Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

red concave bar 1

Repairing a Damaged Brand

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , ,

Will the car sell itself? Perhaps. But some potential buyers will see the Musk association with Tesla as reason to look elsewhere.

One of the relatively new areas of communication research is the study of how a company or individual responds to a damaged brand. It is an interesting problem to tackle because there are so many corporate vulnerabilities.  There may be a publicized problem with a product. In other cases the producer’s recent words or deeds are the focus. In the case of damage to the Tesla car brand, the challenge is obviously with CEO Elon Musk, who is about as popular now as the idea of dental surgery. Musk signed on to Donald Trump’s chaotic effort to dismember the federal establishment by firing thousands of career federal workers. Weeks ago he brandished a chain saw in the Oval Office to dramatize what he and his DOGE staff planned to do in cutting jobs and federal agencies like OSHA and NOAA. The photo op gave new meaning to the metaphor of being tone deaf. The saw suggested how indelicate and insensitive the process would be. News coverage has been filled with dazed workers fired on the spot, and the apparent pleasure Musk seemed to receive by depriving public servants of their employment and citizens of needed services. In rhetorical terms, for many, Tesla has become a convenient synecdoche, a symbol for a whole cluster of negative feelings associated with the administration.  Dealers and automobiles are now easy targets for protesters.

A recent Newsweek poll notes that forty-nine percent of respondents said they view Musk unfavorably, compared to only 39 percent who view him positively. Those are not good numbers for a high profile head of a company who has taken a detour to help fire some 140 thousand federal workers.

The brand Musk nurtured as uniquely his has paid the price in terms of a huge drop in the value of Tesla stock and car sales. In Europe, the losses have nearly been total.  And many owners in the U.S. have since sold their cars. Many of those who remain have grown uneasy driving their Teslas in areas where hostility toward the administration is white hot.

If these problems aren’t difficult enough for the brand, they have been made worse by Musk’s seemingly pro-Fascist and gestures and statements, confirmed recently by his overt support of Germany’s far right political parties. In the 1920s Henry Ford similarly flirted with German Fascists and virulent antisemitism. But news about Musk has been more overtly available and negative.

For all of these reasons the former Cinderella brand now seems to be in deep trouble. Investment specialist and former enthusiast Dan Ives cites the ongoing Tesla problems around the world as a “dark black cloud” over the company’s stock, which is now down 40 percent this year. The future is further clouded by high-flying new EVs from BYD, Nio, XPeng, and other Chinese automakers. So far, these lower priced competitors are tariffed out of the U.S. market. But Tesla now has other car makers with their own competitive products. One auto analysist has compared the storm of controversy that has overtaken Musk to an F5 tornado.

Salvaging a brand

People who focus on crisis communication look first at earlier cases, like the storm of news about Johnson & Johnson’s painkiller brand Tylenol in 1982. It was hit by a literal life-and-death crisis when seven people died after taking contaminated Extra Strength Tylenol. J and J saved the brand by being transparent about what had happened, and reformulating Tylenol into a tamperproof pill.

Other brands have not been so lucky and were abandoned because of various accidents and flaws that got extensive coverage. If you are old enough, think of the Edsel, the Ford Pinto, the Chevrolet Corvair, or the Oil Spill of the tanker in 1989. More recently we witnessed misuse of Facebook personal data by Cambridge Analytica in 2016.

Notwithstanding question’s about Musk’s character, will the Tesla continue to sell itself? Perhaps. But some potential buyers will see Musk’s association involvement as enough to look elsewhere.  Then, too, the company is not known for thoughtful attention to customer concerns and needs.

Some potential buyers won’t care, using the logic that they are buying the car, not its creator. If Musk removed himself from Tesla’s management, that would probably help.

The usual road to recovery usually begins with a full apology for past actions. Theories of brand repair lean heavily on honest disclosures of mistakes. Helen Edwards, an expert in marketing, has additional and familiar suggestions:

  • Keep the name.
  • Study histories of Tylenol and other restored brands.
  • Make product service a top priority.
  • Refresh your communications with your customers.
  • Give yourself 10 to 15 years to recover.

In the end, Musk has one deep liability and one significant strength. The strength is that he seems to have boundless wealth, which can carry even as massive a business along for a while. The weakness is equally clear. If a person has the kind of character that tends to turn people off, in this hothouse digital age that is something that is not easily changed, even if you own one of the platforms.

red bar graphic

It’s 1984 Again

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”  –George Orwell

It has been a pathetic spectacle to witness the ransacking of our federal government under the guise of serving the American public. Extra-legal acts of sabotage to agencies like the NIH have come with the explicit endorsement of the GOP and implicit acceptance of a somnolent public. We have to wonder what kind of country actually wants the self-inflicted wounds of wholesale firings and dismembered agencies. Few democracies have seemed so placid in the face of such self-destruction.

It tends to be the smaller declarations from the White House that capture its sloppy logic and daily rhetorical mayhem.

Consider the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf is shared by three nations. Though the  mental  fog may sometimes lift from his thinking, Donald Trump was logically out of his lane to overturn tradition and unilaterally assign a new name. Mexico and Cuba rightly have other ideas.

And for keeping the same geographical label, the Associated Press was suddenly barred from full access to the White House.

In overturning an uncontested place name Trump sought to turn a rhetorical whim into reality. Like his absurd palaver ignoring the sovereign states of Canada and Greenland, he squandered his authority to deny what others can clearly see. Such denial tries to sell a fantasy as the truth. Only small children and politicians engorged with a sense of power would try this kind of sleight-of-hand.

And so when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins put the question to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, her response was stunning in its audacity. The logic of Leavitt’s non-answer would bring no credit to even a child. She tried to sell the renaming as settled fact, and the traditional name a “lie.” “I was upfront on day one if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” she noted. And with a straight face she continued with a perfect example of doublespeak: “It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I am not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is. The secretary of interior has made that the official designation, and geographical identification name server, and Apple has recognized that, Google has recognized that, pretty much every outlet in this room has recognized that body of water as the Gulf of America, and it’s very important to the administration that we get that right.”

                                 Karoline Leavitt

The circular logic here tries to sell this weeks old fabrication as the status quo, presumably while the rest of us will avert our eyes to avoid noticing that Mexico itself shares over 1700 miles of shoreline along the Gulf. This kind of  binary thinking is Alice in Wonderland kind of stuff, spoken—amazingly—to a packed pressroom disappointingly silent except for Ms. Collins.

Ditto for the new administration’s insistence in the same press conference that gender is a simple two-tailed concept. In attacking efforts to deal with the dynamic nature of gender identity, Leavitt wanted to hold to a view of language that admits no well-documented subtleties. Apparently the Trump administration is ready to declare “that there are only two sexes, male and female. And we have directed all federal agencies to comply with that policy.”

Again, Leavitt can say this, but even in the precincts of the White House her truth is a forgery. She needs to get out more. It is settled science that gender is fluid, allowing no one-size-fits-all dichotomy. As the University of Iowa’s Maurine Neiman has noted, scientists of human reproduction “are in wide agreement that biological sex in humans as well as the rest of life on earth is much more complicated than a simple binary.” In fact, according to the Gallup Organization, nearly one in ten Americans identify as L.G.B.T.Q. Poor Ms. Leavitt wondered off into the weeds again to presume that it was her place to deny firm scientific proof. He attempt to usurp the prerogative of Americans to shape and affirm their own identity would have been wide of the mark even in 1894.