that employers are taking steps to protect workers. Regardless of public rhetoric, leaders prove real impact with the actions they take. Americans across the political spectrum will feel more comfortable and confident in our collective back-to-work plan when they see that employers are doing everything in their power to appropriately balance financial decisions with public health and safety.

 

Purple Pulse Survey of the US Informed Public. N=834. June 10-13, 2020.

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By Erica Goldman | Director | erica.goldman@purplestrategies.com

Purple is actively partnering with companies and industries to navigate the ever-changing COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for the future that will come after, bringing deep experience helping the world’s best-known companies navigate the world’s toughest challenges. Please reach out to author Erica Goldman or any member of our Purple team to let us know how we can support you.

Coming off 15 years successfully working at the intersection of policy, politics and messaging in both the House of Representatives and high-profile congressional campaigns, Jordan Davis joins Purple Strategies as a senior director this week.

“As we navigate this moment with our clients, we’re seeing heightened demand for the political campaign and policy expertise that have been part of Purple DNA from the beginning and that Jordan brings in spades,” said Steve McMahon, Purple co-founder and CEO. “We’re excited we’ll have him alongside us helping clients confront the changes they’re facing every day.”

Most recently, Jordan has been serving as senior advisor at the House Energy & Commerce Committee during the 115th and 116th Congresses, where he advised Committee leadership and members on messaging and legislative strategy. In this role, he oversaw all internal and external communications, coalitions engagement, and external affairs efforts of the Committee.

Previously Jordan served as policy director and communications advisor at the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) during the 2014 and 2016 election cycles, where he established the NRCC’s policy department and provided strategic communications advice and issue education to House campaigns nationwide. He also served as legislative research director at the NRCC during the historic 2010 election cycle, and prior to that, in multiples roles within the House of Representatives in some of the most competitive political environments in the nation. Jordan is a graduate of the University of Central Florida.

“Purple Strategies is known for its innovation, thoughtfulness, and an unwavering dedication to their clients, and they do it all with a reputation that is second to none. I am thrilled at the opportunity to join an already stellar team and am hopeful that my mix of political, policy, and messaging experience will bring value both to Purple and its clients,” Jordan said.

Jordan is the latest in a series of senior-level talent across disciplines that Purple has brought on board this year as the firm embarks on its second decade helping corporations prepare for, navigate and compel change. Other key hires for Purple in 2020 have included Rebecca Ballard, managing director for communications, marketing and engagement; Chris Dealy, executive creative director; and Stacey Jaffe, senior director and insights lead.

As businesses start to reopen in nearly every state, leaders face difficult decisions around how to create an environment in which employees and customers are not only physically safe but also feel comfortable enough to return.

A challenge with this is that many of the most effective actions businesses can take to protect employees and customers aren’t easily visible, and therefore may not on their own translate to helping people feel more comfortable. Customers generally don’t see a plane or hotel room being cleaned, nor are they watching their food get prepared in a restauraunt. That’s why detailing and communicating all COVID-19 health processes – including those that may not be visible – is critical for any business welcoming back employees or customers.

And while media attention naturally gravitates toward the sci-fi-esque technology claiming to blast away COVID-19, our research shows that some of the simplest actions, such as offering free masks and hand sanitizer, have the biggest impact on perceived safety.

 

Q: Some businesses are investing in health and safety measures to keep their employees and customers safe when they reopen. Please rate each of the following precautions on how they would make you feel when entering a business with other people.

 

But what makes people feel safe does not always translate to what will ensure their physical safety.

That’s okay, as long as those actions are part of a broader plan that does protect physical health. Consider temperature checks. Many businesses are investing in technology solutions to enable contactless temperature checking and companies are rising to meet the new demand. One such company is IntraEdge, which just launched a self-check temperature kiosk in late May.

Purple’s Pulse Survey survey finds required temperature screenings would make 58% of people more comfortable or feel totally safe going to a business. But how would checking the temperature of everyone who enters a business stack up on actual safety?

March WHO data show 80% of COVID-19 cases are mild or asymptomatic. While the technology is able to identify those exhibiting fever symptoms, it is ineffective against the larger share of asymptomatic cases.

Dan Clarke, president of IntraEdge products and solutions, recognizes this fact, and describes its kiosk as just “one piece of the puzzle” for states’ reopening. While the puzzle piece of identifying and stopping those symptomatic cases from spreading is indeed an important one, businesses that fail to recognize and enforce the others needed to protect people’s health can do more harm than good. If people aren’t properly educated about the constellation of actions needed to protect their safety, it can feed a false sense of security that emboldens them to neglect vital complementary precautions.

While both physical safety and perceived safety are important for businesses, “safety theater” is what happens when they get the balance wrong.

What is ‘safety theater’?

Safety theater is when a company takes performative steps to provide the feeling of improved safety, but without doing enough to ensure it physically.

Some bad actors may intentionally lure customers and employees back to an unsafe environment; however, it’s far more likely that well intentioned companies and brands will inadvertently take the safety theater’s stage.

Intentions aside, participating in safety theater can have serious consequences. Above all else, it jeopardizes the health and safety of employees and customers. Doing so can also have material reputation ramifications, however, including undermining a company’s credibility, diminishing trust, and contributing to the perception that they are putting profits over people.

As companies’ response to COVID-19 continues under the microscope, missteps won’t just affect those interacting with the company directly. Stakeholders are ready to hold companies accountable for perceived missteps, and social and traditional media can easily amplify the voice of even a few critical onlookers.

Selling ‘safety theater’

After 9/11, an entire industry was built seemingly overnight to protect physical spaces from a safety and security threat. Similarly, in the face of COVID-19, countless companies have begun marketing their solutions to keep people safe and allow businesses to reopen.

