But they do have their uses, and Dame Denise L'Estrange-Corbet's media meltdown last week was the classic example of a situation where somebody could really, really have used some PR advice.
Madeleine Chapman nailed the story for The Spinoff, revealing that Dame Denise's World brand was making a mockery of the 'made in NZ' idea by putting it on tags on clothing that had been most definitely produced overseas. The legal technicalities behind this claim still need to be sorted out, but everybody could agree that it wasn't a good look.
But as bad as it was, it got exponentially worse when Dame Denise lost her freaking mind over the story. If she had taken five minutes to talk to somebody – anybody – with a bit of PR knowledge, they would have told her to do exactly the opposite of what she did do, because she immediately starting hooning the wrong way down an intellectual one-way street.
All she had to do was say 'shit, sorry about the confusions, but 99% of our other clothing is made in NZ, so we'll do all we can to sort the situation out, or at least make it a lot clearer. Our bad.' That's all. That's all she had to say
Instead, she totally followed the playbook of how not to handle a tricky PR situation – she lashed out at the reporter and her publisher, and latched onto tiny points about the removal of labels that nobody gave a shit about. She moaned about tall poppy syndrome, semi-accidentally called everybody in New Zealand stupid and did everything she could to paint herself as a helpless victim of outrage. And why couldn't everybody just get over it already?
Dame Denise has been brilliant talent for journalists to talk to about the state of the fashion industry in recent years, and her apparent familiarity with the media must have led her to take this path, without worrying about things like pausing to take a breath, or listening to any advice.
Instead, she has done incalculable damage to her brand – it's now going to be remembered for 'yeah, but Made In NZ was for the tag, not the clothes', not for the fact that it has been operating as a highly ethical and smart company.
The first piece of PR advice for anybody facing this kind of situation is an obvious one, so we're going to reveal it for free: It's just not that hard to say sorry. Apologise, really mean it, learn your lessons and move the fuck on, because everybody else will.
The recent case of Killer Mike's appearance on NRA TV showed us all how to do it. The brilliant rapper is riding on a modern cultural high as half of Run The Jewels, but risked agitating a metric fuck-ton of his fans by apparently going on the TV in the wake of the Parklands massacre and telling students and black people that they just needed to harden the fuck up, an attitude markedly at odds with his politically-aware lyrics.
But before anybody could burn their RTJ discs (or more likely, delete them from their device), Killer Mike put out an apology that explained that he had appeared on that show before the latest schoolyard atrocity, and he wasn't talking about the kids who had made a stand, and he stood fully behind them as a friend and ally. He explained that he had tried to engage with a viewpoint he found ideologically unsound, but he didn't use that as an excuse for the offence he may have caused, and took full responsibility for it, offering nothing but love and respect as compensation.
That's how you do it.
Some people are so abhorrent an apology just won't do – people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein could offer up the most contrite, heartfelt and true apologies in the history of humanity, and they can still go to hell for all the shit they've caused.
But for something as seemingly trivial as a clothes tag, it really could have been handled a lot better. As hard as it is for journos can admit, this was a case where a bit of PR truly could have helped, rather than hindered.
- Ron Troupe
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