THE man is foolish. But he is a foolish man who employs people. Earlier this week Paul Miller, the boss of gin, whisky and beer brand Eden Mill, was on the front page of Dundee’s Courier.
The entrepreneur, the paper reported, had made a series of “outbursts” against Covid vaccines and masks on LinkedIn, the business and work-focused social media platform.
Mr Miller, it said, had talked of “manufactured fear” and accused governments of “playing a dangerous game with unproven vaccines inflicted on a desperate population”. The gin-maker singled out Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director, for criticism. The public health expert, Mr Miller said, was an "idiot”.
All this is according to the Courier. Mr Miller’s profile on Linkedin has evaporated and his company has had no comment.
There is nothing remarkable about another internet know-nothing spouting off about stuff beyond their ken. Social media brims with irresponsible covidiots spreading disinformation. Mr Miller’s social media advice – that healthy people need not get vaccinated – is not just stupid, it is potentially lethally so.
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Luckily, at least in Scotland, most people shrug off such nonsense: we wear our masks, wash our hands, obey health regulations and get our jags.
But what if the person who is cracking up online is your boss? What if it is not just their own credibility they are trashing – but that of their company’s brand, of a business you depend on for your job, your livelihood?
Workers at Eden Mill will probably just want this story to go away. So, sorry for bringing it up again: one guy with poor judgement should not colour our views of an entire business.
But as Scotland – fingers crossed – eases its way out of most of the restrictions imposed under the public health crisis it is worth looking at how well the nation’s businesses have handled the PR challenges of Covid.
This last year or so has been an entirely unfair character test for entrepreneurs and executives, especially, but not only, in those sectors on the frontline of restrictions, such as retail, gyms, travel and tourism and hospitality. Some bosses have cracked under the pressure, saying or doing things that made it look, rightly or wrongly, like they put profits before people, lolly before lives. And, of course, leaders in businesses which were already struggling – patients, if you like, with pre-existing conditions which made them vulnerable to Covid – were always going to be most likely to break.
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Business leaders are as fragile as the rest of us: their cracks show under stress. Some, like Mr Miller, have lost their rags about vaccines and masks. Others, including parts of the booze lobby, did so over lockdown.
Remember the protests back in October 2020 when some pubs and clubs dumped their unused ice outside Glasgow City Chambers? Back then this looked like a visceral shriek of powerlessness in the face of a pandemic, a raw outburst of understandable existential angst. But, for some, it also appeared ill-judged, insensitive, selfish even.
Ten months and thousands of deaths later, the businesses which supported those actions have to rebuild their relationships with their customers (especially older ones), communities and regulators. That is not going to be easy.
Relations between parts of the night-time economy and local and national authorities across Scotland have been strained. That will have to change. Businesses will have to reflect on their rhetoric, on their demands for special treatment which, at times, showed a striking lack of perspective.
Stakeholders in the public sector – who already ‘get’ that some of the harsh language and impractical policy proposals came from a place of fear and pain – will have to find a way to put any resentment and bad feeling behind them. A re-set is needed.
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There were other businesses too which adopted stances which – at the very least – risked charges, albeit usually unjust ones, that they were lobbying on behalf of Covid as well as their own bottom lines. Football thought it was a special case. Or should be. The air travel industry too. Sometimes their messaging was crass.
It is easy to focus on the PR disasters – even if some of the business people who screwed up have not quite realised it yet.
But the big picture is quite different. Indeed, there is a slight sense of relief among some people in the world of corporate and public affairs: a lot of insiders expected things to a be a lot worse.
Even in the most affected sectors, most leaders have held their nerve and avoided the kind of public special pleading which carries serious reputational risk.
Take those Covid-vulnerable sectors: pubs and clubs, airports, tourism or football. As it happens, these are regulated and publicly supported industries which depend on good relations with authorities. So they have skills for dealing with the state and with the public and they have umbrella groups for lobbying and for getting their views across.
Those few individual business leaders who have lashed out angrily on social media are not just jeopardising relations with outside stakeholders. They also risk problems with their boards, investors and employees.
Even under Covid, the tried-and-tested praxis of corporate PR and stakeholder relations have mostly held up, insiders insist. And on a human level, most entrepreneurs have understood why business could not go on as usual. Most people, after all, are not sociopaths.
Harry Hussain, head of corporate and business PR at Frame, a public relations firm, was positive. “Scotland’s business community has on the whole shown remarkable tenancy in facing up to the PR challenges posed by the pandemic,” he said.
“There have obviously been winners and losers. Those who have taken a people-first approach have gained plaudits for the way they have treated staff, customers and suppliers. However, others who have shown dubious moral judgement have been rightly exposed and experienced the negative impact of their actions on their bottom line.”
Covid is not over yet. As Eden Mill’s Mr Miller has demonstrated, there are still reputations to be trashed. But – whisper it for now – corporate and small-business Scotland has not had the Covid PR nightmare it might have had.
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