Can someone with experience with this help me understand the point of a PR team to talk to press? As an outsider, it just looks like another form of marketing—-never confirm or deny anything and just put out press releases that are filled with business jargon. And when it’s actual a sticky situation, any communication is going to be drafted by legal or execs. Maybe I’m wrong though.
1. It's a skill that needs practice and most professionals are not trained in. 2. PR is an entryway for collecting and managing stakeholder questions that might warrant future board level action (in communication). 3. PR is usually close to the board and has it's own dynamic with marketing being further down the chain.
Elon dismantling PR makes sense. Probably they rubbed him the wrong way too often. Why bother.
But so what good does a PR team do. Maybe for Tesla specifically not much. It's like how Border Cafe in Harvard Square used to be - always so busy with hour+ waits that there is no need to bother with reservations.
For a regular large sized company there are press pieces written every day that want an informative quote, shareholders cold-mailing you, customers trying all kinds of angles except the regular ones to get in touch, TV-shows that want your CEO on. All this gets managed in a way that at least suggests some uniformity in what you proclaim externally. Sure, there's domains that overlap PR / (internal) communication and marketing but generally they are treated as different tasks and organised as such.
TL;DR - They manage one single external voice. There's value in that. As other point out, Musk is a communications study in and of himself.
I can only assume he wants to run the PR show himself by going on Joe Rogan and twitter. His man-of-the-people strategy does seem to have some merit. "Elon Musk" is arguably a stronger brand than Tesla.
I’m not sure having the Elon Musk brand be stronger than the Tesla brand is a good thing. He is a bit impulsive and seems like an asshole at times. People put up with it because, so far, his companies have produced some great products.
When the other car manufacturers finally catch up to Tesla, the negative perception of the Elon Musk brand may drive some buyers away from Tesla.
The genius stroke is combining modern sensibilities with traditional masculinity. He manages to do solar projects and electric cars, hell even smoking weed, without looking like a hippie. I guess the trick was sci-fi and fast cars.
He's the main reason the Tesla stock price is so high. If you are a shareholder of Tesla that cares mostly about capital gains, you really want it to continue.
I definitely have friends who would and could buy Teslas if not for the asshole techbro image cultivated by Musk. IMO, that is kind of silly of them, but it's foolish to pretend people don't consider their self-image when considering a car, especially a luxury one. Plenty of people don't want to be associated with him.
So? That's one of the ways to avoid PR snafus. PR departments are added after snafus like this one, which have nothing to with legal and execs drafting responses, but normal day to day communication with the userbase.
It's great to talk to a press if the press has goals aligned with the company: make people more aware of a product / service. As an example my girlfriend wrote a book, she talked to the press about it, which made interesting content for the newspaper and the radio, and got some recognition in return for free.
But as Tesla doesn't pay for advertising (unlike its ICE competitors), the incentives are not aligned, so Tesla and the press had bad relations for a long time.
> It's great to talk to a press if the press has goals aligned with the company: make people more aware of a product / service.
It's also great to talk to the press when the story and the company's goals DON'T align. If a company is being investigated or impacted in some negative way, then not commenting looks worse on them.
The job of PR is to align the press with the company. The "R" in PR stands for "relations." It's not just sending out press releases.
The press tends to be antagonistic toward any big company. Good PR counteracts that, in part by finding and helping the members of the press who like the company.
No company was better at PR than Apple under Steve Jobs. They carefully groomed key reviewers and helped build up a pro-Apple ecosystem of media properties.
Edit: I should add that Apple's PR under Steve Jobs was led by Katie Cotton, and her dept. was famous for rarely responding to direct requests for comment on the news of the day.
In most places I have worked, it is not called "PR", it is the Communications department. They typically do edit and revise all the public communications, in particular for public companies. You are partly correct that communications need to be careful to not divulge confidential information, nor information that could impact any regulatory requirements for public companies, which can feel like jargon. But they also will often help draft internal communications when announcements need to be sent to the entire company. Their role is to improve the effectiveness of all communications, making sure that people know what is going on, how it impacts them, what actions are needed, and where to go with questions. You'd be surprised how much gets written that fails to effectively communicate such things.
> Can someone with experience with this help me understand the point of a PR team to talk to press?
