The cover story of the July 2019 issue of the Harvard Business Review featured a topic many scholars have been discussing for more than a decade: “The Trust Crisis.” Written by Harvard Business School professor Sandra Sucher and researcher Shalene Gupta, the lead paragraph reads:

“Businesses put a lot of effort into meeting the diverse needs of stakeholders – customers, investors, employees, and society at large. But they're not paying enough attention to one ingredient that's crucial to productive relationships with those stakeholders: trust.”

Around this same time, late December 2018, the Pew Research Center, a US-based nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world, conducted a study that found Americans believed declining trust in the government and each other makes it harder to solve problems. The study uncovered fully 71% think interpersonal confidence has worsened in the past 20 years. And about half (49%) think the major weight dragging down such trust is that Americans are not as reliable as they used to be.

China is not immune to declining trust problems. In a 2017 Ipsos study Chinese people expressed the greatest concern of citizens of any nation about “morale decline” in their country. An article on the study, written in the August 6, 2017 edition of Quartz, a leading news portal created for the business community, reports, “Chinese citizens often lament that people in the country lack moral responsibility. Relentless news about reckless car accidents, small-scale scams and food safety scandals fuel the sense that a widespread lack of trust is bad for society.”

Perhaps United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres' articulated this best in his keynote speech at the Doha Forum in December 2018.

“What then is going on? I believe that … there is a huge deficit of trust. As I said at the United Nations General Assembly, our world is suffering from a bad case of Trust Deficit Disorder. It's a deficit on many levels. Trust between people and political institutions. Trust among countries. Trust in international organizations, namely the United Nations itself.”

So how does this relate to public relations today and tomorrow?

If the pillar of the public relations profession is the cultivation of relationships that result in greater trust, this moment should be our opportunity. Great public relations professionals build bridges – we counsel clients on connecting with their audiences to strengthen relationships and build trust to achieve targeted objectives. Through thoughtful, skilled communications we help clients close their own trust deficits. This mission of our business has not changed since the establishment of the public relations industry more than a century ago and is ever more important today.

Yet a fundamental change has taken root in the channels, influencers and tools we use to connect to audiences to influence attitudes and motivate behavior towards achieving a client goal. Before, the practice of public relations centered on strengthening relationships by influencing opinions and motivating behavior through third-party advocates, most often widely accepted experts, who amplified their views by reaching consumers through respected media. These advocates earned attention for their point-of-view on behalf of a client, organization or campaign goal. This is where the definition of earned media came from, and this approach is still relevant today in many instances. However, earned media largely represents a one-way communications process and has many deficiencies based on how the world of media has evolved. One problem that exists at present is almost every media vehicle is associated with a tribe rather than being seen as a neutral source.

Today, with the rise of social media and increased opportunities to engage in a two-way communications process, the nature of influence has changed. By becoming part of a community and engaging with that group, communications professionals are given permission to influence. With permission comes increased opportunities to deliver a message, create stronger bonds and maybe even change minds. We earn that right to influence others and this is what we call earned influence.

The Emergence of Earned Influence

There are many implications to the rapid migration to social media. With consumers spending greater amounts of time online and looking at their phones, companies and brands have been focused on developing content to inform, engage, entice and motivate them. Companies and brands responded to this phenomenon with the development of corporate and brand newsrooms – simply companies or brands setting up miniature news bureaus to create stories about their brands ostensibly like those of the Associated Press, Reuters or Xinhua News Agency.

“Content is king,” explained Chris Graves, former Global CEO of Ogilvy, Public Relations & Influence and today the Founder and CEO of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science. “It doesn't matter who develops the content or in what form it is presented, if it is informative, engaging, useful and perhaps entertaining, and if it consumed, it has the ability to influence,” he continued.

Another result of this came in the rise of influencer marketing. Beyond social media platforms, influencers also become platforms and an entire industry developed around influencers and their endorsement of brands. In a 2018 article in the Guardian titled, “The rise of the nano-influencer: how brands are turning to common people”, the subtitle reads, “It's not just celebrities and YouTubers who are paid to plug stuff – now everyday Instagram citizens are being courted.”

What evolved is a whole new practice of public relations – one which leverages all of the new technologies to reach and engage with a company or brands' stakeholders.

“What is different with such technologies is that engagement is not a one-way process. When a consumer is part of a community, they are granting others permission to communicate and influence them,” explains Graves.

The “permission” is what changed and opened the public relations professional to a much more approachable consumer. It also provided greater opportunities for public relations practitioners to influence via paid, owned and earned vehicles. In the past, earned media was one-way process, however with earned influence we entered into a dialogue.

