(MENAFN- PRovoke)
In our latest CCO podcast, PRovoke media founder Paul Holmes is joined by Moira Gilchrist to discuss PMI's concept of the“Fifth Estate.” Activists have traditionally been viewed as likely foes by companies embroiled in controversy, but a new age has given rise to a new breed of activists who under certain circumstances are willing to come to a company's defense.
Five Key Takeaways:
Many scientists are increasingly aware that they need to be out there explaining their research, and the scientific method more broadly.
“We're doing a lot of work to help people understand what a different company we are today.”
A spontaneous outpouring of support showed the company that a“Fifth Estate” might be willing to come to the defence of PMI's new products.
If companies try to“engineer” grassroots support they will fail, but it can happen organically and authentically.
“Aggressive transparency” is essential to earning a second look for companies dealing with controversial issues.
The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Paul Holmes :
I am joined here today by Moira Gilchrist, who is the CCO at PMI to discuss her first full year in that role. Why don't we just start, Moira, with you introducing yourself?
Moira Gilchrist : I'm a little bit of a unicorn I think in communication circles because I didn't train as a communicator, I'm actually a scientist by training and cut my teeth on scientific communications before I was put into this role at the beginning of the year.
I've been with Philip Morris International for almost 19 years. I started at the very beginning of what we now call our transformation to help the company start to develop and scientifically assess smoke-free alternatives to cigarettes and I came from the pharmaceutical industry to bring my skills and expertise that I had learned there to the task of transforming the whole company and I have to say there's never been a dull moment/
PH : I'm intrigued by that background because you know scientific and technical expertise is becoming much more important to communicators in a whole range of industries. One of the things you hear in the PR business is that scientists are not good communicators. Tell me a little bit about your journey from scientist to communicator.
MG : Well, if I think back to the days of my PhD, what I didn't enjoy was the lab work. But what I thoroughly enjoyed was explaining it, so writing up the thesis and defending it in front of experts. That was a real passion of mine, trying to make sense of the data, trying to understand patterns and communicate those through storytelling.
I think that's where my passion for communication really started, right back at almost the beginning of my career.
I do take a little bit of an issue with the assumption that scientists are not good communicators. I think some are not, but I think many are because there's very little point in your data staying in a in a laboratory notebook because it doesn't benefit society. I think many scientists have understand that they do need to be out there and explaining what the data means, putting it into a bigger context and also simplifying it for non-experts and I think that's what I've worked on a lot is taking very complex subjects distilling them down to their essence and what they mean for society and different groups of stakeholders.
PH : Let's stay with that for a moment if we can because one of the things that we have seen over the last few years is a declining trust in science. And that manifests itself in skepticism over climate science and other areas where conspiracy theories and fringe beliefs have taken hold. Do you see that as a failure of communications on the part of scientists?
MG : I think this situation calls for way more communication and better communication for sure. I think there's also a concept that I think scientists are very used to, that we need to get across to the rest of the world, and that's the ability to change your mind based on data. That's what scientists do every single day. You may start with an experiment or a project with a particular assumption or hypothesis in mind. If the data show you that that hypothesis is incorrect, you have to change your mind and I think that's part of the scientific method. I think getting that concept out to the broader public is really important.
Science is never done and I often hear, and it drives me crazy when I when I hear people saying the science is done. That's not true. Science is always developing and people always changing their minds based on new data. So I think getting comfortable with that concept, being honest about what we know and what we don't know, what we still have to find out is really important in building trust.
So saying things are black and white in science, that's not the case. Things are always gray in the middle and you're trying to make it clearer and clearer as time goes on.
PH : Give me a quick sort of summary of the last 12 months, what you feel was easier than you expected and what was more difficult or more challenging?
MG : I've been thinking about this as a year of two halves. I was promoted from within the function, so I know what we do, I know the team very well and I know the strategies that we have been deploying over the last years. But from the very top of the function I saw things very differently. I think the first part of the year was really all about looking at things through this different lens, deciding what we needed to hone in on and what we needed to double down on and what we perhaps needed to do a bit less of. So that was very interesting.