Simple: PR teams are some sort of equivalent to the "triage" at emergency rooms. Basically they scan incoming requests for stuff that could land the company in hot legal water or signalize a coming shitstorm (e.g. if journalists ask for information regarding potentially damaging stories during their research), misdirected customer service stuff (pretty common, especially in companies ... not exactly known for decent CS reps), youtubers/other influencers looking for merch gear, shareholders inquiring about financial or other information, movie makers / photographers interested in showing off company products, reps of athletes wanting a sponsorship deal... all of this usually goes through the PR dept who forward it to the appropriate departments or answer on their own.
The key role / function of a good PR team is that the individual departments don't get flooded by bullshit (you don't want to waste the expensive time of the legal dept on a youtuber wanting a Tesla for a rap music video).
I read that. It's full of the usual anti-Tesla cherrypicking, sarcastic one-liners, fumbling for clickbait headlines that zombie gawker Jalopnik has to use every day to eke out any engagement possible.
The comments section is full of astroturfers that also post on a half-dozen other sites with the exact same anti-Tesla comments.
There is a lot of exciting technology in Tesla, a sea change in the very industry jalopnik purported covers, obviously a lot of debate and nuance in self-driving. Jalopnik doesn't bother with any of that.
If I worked for Tesla I would have stopped replying 5 years ago to Jalopnik.
Elon Musk isn't Jesus, he isn't a saint, but you'd think he had perpetrated genocide reading Jalopnik and its commenters.
It's full of the usual anti-Tesla cherrypicking, sarcastic one-liners, fumbling for clickbait headlines that zombie gawker Jalopnik has to use every day to eke out any engagement possible.
Clearly you are unfamiliar with Jalopnik. All of their posts are full of cherry-picking, sarcastic one-liners, and clickbait headlines.
They don't single out Tesla for special treatment (good or bad), nor should they.
Go ahead, go through the last two weeks of headlines and show me three headlines about GM, Ford, Toyota, FCA, etc that are as negative as the typical Tesla headline.
The mainline auto makers get kid gloves compared to Tesla. But then again, auto press always knows who pays for the buffets and junkets.
I've been on jalopnik for what seems like a decade now, through the Univision years and the PE Spanfeller years, and the death of deadspin.
Tesla is selling new cars with holes in the body panels, scuffed body panels, misaligned body panels, different shades of paint on body panels, dirty interiors, materials in the drive train that corrode within months, etc... These problems are well documented. Tesla makes luxury vehicles, they are not competing with Yugo or Fiat. For that kind of money one should expect better quality.
Don't need to go back 2 weeks to find negative posts about other automakers.
The top article on Jalopnik right now: "The Mercedes G-Wagen Is Objectively Impressive But Still A Dumb Car"
The next article: "Jaguar XE And XF Sportbrake Wagon: Dead"
Followed by "Mercedes-Benz Gives Up On Manuals"
Meanwhile, after a Tesla suffered catastrophic structural failure that could have killed or maimed someone, the title of the related article is simply: " Brand-New Tesla Model Y's Roof Flies Off on First Drive Home."
That's BS. I read jalopnik regularly for brainless amusement and car news. You're perceived slant against tesla is baseless. They regularly shit on H-D for their idiotic product decisions, chevy and BMW for their idiotic truck/M car grilles, nikola for fraud lately, tons of other cars/manufacturers, and yes, they shit on tesla for poor QA practices, dickish moves on resold cars, and being run by a petulant egomaniacal manchild.
What's the deal with tesla fans? Sure, every brand has fanatics and haters, but tesla fans are special. They froth at the mouth like an attack dog. Any single miniscule criticism of tesla is treated like you'd pisssed on the dinner table. They're like some hybrid of a 12-year old who thinks the supra has 1000 horsepower stock, and a basement dweller who thinks the Oculus is the pinnacle of technology.
Seriously, what's in the kool-aid and why has no one called the FDA about it?
Good for them. Why do we need a biased filter (journalists) between customer and company.if it is damage recovery journalists and their employers can be easily bought for cash.in this world of direct communication it would be childish to assume papers and journalists are still relevant
On the same thought, why do politicians talk to journalists either? For example Trump doesn't trust them... so why does he talk to them at all? Why not just stop inviting the press in? Why not just present your own releases direct to consumer/elector via your website and social media?
In the same vein (in a vastly different field), Nintendo stopped going to industry-wide events and started their own press releases directly to consumers instead - Nintendo Directs. It's been a few years now so seem to be successful, though I confess I'm not that big of a gaming enthusiast as I was before.
Absolutely the right move, in a social media/post-magazine world the journalists need them way more than Nintendo needs journalists.
Seems utterly absurd to be a company that actually builds something of value from nothing to be required to court and curry favor with individuals who only exist to talk about the work of creators and hope they talk about your work positively when instead you can just bypass them and be the master of your own narrative.
