James Hoggan can come across as an old-school, starched-shirt strategic communication authority. Representing a distinguished blend of both blue-chip and new-economy clients, the Canadian public relations guru has cultivated a particular niche in a fast-paced world where image is everything. His special area of expertise is damage control. And his advice to the CEOs that enlist his firm’s services is to tell the truth because, in the end, what makes successful companies more successful is maintaining the internal devotion of employees and aggressively re-earning the trust of customers every business day.

Hoggan’s been in the trenches a long time, advising clients on everything from public health crises and union strikes to corporate mergers and investor relations. In 1984, he founded Vancouver-based James Hoggan & Associates, one of the largest independent PR firms in western Canada. Consumers in North America, Hoggan says, are willing to cut companies a break if they make an honest mistake and take action to correct it, but they have a low tolerance for companies and CEOs who lie and then get caught afterward.

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Averting a Disaster
Hoggan tells the story of a news-making event that resulted in his firm earning the prestigious Silver Anvil Award from the Public Relations Society of America, for crisis management strategy. In 2003, it became known that a former employee of Capers Community Markets, a leading chain of natural and organic foods in the city of Vancouver, had tested positive for hepatitis A. Public health officials, in moving to contain a possible outbreak, called upon all customers coming in contact with the stores to receive a precautionary inoculation. When the recommendation hit the evening news, Capers, a subsidiary of Boulder. Colo.–based Wild Oats, sensed a potential PR disaster on its hands.

Wild Oats had invested significant resources in Vancouver, a city widely recognized as health conscious, to build its brand. The parent company turned to Hoggan, who established a multifaceted response that included daily media interviews, establishment of a Web site and an 800 number to disseminate information and calm the masses, bulletins delivered in-store to customers, and an elevated presence at inoculation clinics where thousands of people came in for free shots.

The heart of the response, however, was an investment by Wild Oats/Capers in a series of print and radio advertisements in which corporate officials apologized to customers for their inconvenience and concern. Not only did Hoggan work with Wild Oats to meet the frenzy head on by encouraging company managers to personally demonstrate their sincere intent to act responsibly, but the action ultimately led Wild Oats to tighten its already stringent food-handling practices.

“Wild Oats/Capers became a better and more respected company in the end,” Hoggan says, noting that even after seven people tested positive for hepatitis A following the epidemiological dragnet, Capers’ business volume recovered to pre-crisis levels within five months. “In the information age, the new premium for companies to trade on is honesty. Information can be used for purposes of deception or it can serve as a magnet for attracting people who will naturally gravitate toward companies and products that ring true.”

Recently, FuelNet caught up with Hoggan in Vancouver for a wide-ranging interview.

FuelNet: When a client comes to you, what are they getting?

Hoggan: First, they get frankness and a team that prides itself on helping companies [recognize] truth and honesty as major assets. They also get a firm that has a sophisticated understanding of how human nature works. It’s a big mistake when the first response of companies is to confront crises by cynically treating them only as public relations problems. It’s a move that only gets them drawn deeper into a trap. Their first assessment must always involve the question “How do we do the right thing?”

FuelNet: Doesn’t this run counter to the whole modern notion of PR, championed by some, of retreating to “war rooms” and trying to manage spin in order to gain the upper hand, even if it means lying?

Hoggan: It’s true that lying works; so does spin. Sometimes, at least, they may achieve favorable results in an immediate sense. But misleading does not work over the long term. If your PR is inconsistent with the way you claim to go about business, your employees know it and that gets transmitted to the public. The old, arrogant, almost militaristic way that corporations used to respond to public concerns doesn’t work any more. It didn’t work for Phillip Morris and other major tobacco makers in their denial of the health problems associated with cigarettes.

FuelNet: What’s out there that leaves you inspired?

Hoggan: Google has a motto: Don’t Be Evil. Some people may chuckle at it, or respond with all-knowing disbelief, but when you think about it, the essence of what Google is saying is that to compete in the marketplace, compete hard, play hardball. But you don’t have to win by being immoral or dishonest or sacrificing your dignity and sense of values. Everybody likes a fierce competitor, but no employee, no matter how driven they are to succeed, wants to work for someone who is evil.

FuelNet: What are some of the dividends of being truthful?

Hoggan: Consumers will generally give you the benefit of the doubt if you are a good public citizen when you are forced into trying situations that inevitably arise. It’s when companies exacerbate the pressure cooker that things go wrong, and that creates a bigger burden. It’s easy for managers to do the right thing when things are going well, but when challenges emerge, it’s very easy to do the wrong thing. That’s when people and companies get into serious trouble.

FuelNet: What is the reputation of Capers and Wild Oats today?

Hoggan: Canadians like the company and feel very good about the products they offer. They have been a good client, projecting a good corporate cultural image, and, as a result, they have a good reputation that is well deserved. They used the hepatitis scare to start doing better things in the community. It’s been good for them and for their business.

FuelNet: You started a Web site called DeSmogBlog.com that focuses on exposing scientific and public relations frauds manufactured by companies, including big oil and big coal companies that try to present global warming as a hoax. The site has gained international attention, but has it negatively impacted your own business?

Hoggan: Global warming is shaping up to be one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced, next to nuclear proliferation. This isn’t some ephemeral worry. It’s something that our kids and grandkids and their kids will feel the full brunt of. We decided, as a firm, that if we were going to counsel our clients to do the right thing and take risks, then we needed to set an example. I’m a corporate PR guy, not a radical environmentalist, and no one has ever accused me of being antibusiness by any stretch of the imagination. But what the energy companies have done by distorting the overwhelming evidence assembled by scientists is wrong. The public backlash that is growing in response to the misinformation only undermines the level of trust we are trying to help our clients build. It’s in the PR industry’s best interest to monitor its own.

FuelNet: Do you have any regrets?
Hoggan: I think there has been a certain amount of cost. PR firms are usually valued by the business community for their ability to calm waves as opposed to cause them. When you cause waves it makes people in the business community nervous. But we’ve been around awhile and our most bankable commodity is credibility. As for the impact on the firm, taking a stand may not have earned us Exxon as a client, but it’s been very good for the morale of our own employees and that, ultimately, translates into having a firm companies want to hire.

FuelNet: Your firm has been retained by large companies and by environmental groups such as Greenpeace that have sometimes been accused of exaggerating impacts caused by industry. When you meet with green activists about the campaigns they are waging over things like saving whales and sparing old-growth forests, what do you tell them?

Hoggan: That exaggerated messages are transparent and people see through them. What the public wants to hear are reasonable voices that seem shared by a cross section of society. It’s very difficult for any one source to gain more credibility than someone else if the net result of all the information is only more distrust.

FuelNet: At the end of the day are you an optimist or pessimist about the ability of companies and consumers to have a meaningful relationship with one another?

Hoggan: I am absolutely an optimist. We need to get rid of the age of misinformation. It is happening ever so slowly in the business community and it will be accelerated by a public of consumers that rewards companies for telling the truth. The best compliment they can make is by giving a company their business. You need to give them that reason and make it easy to act on it.

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