The second half of the year has then been, okay, doubling down on the really great things that I believe that we need to be doing more and more of going forward. Building the team, focusing on looking at the long-term perspective and where we're going as a company, and therefore as a function for even almost like a 10-year horizon rather than just looking one year ahead.
The second half of the year, I hope, brings us into 2025 with a new perspective and a new sense of belonging and urgency to get our message out.
PH : Tell me a little bit about how the communications function is structured there and how it fits into the management of the company generally. You're operating in anunusual environment. You're clearly in a highly regulated industry. You're also in an industry where marketing is restricted. So what are the communications priorities and the stakeholder needs you've encountered?
MG : We 100% are not doing marketing. We have a very clear distinction between what we're doing in communications and what my colleagues are doing in the marketing teams. The two do not cross.
First of all, our role is building awareness that smoke-free alternatives to cigarettes exist because in many countries people don't even know that they exist. I think building awareness and helping people understand what they are and how they can contribute to improving public health is one key goal.
The second key goal is around regulation, so helping governments and policymakers understand how these products could be regulated in order to speed up the transformation and the transition of adults who smoke, away from cigarettes to better alternatives if they don't quit. So helping them to understand so that they can make the right policy decisions to help society and improve the public health.
And then the last thing we're working on is more broadly in the corporate reputation bucket. There is an ingrained dislike often of the tobacco industry and my company in particular. We're doing a lot of work to help people understand what a different company we are today than they might have expected. Almost 40% of our net revenues are coming from smoke-free alternatives. We've had products on the market for more than 10 years now. And a lot of people just don't know that. So we've been doing campaigns to help bring that up into the public consciousness so people can look at us again and perhaps in a slightly different light than they expected.
PH : What are your metrics for that? Is it awareness of the changes or the degree to which people have a more favorable impression of the company? How are you measuring your success?
MG : I think both of the things you mentioned are important. Awareness that we now are a different company is absolutely critical. And my learning is you've got to tell that message over and over and over and over again. I think there's a theory that you have to tell people something seven times before they even remember it, never mind change their mind. So there's one large element of that is telling that story again so that we raise awareness.
And then the second point is, okay, what's the outcome of that? Once people are aware, how does it influence their opinion of the company and our smoke-free strategy? So that's also something that we're monitoring and measuring to see if we get an uplift once people are aware, do they support what we're doing as a company?
PH : When you and I first connected earlier this year, it was around the publication of a white paper on what you're calling the Fifth Estate, which I think is a new take on the sort of activist community and those loosely organized stakeholders who have strong opinions about brands. Tell me a little bit about the thinking behind that and what you learned as you delved into it.
MG : It was really fascinating. I think it came from an intuition that something was going on whereby surprising people were having a voice on our issue, both for the positive and the negative as well.
We come from a controversial industry, controversial company, and people have strong opinions. We've never really seen much organic support coming from stakeholders over time, but we did see that earlier in the year, based on a politician criticizing one of our smoke-free products. And it was really quite intriguing for us to see this groundswell of support behind one of our product brands, and how people were willing to be very vocal about how this product had really benefited them and changed their lives.
I thought, well, that's really interesting, because what we're used to is the crowd of people telling us that what we're doing is wrong, and we shouldn't be doing this, and having very strong moral opinions about us. We thought, okay, maybe we're in a different era now. Maybe we're in an era where, you know, people who have strong opinions are willing to voice them, not just the naysayers but maybe there's a new set of people who are willing to speak out on this issue and willing to have their voice known.
That's really where the Fifth Estate idea came from. Everybody is connected to social media apps and they can make their opinions known really strongly. We've seen all sorts of different political campaigns during the year where the voice of the Fifth Estate has been pretty prominent.
PH :
I think I'm right in saying that the first time this phenomenon became apparent to you it was organic and somewhat surprising? And some of the value is in the spontaneity and the organic nature of this. So as a company, do you have to be sort of careful about where the line is between an orchestrated response and an organic response, between what in American politics is known as grassroots versus astroturf. How do you take advantage of this phenomenon without being seen to be manipulating it?