> Why not just present your own releases direct to consumer/elector via your website and social media?
1. You can't do without some press coverage, because you want to sell to people who aren't already superfans.
Toyota sold 10.7 million cars in 2019 and has 803,000 Twitter followers. If their message only appears on Twitter, the vast majority of their customers and potential customers will not see it.
Of course, the press might find your tweets and report on them, but:
2. Given that you want press coverage, having friendly relations with the press is a good thing.
3. If you're a company, the status quo that you're generous with review units and access, and journalists aren't very rigorous or probing in their reviews, is just fine with you.
Firstly, this was Tesla’s PR team, not journalists. As a company, you’d think they would want people whose role is to talk to the public (consumers or journalists), as people not trained in that capacity doing so can quickly get you into trouble. One misstep can get you a visit from the SEC or cost you market share. Given Musk’s history of foot-in-mouth disease, this seems like a pretty awful business move.
Secondly, though your point about journalists and papers isn’t really hyper-relevant to having a pr team: journalists do the job of a) filtering out the noise (useless info), b) filtering out the lies from corporations, government, or people, c) investigating issues of public interest, and d) alerting the public when these issues are important or problematic. While individuals could do this themselves, we don’t all have the time, and it makes sense to have people who do this professionally (and better). The role of the free press has been this for a long time, and the calls against the press are a coordinated strategy by groups whose interests are opposed to knowledge being in public hands and who fear being investigated.
Because trust, I seen yesterday some customer reporting a dangerous Tesla quality issue on reddit and it was "attacked" by fanboys and strong evidence was requested. If a journalist would like to report this problem then you would probably like Tesla to have some competent person to respond but seems you prefer the "Tesla did not responds to journalists anymore".
You know what else is dangerous? An inner circle kabal that can destroy anyone with an allegation that will get retracted 6 months later. A group of people beyond any control and that suffers no consequences. Maybe also a group of people that understands only doublespeak at this point. I have not love for EM, but at least he is in a position in which he can stand against their attacks.
Can you make a point that is related to why not having some official person respond to a press question is a great idea ?
My only idea why you would do that is if you anticipate a lot of bad press so then your strategy is to label it as "fake news" or "shorting" and label critics as puppets and videos that show problems as deep fakes.
Let me know why do you think this is a good idea though.
P.S. I can enumerate random stuff some journalists did wrong, and bad/evil things companies did wrong, and horrible things marketing/PR done ... is not a proof to find some unrelated example, there needs to be some logic to it.
Maybe it's the reddit filter but most comments seem to be jokes? I don't see comments attacking OP on the post you linked...
Now to address you actual point, what would a PR person do here exactly? "Tesla is investigating the issue and will not provide any comments at the current time"? They fixed the car so their internal metrics will ensure that whatever issue caused this will get fixed. It's not economically sensible to fix any percentage of cars right after delivery.
I understand that Tesla light passions and that PR has got (ironically) bad PR in the last few years, but I fail to see how your comment is related to the issue.
Maybe some of the bad comments were removed since I read the thread.
My point was this:
OP said something like "press is evil, Tesla does not need PR"
My point: I would like that maybe 3 paid journalists contact the customer, the dealership and Tesla(so PR contact needed for Tesla) and 3 articles are published with this 3 different sources rather then each individual attempt to contact on it's own the involved parties and try to find the truth.
The same reason we need them for any other set of reasons: To do full-time work investigating different angles of current events and to provide, often, a less-biased report on things.
Of course, eliminating PR =/= eliminating journalists, so this comment is off the tracks anyway.
>and to provide, often, a less-biased report on things.
This isn't what a journalist does at all though and I think they're pretty honest about this if asked.
At best they take the facts and induce bias to provide them in a way that is most palatable to their audience and mirrors the belief of their audience to get more views and therefore more ad impressions. At worst they see themselves as a class above normal people and their job is to ensure the people below them think the right way.
Essentially in a world where the actual events is transmitted via video over social media moments after they occur, seems pretty redundant that we need it filtered through biased individuals who's business only existed because newspapers used to be the most efficient way of doing that.
We need a Free fourth estate . Not some for profit media companies producing click bait articles. (A sample title would be “Look what Elon did to jalopnik”)Nowadays mostly standup comedians are tracking the issues of common man.
Why, so they can put out a limply worded two sentence denial for every news outlet in the country to dunk on?
Bad press happens. I'm sure journalists love it when companies engage directly with them but I'm not sure that it results in more favorable coverage on average.
