Selling Victimhood: a PR perspective

Let’s try to analyse the elephant in the room instead of flogging it

There’s a word I use almost every day in my career. ‘Optics’. Cliché, I know, but if you aren’t thinking about how your market, consumers, or audience are going to respond to your narrative, you’re going to be about as successful as a salesman selling cannibal babysitter services. Anyway. Let’s talk about sob stories and crisis management, shall we kittens?

The three things to look out for when branding a narrative

The most important thing to be aware of, as a PR, is that your clients will normally not be ordinary people with an ordinary worldview. There’s loads of factors at play: privilege, wealth, power, and lived experience. Chances are that whoever is paying you probably hasn’t lived off change they found down the sofa for a week. Chances are that whoever takes you to Daphne’s for a lunch meeting probably hasn’t just paid for a friend’s groceries when they faced having nothing to eat for a month. This isn’t because they are bad people, so take that chip off your shoulder. It just means that it is your job to identify their blind spots and help them navigate an empathetic way forward. Which brings me to the massive, room consuming elephant:

Prince Harry.

I know: we’ve already done this bit to death. He’s so out of touch, he’s so privileged, he’s…