MG : I think it all comes down to authenticity. I think companies who are trying to engineer a grassroots type of campaign almost always fail. I think people can see through it. And I think that was the beauty of the situation we found ourselves in. It was absolutely nothing to do with us. And that's what made it more powerful, because people were speaking in their own voices, and doing it in a way that was comfortable for them. And therefore you could see it was authentic. I think if we tried and put our fingerprints on it, it would immediately have gone in the wrong direction.
Now, if bad things are happening through the Fifth Estate, you also need to intervene and set the facts straight for sure. But I think you can't try and engineer something to appear as if it's organic when it's not. It is just impossible these days. People see right through it.
PH : Have you found that this concept of the Fifth Estate resonates with other companies in other sectors? Is it a phenomenon that they were experiencing? And how does it differ from traditional activism?
MG : Yes, it is resonating with other companies. I spoke to many people in Cannes and I think other companies are sort of feeling that there's a new movement, there's a new way of bringing news and bringing opinions out.
Now, how does it differ from activism? I think it's this organic nature of it. Activism has historically often been spearheaded by particular organizations, non-governmental organizations is one example, who try and rally people around an issue. But the Fifth Estate that we're seeing now is not governed by these organizations, it's people sitting with their phones and making their opinions known.
It doesn't have a leader, would be the way that I would describe it, whereas in typical activism you see one organization or the other who generally takes the lead.
PH : How do you take advantage of that without fueling the sort of polarization and the misinformation that's out there?
MG : I think again it's doing everything with care. I'm always an optimist and I know social media has had its ups and downs but I'm always an optimist and I think there are tremendously good things that come out of the social media tools that we all have at our disposal today. this sense of community, this sense of, you know, rallying around particular subjects, I think is a really valuable thing for society.
If you layer on top of that artificial intelligence, I think we have new ways for people to find out the truth and to socialize the truth. I do think, in general, these can be good things.
PH : Since you mentioned AI, how are you seeing that changing your job?
MG : So I really look at it with two lenses. One is the more the generative AI part, which is the sort of obvious part for communicators. How can one use those tools to help you create content and deploy content in a much faster way? And I think those are all super exciting.
But I think there's also a more strategic use of AI tools that I'm interested in pursuing. And that's really using tools to help you understand better how people think about your issues. I think there can be real strategic insights that AI can help us to develop in a way that's going to be cheaper, faster, and potentially more accurate than the traditional tools like focus groups and so on.
PH : So that's more in the sort of cognitive AI arena where you can use it for red teaming situations and creating persona that you can test messages against, that kind of thing?
MG : Yeah, wouldn't that be exciting if we could do that? And I think, you know, it's very difficult to test campaigns before you deploy them, particularly when you're doing something oftentimes at the speed of light, and it's difficult to get the messaging and the campaign in front of the right audience before you really have to deploy. So if we had AI tools that could give us feedback, that's 60 or 70% close to the reality, I think it's better than nothing.
PH : How has the political change of the last 12 months made your job either more difficult or perhaps even easier in some cases? We've seen elections affecting about two-thirds of the world's population, the UK, the US, continental Europe, India, and we're seeing non-elective regime change in places like Syria now. How has all that impacted what you do?
MG : I try and look at this apolitically, because you have to work with what you've got. We don't choose who's going to be in governments around the world, but you have to work with the government that is in place.
I think the one thing I am quite happy about is the media can now focus on something else. We've had a huge media focus and social media focus on elections in 2024. I think hopefully in 2025 we'll be able to look at some other issues as well.
PH : There's been a lot of commentary since the election about the declining audience for some traditional mainstream corporate media. We've seen people cancelling their Washington Post subscriptions en masse. We've seen a substantial decline in CNN viewership. And at the same time, we've seen some very non-traditional media channels gaining prominence. In America, you can reach more people by talking to podcast hosts than you can talking to some of the traditionally powerful outlets. How does that affect our profession? And do you see that as a decline of media that were trusted and credible, or do you see it as an opportunity to use non-traditional channels to reach a wider and perhaps more open minded audience?
MG : We've been skilled in dealing with what's collectively called mainstream media for a long time. We know how it works. And I think that's not going to go away completely. And I think it still will remain a very important part of the work that myself and my team do. But what I'm interested in also is exploring some of these new formats, things like podcasts, I think, are super interesting.