They still have a blog and a Twitter account. If they want to make statements they can tell the public directly instead of favoring specific journalists with private communications.
> If they want to make statements they can tell the public directly instead of favoring specific journalists with private communications.
Who is going to do that when you get rid of the PR department? I mean sure, someone can do it, but then they are doing PR work on top of whatever other work is on their plate.
I mean, the most prolific of them even get TV shows and podcast episodes and documentaries about them. And that specific sub-genre is exploding in popularity.
So yes, in a way we are holding them in certain high regards.
I am not sure why you are lumping pedophiles with murders and rapists. Pedophilia is the attraction to prepubescent children. It is nothing more than that. Most people with this disorder don't sexually molest prepubescent children. About half of the people that do engage in sexually activity with children are not attracted to them, they do it because they have access and control of the child.
This is not an opinion, it is a fact. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association lists pedophilia as both a sexual orientation and disorder.
"The essential feature of this disorder is recurrent, intense, sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies, of at least six months' duration, involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child."
"The age of the person is arbitrarily set at age 16 years or older and at least 5 years older than the child."
If Reddit is their marketing, then it failed on me yesterday. Reading about the brand new Model Y having its sunroof come off on the drive home from the showroom finally confirmed that the build quality is not worth stretching my wallet for.
"There are obviously still people arranging test-drive promotions for YouTubers but their role isn’t in a traditional public relations capacity."
Remember when people used to say Tesla doesn't do marketing?
The last few years of Tesla has been quite sobering for myself as I had my worldview flipped upside down. With Elon/Tesla, as more information has come out with time, it's been disenchanting.
I was sold a capitalist trying to save the environment by making a car affordable to the masses who is also going to have humans on Mars in a few months. I was inspired, now I'm disgusted in myself for believing it.
Tesla was awarded tradeable regulatory credits. They didn't have any use for them, so they sold them. I suppose they could have just sat on them and refused to sell.
There are valid criticisms around the environmental cost of building electric vehicles. There are also valid criticisms of the regulatory environment that Tesla operates in. I'm not convinced, though, that it makes sense to expect Tesla to refuse to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unneeded credits out of principle.
The regulatory credit trading scheme is effectively the same as a system under which the government imposes extra taxes on FIAT/Chrysler while giving Tesla a tax break. Should Tesla refuse to take that tax break because the money is coming from FIAT/Chrysler?
But it means that buying an EV in the EU doesn't really help the environment as an individual action. The emissions are essentially locked in by government policy, although it's very aggressive.
I think this is better though. It doesn't rely on consumers being conscious of their externalities, because regardless of their choices the aggregate carbon efficiency will be improving steadily by the exact same amount year over year.
The program is clearly creating a vibrant BEV market and forcing economies of scale that will eventually make them profitable outside of compliance. It's a major win.
Buying an EV, buying its certificate and not letting anyone use it would mean you're not also allowing 10 ICEs to be sold. But that would really be going above an beyond.
And I don't think Tesla (as the only auto maker that could have this program) wants to draw attention to the dynamics at play.
I get that Elon is controversial and puts a lot of bull out there. And yet, without him, electric cars would still be in their infancy and rockets would not be landing themselves. These technologies do not develop themselves and market niches do not magically get filled. Many things happen in the world because a single wealthy person wants them to happen. My recommendation is not put too much stock in the future promises, but don't diminish the actual accomplishments, which are impressive by themselves. I think there are personal lessons to be gained too, about the power of picking a stretch goal that you know is within your means to achieve, then dedicating yourself to achieving it. Being an egomaniac is no requirement and probably holds him back. We may not be working on the billionaire problem space, but our own goals can be equally lofty.
Mitsubishi's iMiev (2009) was the first EV to sell more than 10,000 units.
Toyota RAV4 EV was released in 2003 though it was only available for lease (leasors could buy the vehicle at the end of the lease). Indeed, the RAV4 EV 2nd Generation is the reason Tesla exists as a going concern today; without Toyota's cash infusion, Tesla would just be another Faraday Motors in car history.
Ford released an EV truck in 1998.
And the US granddaddy of them all (excluding vehicles only available to fleets) is the GM EV1, released back in 1996.
> Mitsubishi's iMiev (2009) was the first EV to sell more than 10,000 units.
Wow, hadn't realized that one sold that well; I had it filed in my head with the Smart EQ. I'd consider all the others on that list niche impractical devices, though. So the first practical one was probably the iMiev, not the Leaf, then.