What evolved is a whole new, broader practice of public relations.

In terms of defining this new era for the public relations industry, earned influence is the art and science of gaining permission to influence decisions and motivate behaviours of customers, consumers and key opinion formers.

While the definition or practice of earned influence evolved with the growth of the internet and explosion of social media channels, it also followed the convergence of communications disciplines driven by marketers who don't discriminate where solutions come from as long as they solve their critical marketing and communications needs. Corporate reputation and brand image at this time also began to blur, again driven by clients who recognize there is a connection between the two, and both corporate reputation and brand image have to work together towards the achievement of an overall marketing goal.

What has transpired is many clients recognize we are living in an earned-first world. What that means is before marketers go out and spend marketing investment dollars to achieve a certain goal, they have to build a foundation of trust with important stakeholders, and earned influence is the best way to do this. The expression “earned first” evolved from the belief, decision and action by marketers to place public relations at the center of their campaign efforts.

First introduced by Graves in 2015, earned influence raised the bar on how we as public relations professionals successfully shape opinions. According to Graves, earned influence focused on the new world where consumers were spending their time and forming their views. With earned influence, once a consumer became part of a community and granted other community members permission to influence, the forms of communications serving as the influencing agent, and the role of influencers themselves exploded. Whether content was paid, owned or earned, if it appeared on social media channels and was consumed by members of that community, this opened up many new avenues to public relations practitioners to consider in our influencing campaigns.

Putting this into action utilizes the same skills public relations practitioners have used all along. It starts by listening and understanding who we are targeting. What follows is the development of messages and content that engage them. What is different however, beyond the channels, are the influencing tools we use and the role of influencers, accompanied by messages and content developed with a deep understanding of the platforms where the brand's consumers exist. At the most basic level developing engaging content that is platform-specific is the most fundamental change.

Improving The Public Relations Industry's Influencing Effectiveness

In addition to exploding channels and forms of content by which people are getting their information, there has been a movement forming in the public relations industry towards better understanding of human decision making. At Ogilvy, we were amongst the first agencies to embrace this with the establishment of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science, founded by Graves. Today this unit helps organizations understand both simple and complex concepts related to how people make decisions. “Deploying a new approach to behavioral-science based earned influence – the understanding of human biases and the individual differences of how people are wired to reject or accept lines of messaging based on their personality and worldview – is where the industry is headed,” commented Graves. “What is important for communicators is how to tailor and reframe messages to resonate rather than clash, and that is where deep understanding of behavioral sciences comes into play,” he added.

Central to becoming a more effective communicator, behavioral science teaches us that understanding a consumers' biases first and foremost is essential. The Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science has researched many aspects of Confirmation Bias in consumers, which is defined as the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories. By understanding confirmation bias a communicator would know arguing with someone head on with facts and evidence are futile when trying to influence opinions.

According to Graves, if you attack somebody with evidence with facts that they are wrong, they don't pause and look at your facts and go “wow, maybe I will change my view”. Instead they get angry, they dig it in and all behavioral science shows that they get more fervent, more shrill in that line of belief that they started with. Rather the way to address people with such biases is through a tactic called “affirmation”, which involves getting a consumer to realize you understand an issue as they see it but have a different view on how to address it. Many behavioral scientists also found by befriending the consumer and telling them something good about themselves, they are more amenable to changing their views on the issues.

For example, if a consumer is a violent opponent to vaccinations, giving them facts to explain to them they are misguided would fail to influence. However, if they are presented with an emotional story of how a vaccine helped a like-minded friend, they may be more inclined to change their mind. Their bias prevents them to accepting any contrarian view, but a like-minded individual with an emotional story they can relate to may do the trick.

Other aspects of behavioral science have also been effective in influencing decisions. For example, the Concreteness Effect describes how the use of specific, concrete nouns, are more effective in helping an audience visualize a point of view vs. nouns that are more abstract. For example, concrete nouns like chair, house, car are easier for people to visualize then such nouns as romance, guilt or feelings.

For example, as described in the popular book, Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, the Centers for Science in the Public Interest worked to explain the health risks of eating fatty foods in a more effective way. The Center used buttered popcorn as an example, which is equivalent to 37 grams of fat. To be more effective it helped consumers visualize how bad that is by offering a simple explanation or a visual that showed 37 grams of fat is equivalent to a full breakfast meal of two eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, along with a big mac, fries and a full steak. The Center knew only by visualizing how much someone was consuming by eating a simple bowl of popcorn could they get better behavioral results.