I think it gives people an opportunity to go much deeper into issues. And when they're nuanced, when they're controversial, when they're difficult, sometimes that type of format can be much more helpful than trying to do a three minute slot on a mainstream channel. When you've got to take time to explain things and help readers, listeners and viewers understand things in a bit more detail, these new formats can be super interesting.
I'm also interested in some of these smaller outlets where you have a much more focused audience who cares about particular issues, cares about them very deeply. So those are also very interesting. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, being relevant to the relevant audience that you're trying to reach is just as important. So I see it as an interesting time, but I think it's a time where we're all going to learn how to use these new tools while not neglecting the old ones.
PH : We've talked the fact that you're working in what has been a controversial sector. What are the keys to building trust and reputation for a company like yours? And what can other communicators in other increasingly controversial sectors learn from your experience over the last year?
MG : I think the key for me and certainly what we've been doing here at Philip Morris is something that somebody once termed aggressive transparency. I think we were pretty clear in articulating what the problem was that our product caused. It took some time to get there, but once we did do it in the 1990s, we were clear. And I think that opened up the opportunity to start to innovate and think about solutions to the problem.
That's when we entered into this phase of transformation. And we recognized pretty early that people were going to be skeptical. So we told people what we were going to do. We're developing these products, we're scientifically assessing them, and we're going to tell you what we found. And we did.
We've been very transparent about the science, we've been transparent about the way that we're commercializing, we're transparent with governments as well as other stakeholder groups.
And then you have to keep telling people what you have done, what results you have achieved, over and over and over again. And I think it's that transparency that can help to build trust. You're never going to completely eliminate the skepticism, but I think if you're consistent, if your words and your actions are aligned consistently, then that helps. And I think people can see that very clearly in the progress we've made, particularly in the last 10 years.
I'd encourage anybody in any industry, controversial or not, to really focus on this transparency and authenticity and aligning words with actions. Because the minute they're not aligned, that's when you get in trouble if you're just only saying things and not actually doing them.
PH : I've always been intrigued by Net Promoter Score and the idea that what we should be trying to do as communicators is create more advocates and reduce the number of detractors out there. And I wonder from your perspective about the balance of those two things. Presumably there's an audience that finds tobacco or any of its successor products unacceptable. Do you just write those people off as too cynical about the industry to change? Or are you trying to move them at the same time that you're trying to create some brand advocacy at the other end among people who do in fact find value in these new products?
MG : That describes the situation we're in. Our audience is on a spectrum for sure. And we do have brand advocates, if you want to call them that, who are very supportive of what we're doing, of the products of the scientific approach we've taken, the overall transformation and the goal we have to ultimately end the sale of cigarettes. They don't necessarily speak about it because it's not necessarily very fashionable, but they are there and we know they're there.
And then at the other end of the spectrum, as you say, we have people who we know will just never change their mind for many reasons, and I'm not going to pass judgment on them. I think I don't spend too much time trying to change those people's minds.
What I do spend a lot of time on is all the people in the middle, the people who are persuadable, the people who maybe haven't thought about this issue, the people who haven't had an opportunity to look at our company in any detail in the last 20 years, those are the people that I really focus on to make sure that they understand the truth behind what we're doing, they understand where we're going. And that's worth time. It's worth a lot of effort to make sure that those people are well-informed and not misinformed.
PH : Finally, let's talk briefly about the internal audience and how much time and attention you spend on employees as an audience. How do you sort of keep them engaged and excited about what you're doing and informed about the mission and the transformation and how do you turn them into brand advocates for you within the marketplace?
MG : This has been one of the joys of my year this year is finding out much, much more about internal communications which is something I had never really touched on prior to this role.
We're looking at an approach that's broadly termed“mix-ternal,” so trying to make sure that employees get the news at the same time as the external world for big announcements. We've had mergers and acquisitions and all sorts of things happening in the last few years. So making sure that employees feel bought into those big news stories and they understand them and they're well informed to become advocates.
We did an internal campaign to ask people to share the stories of how the our new products really changed their lives. We've had stories from thousands of employees all around the world with their own unique take on our transformation, what it has meant to them personally, the things that they remember, the things that were game changers. And that has been so motivating for all of us.
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