Are we just going to ignore that they have an 'External Relations' department?
And that their own jobs board has positions posted two weeks ago for "Marketing & Communications", PR positions all across China, and for "Community Relations Partner"?
It's because Human Resources, public relations, advertising and marketing are the very departments that are taken over by people with an agenda.
I have no idea why people are so naive, there are literally people in government who are trying to slow and impede the progress of technology because they want to retain the right to manipulate the public via centralized advertising, marketing and mass media.
Nearly every single technology company in the United States that has a large enough user base is partially taken over by people with an agenda to slow down the pace of technology. There are severely mentally ill people who literally believe they are in a war against technology devouring people's jobs. Most corporations aren't telling people this because it is embarrassing. There is a growing e-commerce company in NY that was partially taken over and the employees they hired believed that you had to be enslaved (yes, enslaved I'm not kidding) to people who do no believe in technology in order to participate in technology. This is a real thing but not a single company is going to admit this is happening because they want everyone to believe they are perfect.
The way this works is that they use these departments to control the people in these companies and slow down innovation by creating unusual amounts of frustration and screwing with the advertising and public relations of companies to give technology and people in technology a bad image.
In some places it is an organized effort of a small number of people. It's literally small groups of people independently doing this all over the country.
There are obviously still people arranging test-drive promotions for YouTubers but their role isn’t in a traditional public relations capacity.
There's your problem right there. Why bother answering questions from some whining car blogger or lamestream media outlet when Tesla can 100x its messaging impact with a select group of YouTubers and Instagram influencers? If people want the truth about Tesla, Elon will tweet the facts, light one up with Rogan, or harness a cabal of anonymous Reddit users to put the message out there.
"There are obviously still people arranging test-drive promotions for YouTubers but their role isn’t in a traditional public relations capacity. "
That's absolutely traditional PR for an automaker. "Arranging test-drive promotions" means deciding who is eligible for test drives, viewing what is published on YouTube, and deciding if the person will be eligible next time. Even if no words are spoken/written to the YouTubers beyond logistics for the test drive, it is effectively PR.
It's telling they are keeping the most lucrative PR, video product promotion. It sounds like they mainly don't like dealing with the business press. But their investor relations department is going to end up picking up at least some that burden (even if just in the form of ignoring questions). Tesla still has to disclose quarterly earnings figures and its executives will still conduct calls around those earnings releases. They may only allow questions from financial analysts but any member of the public can listen in.
No questions to be answered by PR that might invalidate the hype from tweets* long forgotten that "motivated" buyers and investors.
*Tweets are non binding, we reserve the right to keep it at hype.
You could say it is the most traditional PR technique of the whole automotive industry.
> On 5 August 1888, 39-year-old Bertha Benz drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old respectively, in a Model III, without telling her husband and without permission of the authorities, thus becoming the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance, though illegally.
[...] The novel trip received a great deal of publicity, as she had sought. The drive was a key event in the technical development of the automobile.
Recall one youtuber trading in his Model X for a hybrid Honda Accord (he had a valid issue with long family trips and the supercharger network in his locale) and it got 1.5m views and lots of dislikes and some really crappy comments.
This is exactly why electrek get accused of being Tesla's PR department. In no meaningful way is the headline true, it's this stupid trope that Tesla doesn't advertise, but you can look through this thread and see the thousand ways they do.
138 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadElon dismantling PR makes sense. Probably they rubbed him the wrong way too often. Why bother.
TL;DR - They manage one single external voice. There's value in that. As other point out, Musk is a communications study in and of himself.
When the other car manufacturers finally catch up to Tesla, the negative perception of the Elon Musk brand may drive some buyers away from Tesla.
Wasn't that his public goal?
Steve always use his brand to sell Apple. Elon always use Tesla to sell his brand.
https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/18/20811014/apex-legends-iron...
But as Tesla doesn't pay for advertising (unlike its ICE competitors), the incentives are not aligned, so Tesla and the press had bad relations for a long time.
It's also great to talk to the press when the story and the company's goals DON'T align. If a company is being investigated or impacted in some negative way, then not commenting looks worse on them.
The press tends to be antagonistic toward any big company. Good PR counteracts that, in part by finding and helping the members of the press who like the company.
No company was better at PR than Apple under Steve Jobs. They carefully groomed key reviewers and helped build up a pro-Apple ecosystem of media properties.
Edit: I should add that Apple's PR under Steve Jobs was led by Katie Cotton, and her dept. was famous for rarely responding to direct requests for comment on the news of the day.