Another technology gaining interest is UV light walkthroughs, which purport to kill germs on those who pass through them and would make most people (58%) more comfortable entering a business. While businesses may be well intentioned in investing in this technology, it falls short of stopping the spread of potentially dangerous germs once people have entered a controlled space. If reliance on this technology causes employees and customers to overlook other important protocols, the effects of the measure can actually be counterproductive.

How can leaders avoid the safety theater trap?

First and foremost, follow advice of health experts. Health experts and organizations are not only the most qualified to provide proper guidance, but stakeholders also view them as the most credible. Following their lead on protocols that have been proven most effective – and adapting your policies to new information – may turn off a small group of vocal customers in the short term, but will protect your long-term business and reputation.

Implement COVID-19 health guidelines, and communicate regularly and transparently. Making changes to your business like providing health shields for customers and sharing detailed and clear health guidelines can go a long way to make people feel safe and prevent further spread of the disease. In doing so, recognize that no single measure will offer complete protection, and always communicate where there may be deficiencies.

Don’t ignore onlookers. What’s theater without an audience? Remember your actions have visibility beyond those with whom you’re engaging directly. Proactively communicate through channels that inform in-person audiences as well as those watching the show remote.

 

Purple Pulse Survey of the US Informed Public. N=834. June 10-13, 2020.

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By Diana Muggeridge | diana.muggeridge@purplestrategies.com

Purple is actively partnering with companies and industries to navigate the ever-changing COVID-19 pandemic and prepare for the future that will come after, bringing deep experience helping the world’s best-known companies navigate the world’s toughest challenges. Please reach out to author Diana Muggeridge or any member of our Purple team to let us know how we can support you.

What it means

COVID-19 and the challenges it poses to governments, companies and individuals around the world are often described as “unprecedented.” But one much-covered angle of the larger COVID-19 story is not only not unprecedented, it was utterly predictable. And that’s the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation we’ve seen swirling over the last several months.

I say “utterly predictable” because we see this phenomenon routinely with major news events, and particularly in times of disaster or crisis when people are starved for the latest information. Misinformation is created (whether it’s done with good intentions or bad isn’t so important), spreads rapidly and then has its impact, whether it’s people refusing vaccinations or other medical treatment or believing, despite the obvious implausibility, that the coronavirus-imposed quarantine has allowed dolphins to “return” to the canals of Venice.

Companies and organizations often fall prey to misinformation. We’re seeing it now. The Gates Foundation was accused in January of “patenting” the coronavirus by a Twitter personality with 150,000 followers. 5G cell phone technology also became a magnet for misinformation. What started as a post on an anonymously run blog morphed into an incoherent global narrative about how 5G was somehow connected to coronavirus deaths. And it ultimately led militant conspiracy theorists to set fire to Vodafone cell towers in the UK.

These are extreme situations for sure. But most companies have to fight misinformation every day, whether defending themselves from claims that they’re harming consumers with a dangerous product ingredient or having their motives questioned when critics surface out-of-context documents and distort their message and meaning.

And though it rarely if ever solves the problem, the corporate playbook with regard to combatting misinformation is usually the same: Get the facts out. Make our voice heard. If only people knew the truth, they’d see things our way and the misinformation would stop.

The reason this approach seldom works is rooted in psychology.

Belief formation is not as conscious a process as we like to think it is. Many decisions we make about what to believe or not are made instantaneously, driven by instinct, intuition and past experience. So many people on the receiving end of misinformation have already formed their beliefs by the time companies reach them with the facts, and they don’t think they need to be corrected. They’re not in search of the truth, seeking out different sides of the story and coming to thoughtful conclusions. They’ve found the truth. And though that “truth” may be inaccurate or misguided or even irrational, it doesn’t matter. Largely because of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias leads us to believe in ideas, concepts, information we receive that we want to be true. And this is true of even the smartest and most scientifically literate among us. We’re motivated more by our subconscious wishful thinking than we are by facts or data. And that means that once we’ve formed a belief, it’s pretty likely we’ll stop looking for new evidence, particularly evidence that would refute what we now know to be true. People believe that 5G is linked to the coronavirus because it aligns with what they want to be true (believing in a salacious conspiracy theory can be fun, so long as you aren’t burning down cell towers) and what they know to be true (companies can’t be trusted and advanced technology like 5G must have come with downsides). Try as a company might, a whitepaper alone can’t refute such deeply held beliefs.

So what does this mean? How should we respond? Axios recently published a thoughtful piece that offers some ideas, though many of them depend on companies being proactive and “pre-bunking” rather than debunking myths and misinformation. Useful advice, if a company has the foresight to recognize the real harm misinformation can do. Most of the time though, companies are too late and find themselves on the defense, trying to swat down individual news stories and tweets and losing the forest through the trees.

The truth is, there are no easy answers to this problem, one that will only grow worse in our inter-connected world where misinformation increasingly gets the same shot as information at informing and reinforcing our beliefs. We have had some hard-fought successes tackling this challenge for individual clients, but it became apparent that we needed an enterprise-level commitment. That is why before COVID, we invested in a cross-disciplinary team tasked with writing the new playbook on fighting back.

At our core, Purple is about blending different perspectives and thinking to plot the best path forward. So in addition to leveraging the skills of a range of Purple expertise leaders, we’ll continue to collaborate with experts across academia, industry, public policy and tech. And we’re investing in new research to continue to test ways to better combat misinformation. Over the coming months, we look forward to sharing our learnings with you.

 

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By Alec Jacobs | Senior Director | alec.jacobs@purplestrategies.com

Purple is actively partnering with companies and industries to navigate the impacts of misinformation and disinformation, bringing deep experience helping the world’s best-known companies navigate the world’s toughest challenges. Please reach out to author Alec Jacobs or any member of our Purple team to let us know how we can support you.

 

What it means