Language of strategic communication: Advertising, Marketing, Public Relations as Bullshit
4 What is strategic bullshit?
Introduction
To speak of strategic bullshit is to indicate that “strategic communication” is filled with bullshit. To be clear, strategic communication can be defined broadly as “communication that is driven by an expected outcome” (Dudo and Kahlor, 2017, p. ix). It is not restricted to “business communication” but can be understood as any type of “goal-oriented communication initiated by organizations to address any kind of stakeholders and audiences” (Zerfass et al., 2018, p. 488). Various professional fields engage in “the purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfill its mission. … These disciplines include, but are not limited to, management, marketing, advertising, and public relations” (Hallahan et al., 2007, pp. 3-4). For our current purposes, though, it makes sense to narrow the focus to how bullshit is used as strategic communication by these disciplines. It is obvious that these disciplines depend upon tactics of narrative persuasion and framing, Narrative persuasion can be understood as “the process through which attitudes, opinions, behaviors, and related outcomes (e.g., policies, laws, etc.) are influenced by narrative forms of communication” (LaMarre, 2017, p. 23). This is typically a “covert mode of persuasion, where information is generally accepted first and only scrutinized later ” (Dahlstrom, 2012, p. 502). A similar form of engagement where one ‘spins’ the facts of a situation in a certain way, to encourage favourable interpretations, “to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text” (Entman, 1993, p. 52). Both are linguistic devices that can be used “strategically to nudge audiences toward a particular interpretation without their knowledge of being influenced” (Dahlstrom, 2017, p. 11). To be clear, professions such as advertising, marketing, and public relations deal in persuasion, which is to say they deploy rhetoric. But this type of covert persuasion can be understood as “rhetrickery.” Booth defined this as “the whole range of shoddy, dishonest communicative arts producing misunderstanding – along with other harmful results. The arts of making the worse seem the better cause” (2004, p. 11). Instead of simply using rhetoric to persuade (and hopefully reduce misunderstanding, rhetrickery uses bullshit appeals to sow misunderstanding and cultivate strategic acquiescence or ignorance. In fact, “the realms of advertising and of public relations … are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept” (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 22). The paradigmatic nature of bullshit in these strategic communication industries is so easily recognized that it can be pilloried in the following fashion (warning: “strong language alert”):
Definitions
It should be noted that “strategic communication” is, in the first instance, a euphemism and, as such, a type of ‘spin’ or “Frankfurtian bullshit” meant as a persuasive definition designed to create a positive response (see Thompson, 2016, p. 139) compared to earlier labels.
History
once upon a time …
https://flashbak.com/youve-come-a-long-way-baby-virginia-slims-advertising-year-by-year-365664/
https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smoking-propaganda/
Varieties
Typically, there are lots of different forms of our objects of inquiry … here is where we start to distinguish them…
Performative Bullshit
Language that expresses “a commitment that is taken to be fulfilled simply in virtue of having been made” (Richardson, 2006, p. 93). This form of bullshit is rampant in strategic communication exercises such as customer service pledges and mission statements. It has the form of a commitment but is a pseudo-commitment, appeasing customers by appearing to care. A university says its mission is “to nurture and support our students and faculty in the discovery of knowledge through exemplary scholarship, teaching and service,”[1], but what university would suggest otherwise? And if the same statement summarizes all universities, it distinguishes none of them. The language is performative bullshit, meant to inspire students or fill audiences with a sense of pride or purpose. It’s not that it’s a lie, but it can be seen as a sort of misdirection.[2] After all, if a university were really committed to exemplary scholarship, teaching and service (and providing the highest quality education), would it under-resource its faculty (growth of full-time students, faculty, vs. administrators). PROVIDE PIC/STATS
Type 2
…
Context & Connections
PR as Bullshit: “PR as weak propaganda is the one-sided presentation of data, belief, an idea, behaviour, policy, goods or services in order to gain attention and advantage for the message sender …It intends to persuade through the use of selective facts and emotions” (Moloney & McGrath, 2020, p. 52). This is not communication meant to be altruistic or even moral but rather purposeful and practical — self-serving, furthering the interests of those who organize the campaigns and pay for them. This links to post-communication and the notion that we live in an era of post-trust. “PR as weak propaganda attenuates any role for public relations as a harmonising influence in society, as communication to create trust between citizens” (Moloney & McGrath, 2020, p. 53).
This is where some big-picture information that hasn’t been covered already gets included — and also references to other material elsewhere in the book
Remember agnotology? If “agnotology examines the nature, creation, functions, and effects of ignorance in society” (Stoner, 2020, p. 296), then it makes sense that corporate agents will encounter (and exploit) opportunities to advance ignorance when it serves their interests. For instance, Söderberg highlights how “corporations and other vested interests are producing doubt about scientific findings, to prevent litigations and/ or the regulation of markets” (2022, p. 94). Historical campaigns to convince the public that smoking is not harmful come to mind. The “debate” on climate change is also arguably due, in no small part, to concerted efforts to advance ignorance and seed doubt about the issue.