Simple: PR teams are some sort of equivalent to the "triage" at emergency rooms. Basically they scan incoming requests for stuff that could land the company in hot legal water or signalize a coming shitstorm (e.g. if journalists ask for information regarding potentially damaging stories during their research), misdirected customer service stuff (pretty common, especially in companies ... not exactly known for decent CS reps), youtubers/other influencers looking for merch gear, shareholders inquiring about financial or other information, movie makers / photographers interested in showing off company products, reps of athletes wanting a sponsorship deal... all of this usually goes through the PR dept who forward it to the appropriate departments or answer on their own.
The key role / function of a good PR team is that the individual departments don't get flooded by bullshit (you don't want to waste the expensive time of the legal dept on a youtuber wanting a Tesla for a rap music video).
https://jalopnik.com/teslas-pr-department-hasnt-responded-to...
The comments section is full of astroturfers that also post on a half-dozen other sites with the exact same anti-Tesla comments.
There is a lot of exciting technology in Tesla, a sea change in the very industry jalopnik purported covers, obviously a lot of debate and nuance in self-driving. Jalopnik doesn't bother with any of that.
If I worked for Tesla I would have stopped replying 5 years ago to Jalopnik.
Elon Musk isn't Jesus, he isn't a saint, but you'd think he had perpetrated genocide reading Jalopnik and its commenters.
Clearly you are unfamiliar with Jalopnik. All of their posts are full of cherry-picking, sarcastic one-liners, and clickbait headlines.
They don't single out Tesla for special treatment (good or bad), nor should they.
The mainline auto makers get kid gloves compared to Tesla. But then again, auto press always knows who pays for the buffets and junkets.
I've been on jalopnik for what seems like a decade now, through the Univision years and the PE Spanfeller years, and the death of deadspin.
The top article on Jalopnik right now: "The Mercedes G-Wagen Is Objectively Impressive But Still A Dumb Car"
The next article: "Jaguar XE And XF Sportbrake Wagon: Dead"
Followed by "Mercedes-Benz Gives Up On Manuals"
Meanwhile, after a Tesla suffered catastrophic structural failure that could have killed or maimed someone, the title of the related article is simply: " Brand-New Tesla Model Y's Roof Flies Off on First Drive Home."
What's the deal with tesla fans? Sure, every brand has fanatics and haters, but tesla fans are special. They froth at the mouth like an attack dog. Any single miniscule criticism of tesla is treated like you'd pisssed on the dinner table. They're like some hybrid of a 12-year old who thinks the supra has 1000 horsepower stock, and a basement dweller who thinks the Oculus is the pinnacle of technology.
Seriously, what's in the kool-aid and why has no one called the FDA about it?
On Jalopnik today, Wednesday October 7, 9:30 pm:
3 Tesla - roof flies off! They're ignoring me! Tesla alleges sabotage!
One BMW - NEW $40000 motorcycle! 0 GM 0 Toyota 1 Ford - Mach-E $3000 cheaper!
Maybe if he hadn't done that he'd get different kind of coverage.
Traditionally companies have a hard time trusting that their customers will want the right thing.
The fact that this was ever considered related to journalism is hilarious.
Seems utterly absurd to be a company that actually builds something of value from nothing to be required to court and curry favor with individuals who only exist to talk about the work of creators and hope they talk about your work positively when instead you can just bypass them and be the master of your own narrative.
1. You can't do without some press coverage, because you want to sell to people who aren't already superfans.
Toyota sold 10.7 million cars in 2019 and has 803,000 Twitter followers. If their message only appears on Twitter, the vast majority of their customers and potential customers will not see it.
Of course, the press might find your tweets and report on them, but:
2. Given that you want press coverage, having friendly relations with the press is a good thing.
3. If you're a company, the status quo that you're generous with review units and access, and journalists aren't very rigorous or probing in their reviews, is just fine with you.
Firstly, this was Tesla’s PR team, not journalists. As a company, you’d think they would want people whose role is to talk to the public (consumers or journalists), as people not trained in that capacity doing so can quickly get you into trouble. One misstep can get you a visit from the SEC or cost you market share. Given Musk’s history of foot-in-mouth disease, this seems like a pretty awful business move.
Secondly, though your point about journalists and papers isn’t really hyper-relevant to having a pr team: journalists do the job of a) filtering out the noise (useless info), b) filtering out the lies from corporations, government, or people, c) investigating issues of public interest, and d) alerting the public when these issues are important or problematic. While individuals could do this themselves, we don’t all have the time, and it makes sense to have people who do this professionally (and better). The role of the free press has been this for a long time, and the calls against the press are a coordinated strategy by groups whose interests are opposed to knowledge being in public hands and who fear being investigated.