A third area of behavioral science that has been incredibly effective in landing messages today is the Identifiable Victim Effect. The Identifiable Victim Effect refers to the tendency of individuals to offer greater aid when a specific,identifiable person ("victim") is observed under hardship, as compared to a large, vaguely defined group with the same need.

One simple example of this was experienced with the Syrian refugee crisis. No matter how many news reports informed the world about the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees being displaced by civil war in that country, for many this news did not hit home until a little boy – Alan Kurdi – downed and was washed ashore on a Turkish beach as he tried to flee danger with his family. The picture of one person who could be pictured and visualized vs. vague, significant reported numbers in the hundreds of thousands had a much greater impact.

There are many more aspects of behavioral science we are using to improve communications and effect results, and the leaders of tomorrow understand the nuances and are shaping their messages and campaigns accordingly.

What is certain as witnessed by the evolution of our industry, the adoption of new practices, and the attraction to our craft of people from all marketing disciplines, is that we are at the very beginning of the earned influence phenomenon. If brands, clients and institutions need trust to survive, we will certainly see a boom in the needs of public relations people who understand earned influence and its role in building and maintaining trust.

Earned Influence in Action

Earned Influence has been so commonplace today nearly all effective communications campaigns reflect its importance. Gone are the days of one-way communications. To effectively move others and influence behavior, two-way communications are necessary resulting in the “permission” to influence. With permission, results are accelerated.

Among the very first Cannes-awarded Gold Lion campaigns in public relations from Asia, the Ogilvy campaign for VisitBritain is fantastic representation of earned influence at work. In an effort to attract Chinese tourists to travel to and experience Great Britain, VisitBritain reached out to Ogilvy amidst growing competition for tourists from China.

But how to engage the potential tourist? Certainly featuring the attractions with earned media efforts was not enough. That was “old school.”

The core of the idea was this: For centuries the British circumnavigated the world, planting the Union Jack and naming places. In a public relations-led multi-discipline creative campaign to drive Chinese tourism to Britain, we invited Chinese people to return the favor in a campaign entitled, “Great Chinese Names for Great Britain.”

One insight which served as the cornerstone of the campaign centered around the finding that Chinese people were obsessed with naming - for their favorite places, celebrities, friends, food and more.

Immediate tourism benefits were experienced with Chinese visits to Britain during the period up 20% year-on-year (according to the UK Office for National Statistics). Significant contributions were also made to the British economy as a result given Chinese tourists have a tendency to shop aggressively when they travel abroad.

Ogilvy's multi award-winning campaign for the Chinese city of Chengdu is another example. In an effort to build awareness for Chengdu as a tourist destination similar to Beijing, Shanghai and Xian, the city reached out to Ogilvy to attract visitors using Chengdu's iconic Panda Reserve as the major attraction. After extensive brainstorming, we helped Chengdu create the concept of the “Pambassador” (Panda Ambassador) and engaged influencers all over the world. This campaign attracted millions of new visitors, and even new residents, to Chengdu.

Earned Influence and Reputation Management

Earned influence is not just relevant to product brand and tourism campaigns. Anywhere consumers are spending their time and receiving messages, earned influence is present.

Warren Buffet, the famed global investor, once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.”

Today communicators are definitely thinking differently. As a result of the explosion of social channels and behavior of consumers in how they make decisions, our industry has seen growth in purpose branding and corporate reputation assignments. Reputations today are affected by opinions from multiple angles and two-way engagement is a core part of building a reputation. If great public relations is what other people say about you, getting others to engage on a brands' behalf is all the more relevant today.

Earned influence characterized by earned first decision making is not just apparent in the leading public relations campaigns of today, if you study the leading awarded campaigns from all marketing disciplines, you will see an element of the practice of earned influence at work.

Towards the Future

It is hard not be excited about the prospects for the public relations industry and for the future and the evolution of earned influence. As an industry we have a lot of work to do. We not only have a role in bridging the trust deficits that exist in the world, we need to play a critical role in helping our clients connect and motivate behavior in new and different ways.

At the center of this is the need to improve and evolve our strategic capabilities, particularly related to market dynamics and audience insights. We need to sharpen our creative story telling skills using what we are learning from behavioral science, and we need improve the use of data in guiding and measuring campaigns. If we do these things right, we will be in fine form to create our own destinies.

If we make these advancements, not only will our clients benefit, but we will see our discipline become central, not peripheral to a shift that is taking place in the marketing world today.

We have so many opportunities. If we follow the advice of many leaders on the prospects of the future, this statement attributed to several business leaders of the past, seems to be the most apropos:

“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”