Remember Thompson’s statement that “bullshit may be thought of as postmodernism that has escaped the academy” (2016, p. 152)? A postmodern approach to strategic communication “favours communication as an interaction, as opposed to the modernist notion of simply diffusing messages to a target audience (the ‘Lasswellian’ concept of who says what in which channel to whom with what effect is typical of this approach)” (Nina Overton-de Klerk and Sonja Verwey, 2013, p. 370). Just as postmodernism attacks any overarching story or metanarrative that claims universal validity, “PR as advocacy is often about communicating a truth, but never the truth – no organisation’s perspective will be the whole possible perspective on an issue” (Moloney & McGrath, 2020, p. 46). Postmodern strategic communication embraces local, plural and heterogeneous knowledges; it sees power operating everywhere and through bottom-up engagement and is open to ambiguity and conflict rather than always trying to increase stability and reduce uncertainty. A postmodern communication strategy learns to manage uncertainty (if not produce it, to advance its own purposes). It is consistent with the concept of the public screen, “a mediascape upon which images, glances, speed, panmediation, spectacular publicity, cacophony, immersion, and distraction eclipse the rationality, detachment, embodied conversations, and compulsory civility of the public sphere (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002). Bullshit is the circulatory engine of the public screen, where meaning (much less communion) can never be guaranteed. So, even though it has been said that “the goal of SC [strategic communication] is to build relationships whereby factual information is shared with the public, not propaganda or spin” (Taylor and Sommerfeldt, 2021, p. 175), it seems that propaganda or spin is endemic to the field, especially in an era where the very idea of factual information seems itself contested.
Work Cited [FORMAT
Booth, W. C. (2004). The rhetoric of rhetoric: the quest for effective communication. Blackwell.
Dahlstrom, M. F. (2012). The persuasive influence of narrative causality: Psychological mechanism, strength in overcoming resistance, and persistence over time. Media Psychology, 15(3), 303–326. doi: 10.1080/15213269.2012.702604
Dahlstrom, M. (2017) A Story About Stories in Strategic Communication. In A. Dudo and L. Kahlor (Eds.), Strategic communication: new agendas in communication (pp. 1-19). Routledge.
DeLuca, K. M., & Peeples, J. (2002). From public sphere to public screen: Democracy, activism, and the “violence” of Seattle. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 79(2), 125-151.
Dudo, A., & Kahlor, L. (2017). Preface. In A. Dudo and L. Kahlor (Eds.), Strategic communication: new agendas in communication (pp. ix-xii). Routledge.
Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58.
Frankfurt
Fredriksson, M. (2020). Strategic Communication. In D. L. Merskin (Ed.), The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society (pp. 1673-1676). Sage.
Hallahan, K., Holtzhausen, D., van Ruler, B., Verčič, D., & Sriramesh, K. (2007). Defining strategic communication. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 1(1), 3–35. doi:10.1080/15531180701285244
LaMarre, H. L. (2017). Strategic Storytelling: Narrative Messaging in Entertainment and Emergent Media. In A. Dudo and L. Kahlor (Eds.), Strategic communication: new agendas in communication (pp. 20-41). Routledge.
Moloney, K., & McGrath, C. (2020). Rethinking Public Relations: Persuasion, Democracy and Society (3rd edition). Routledge.
Overton-de Klerk, N., & Verwey, S. (2013). Towards an emerging paradigm of strategic communication: Core driving forces. Communicatio, 39(3), 362-382, DOI: 10.1080/02500167.2013.837626
Richardson, A. (2006) Performing bullshit and the post-sincere condition. In Philosophy and Bullshit … (pp. 83-97)
Söderberg, J. (2022). The moment of post-truth for Science and Technology Studies. In K. Rommetveit (Ed.), Post-Truth Imaginations: New Starting Points for Critique of Politics and Technoscience (pp. 86-110). Routledge.
Stoner, M. (2020) Making Sense of Messages: A Critical Apprenticeship in Rhetorical Criticism (2nd edn). Routledge.
Taylor, M., & Sommerfeldt, E. J. (2021). Strategic Communication for Civil Society and Nation Building: Communication for Societal Effectiveness. In C. H. Botan (Ed.), The handbook of strategic communication (pp. 165-178). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Thompson, G. (2016). A Taxonomy of Bullshit. In G. L. Henderson et al. (Eds.), Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy: History, theory, analysis (pp. 137-154). Southern Illinois University Press.
Zerfass, A., Verčič, D., Nothhaft, H., & Werder, K. P. (2018). Strategic Communication: Defining the Field and its Contribution to Research and Practice. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 12(4), 487-505. DOI: 10.1080/1553118X.2018.1493485
- https://brocku.ca/strategic-plan/vision-mission-values/ ↵
- Remember rhetoric, as a way of encouraging a certain kind of seeing, also presupposes not-seeing. Every act of selection (choosing words to label or describe something) is an act of reflection (choosing to emphasize certain features) while it is also an act of deflection (choosing to de-emphasize others). ↵
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