Btw I am referring to this post https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/j595ns/so_tesl... , it was stickied yesterday and I think is legit.
My only idea why you would do that is if you anticipate a lot of bad press so then your strategy is to label it as "fake news" or "shorting" and label critics as puppets and videos that show problems as deep fakes.
Let me know why do you think this is a good idea though.
P.S. I can enumerate random stuff some journalists did wrong, and bad/evil things companies did wrong, and horrible things marketing/PR done ... is not a proof to find some unrelated example, there needs to be some logic to it.
Now to address you actual point, what would a PR person do here exactly? "Tesla is investigating the issue and will not provide any comments at the current time"? They fixed the car so their internal metrics will ensure that whatever issue caused this will get fixed. It's not economically sensible to fix any percentage of cars right after delivery.
I understand that Tesla light passions and that PR has got (ironically) bad PR in the last few years, but I fail to see how your comment is related to the issue.
My point was this: OP said something like "press is evil, Tesla does not need PR"
My point: I would like that maybe 3 paid journalists contact the customer, the dealership and Tesla(so PR contact needed for Tesla) and 3 articles are published with this 3 different sources rather then each individual attempt to contact on it's own the involved parties and try to find the truth.
The same reason we need them for any other set of reasons: To do full-time work investigating different angles of current events and to provide, often, a less-biased report on things.
Of course, eliminating PR =/= eliminating journalists, so this comment is off the tracks anyway.
That's a hugely broad question. Many are.
This isn't what a journalist does at all though and I think they're pretty honest about this if asked.
At best they take the facts and induce bias to provide them in a way that is most palatable to their audience and mirrors the belief of their audience to get more views and therefore more ad impressions. At worst they see themselves as a class above normal people and their job is to ensure the people below them think the right way.
Essentially in a world where the actual events is transmitted via video over social media moments after they occur, seems pretty redundant that we need it filtered through biased individuals who's business only existed because newspapers used to be the most efficient way of doing that.
Yeah we should get our Tesla information from the unbiased source that is Elon Musk!
There you go, do you need a PR deparment now? If it's your CEO doing that job, that's a bad use of the CEO's time.
Bad press happens. I'm sure journalists love it when companies engage directly with them but I'm not sure that it results in more favorable coverage on average.
They still have a blog and a Twitter account. If they want to make statements they can tell the public directly instead of favoring specific journalists with private communications.
Who is going to do that when you get rid of the PR department? I mean sure, someone can do it, but then they are doing PR work on top of whatever other work is on their plate.
So yes, in a way we are holding them in certain high regards.
"The essential feature of this disorder is recurrent, intense, sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies, of at least six months' duration, involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child."
"The age of the person is arbitrarily set at age 16 years or older and at least 5 years older than the child."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgmzwn/most-child-sex-abuser...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09249...
https://www.aic.gov.au/publications/tandi/tandi429
My point was any PR =/= good PR.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/
Well, so long reddit (and thanks for all the memes)
It's exactly what I thought when I read the headline
Remember when people used to say Tesla doesn't do marketing?
The last few years of Tesla has been quite sobering for myself as I had my worldview flipped upside down. With Elon/Tesla, as more information has come out with time, it's been disenchanting.
I was sold a capitalist trying to save the environment by making a car affordable to the masses who is also going to have humans on Mars in a few months. I was inspired, now I'm disgusted in myself for believing it.
Full disclaimer: happy Tesla owner here.
My math is wonky, does that mean on average, a Tesla is just as polluting as a Fiat/Chrysler car?
Tesla was awarded tradeable regulatory credits. They didn't have any use for them, so they sold them. I suppose they could have just sat on them and refused to sell.
There are valid criticisms around the environmental cost of building electric vehicles. There are also valid criticisms of the regulatory environment that Tesla operates in. I'm not convinced, though, that it makes sense to expect Tesla to refuse to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unneeded credits out of principle.
The regulatory credit trading scheme is effectively the same as a system under which the government imposes extra taxes on FIAT/Chrysler while giving Tesla a tax break. Should Tesla refuse to take that tax break because the money is coming from FIAT/Chrysler?
But it means that buying an EV in the EU doesn't really help the environment as an individual action. The emissions are essentially locked in by government policy, although it's very aggressive.
I think this is better though. It doesn't rely on consumers being conscious of their externalities, because regardless of their choices the aggregate carbon efficiency will be improving steadily by the exact same amount year over year.
The program is clearly creating a vibrant BEV market and forcing economies of scale that will eventually make them profitable outside of compliance. It's a major win.
Buying an EV, buying its certificate and not letting anyone use it would mean you're not also allowing 10 ICEs to be sold. But that would really be going above an beyond.
And I don't think Tesla (as the only auto maker that could have this program) wants to draw attention to the dynamics at play.
This seems... dubious? The chronology is: Smart EQ: 2007 (in tiny numbers; niche non-mass-market product)
Tesla Roadster: 2008 (in tiny numbers; niche non-mass-market product)
Nissan Leaf: 2010
Renault Zoe: 2012
Tesla Model S: 2012
The Leaf was a big seller, and the Zoe outsells Tesla's entire line-up in Europe.
I think it would be fair to say that Tesla really sold the idea of a _performance_ electric car, but not electric cars as a whole.
Toyota RAV4 EV was released in 2003 though it was only available for lease (leasors could buy the vehicle at the end of the lease). Indeed, the RAV4 EV 2nd Generation is the reason Tesla exists as a going concern today; without Toyota's cash infusion, Tesla would just be another Faraday Motors in car history.
Ford released an EV truck in 1998.
And the US granddaddy of them all (excluding vehicles only available to fleets) is the GM EV1, released back in 1996.
Wow, hadn't realized that one sold that well; I had it filed in my head with the Smart EQ. I'd consider all the others on that list niche impractical devices, though. So the first practical one was probably the iMiev, not the Leaf, then.
Yes, GM deserves much more credit for the EV revolution than Tesla.
How is 'external relations' not 'public relations'?
And that their own jobs board has positions posted two weeks ago for "Marketing & Communications", PR positions all across China, and for "Community Relations Partner"?
This "news" is pure fabrication.
https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/?keyword=Communication...
The article explicitly explained that personnel from PR moved into External Relations.
The headline is far more sensational than the article. But that's been standard practice for centuries, not "pure fabrication"
What's the difference between Public Relations and External Relations?
That's a logical fallacy: Argumentum ad antiquitatem [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition
I have no idea why people are so naive, there are literally people in government who are trying to slow and impede the progress of technology because they want to retain the right to manipulate the public via centralized advertising, marketing and mass media.
Nearly every single technology company in the United States that has a large enough user base is partially taken over by people with an agenda to slow down the pace of technology. There are severely mentally ill people who literally believe they are in a war against technology devouring people's jobs. Most corporations aren't telling people this because it is embarrassing. There is a growing e-commerce company in NY that was partially taken over and the employees they hired believed that you had to be enslaved (yes, enslaved I'm not kidding) to people who do no believe in technology in order to participate in technology. This is a real thing but not a single company is going to admit this is happening because they want everyone to believe they are perfect.
The way this works is that they use these departments to control the people in these companies and slow down innovation by creating unusual amounts of frustration and screwing with the advertising and public relations of companies to give technology and people in technology a bad image.
There's your problem right there. Why bother answering questions from some whining car blogger or lamestream media outlet when Tesla can 100x its messaging impact with a select group of YouTubers and Instagram influencers? If people want the truth about Tesla, Elon will tweet the facts, light one up with Rogan, or harness a cabal of anonymous Reddit users to put the message out there.
Easy!
Jokes aside, this is a good thing for our industry - if I wanted to argue to right-size a PR department I now have a clear example to point to.
That's absolutely traditional PR for an automaker. "Arranging test-drive promotions" means deciding who is eligible for test drives, viewing what is published on YouTube, and deciding if the person will be eligible next time. Even if no words are spoken/written to the YouTubers beyond logistics for the test drive, it is effectively PR.
It's telling they are keeping the most lucrative PR, video product promotion. It sounds like they mainly don't like dealing with the business press. But their investor relations department is going to end up picking up at least some that burden (even if just in the form of ignoring questions). Tesla still has to disclose quarterly earnings figures and its executives will still conduct calls around those earnings releases. They may only allow questions from financial analysts but any member of the public can listen in.
> On 5 August 1888, 39-year-old Bertha Benz drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old respectively, in a Model III, without telling her husband and without permission of the authorities, thus becoming the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance, though illegally. [...] The novel trip received a great deal of publicity, as she had sought. The drive was a key event in the technical development of the automobile.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz
Outsourcing PR to the "fans" ... nope.