Bad PR Can Spark Change - But Not Always

Bad PR is complicated. As P.T. Barnum possibly said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”¹ But that’s clearly false. Sometimes the impact of bad PR is real. 

A canonical example is how Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring spurred a DDT² ban in the United States and the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1962, when the book was published, DDT was widely used in the US, though some attempts had begun to reduce its application. But after the book’s publication, its use declined until it was banned in 1972. Today, DDT is widely banned across most countries, except for public health use (such as to curb malaria by controlling mosquitos).

Why did Carson’s book catch on and influence real change while many other environmental books had less impact? Part of the answer may be the availability of substitutes. In the case of DDT, other pesticides like organophosphates, carbamates, and pyrethrins could do the job (if not with exactly the same dose effectiveness). A call to ban all pesticides almost certainly would not have gotten traction.³

So, it’s possible that bad PR might be a leverage point for long-term change if an appealing alternative is available and switching costs are reasonable.

Here’s a system dynamics diagram showing some of these feedback loops:

Walking through the diagram

You can see that as the number of Silent Spring copies sold (bad PR about DDT) increased, several other things also likely increased: political awareness of DDT harms, public awareness and pressure to ban DDT, and counterpressure (pushback aka good PR about DDT, crafted in response to the book’s momentum).

Increased political awareness of harms likely will increase political action to ban DDT, unless counterpressure (e.g., from corporate lobbyists) dominates. But counterpressure will decrease if substitutes are feasible and attractive.

If political action to ban DDT increases (e.g., a law is passed), then DDT use will decrease and substitute feasibility and attractiveness will likely increase further (for example, since there could be more incentive to use a slightly less effective substitute, or to develop better substitutes). And the more feasible and attractive the substitutes, the less counterpressure there will be pushing back against political action such as bans.

Feasibility, attractiveness, and availability of substitutes appear to be key.

Arms-race dynamics versus bad PR

Let’s turn to another example of how bad PR can have societal impact. The space shuttle Challenger mission in 1986 was incredibly hyped in the run-up to launch, with inadequate acknowledgment of the risks (especially as those risks morphed from hypothetical to probable before takeoff⁴). Millions of schoolchildren gathered in classrooms to watch the launch. And weeks later, millions of schoolchildren wrote condolence notes to the families of the dead astronauts after Challenger exploded. 

That was probably not an experience NASA wanted to repeat. After the Challenger explosion, the US stopped crewed spaceflight until September 1988, about 2.5 years later. But interestingly, crewed space launches continued in the Soviet Union during this period. The slowdown was geographically limited—and not tremendously long even in the US, where a generation of children had witnessed a traumatic event. 

Arms-race pressures likely played a role. Specifically, Cold War dynamics could have put pressure on the Soviet Union and the US to keep or resume launching despite the Challenger disaster. That type of arms-race loop doesn’t seem to have been operating in the pesticide industry when Rachel Carson released Silent Spring.

There are ways to reduce arms-race dynamics. They are beyond the scope of this article, but they are likely key as well.  

The popularity factor

It’s also possible for bad PR to have incomplete impact, even over long periods of time. Cigarette use slowed, but very slowly, after studies connected smoking with lung cancer. The decline took decades to fully materialize and be codified in things like indoor smoking bans. And nearly 25% of people worldwide—more than one-third of men and less than 10% of women—still smoke more than 70 years after the cigarette/lung-cancer connection emerged.

An interesting possible factor is that cigarettes were socially popular in the years before and immediately after the study’s release. If they had been socially unpopular, then bad PR might have had a faster impact.  

Familiarity breeds…. meh?

Another possible limiting factor on bad PR is familiarity. For example, security incidents are a familiar form of bad PR. They occur with high frequency, as Statista data shows, and perhaps that’s one reason why their impact on consumer behavior can be muted: we tend to grow inured to familiar threats. Customers may simply have grown used to having their data compromised—or may be resigned to the fact that there’s no such thing as bulletproof security. 

Lastly, unrelated external events can play a role by diluting the impact of bad PR (aka bad timing of bad PR). If a meteor hits Earth, it will be the top story no matter what else is going on.

Summing up dynamics

So, bad PR combined with an appealing alternative and reasonable switching costs may be a leverage point for change. But: 

• If there are arms-race dynamics at play, they may blunt the impact of bad PR. 

• Popularity may blunt the impact of bad PR, but not completely and not over long time horizons, as people have time to absorb the message and as peer-pressure dynamics change. (Conversely, unpopularity may cause bad PR to have outsize impact⁵).

• If bad PR is frequent and not particularly surprising (as with most security incidents), its impact may be limited.

• If unrelated external events draw attention away from bad PR, that will likely blunt its impact. 

Marketing and PR are more art than science. It’s not always possible to know in advance which messages will resonate at which times, in which ways, with which audiences. Silent Spring led to a reckoning, but many other environmental books have failed to reach that thunderous impact.⁶ Why some stories catch on and change systems on a broad scale, while others don’t, is a puzzle with many moving parts. Solve it, and you solve marketing. No one has done that yet. 

1. It’s not certain that he actually said this, according to The Phrase Finder.

2. dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane

3. Similarly, the Montreal Protocol in the 1980s succeeded because there were readily available—and profitable—substitutes for CFCs.

4. A few knowledgeable and heroic people tried to stop the launch and were overruled.

5. E.g., if people are looking for an excuse to get rid of someone or something anyway.

6. If we had a formula for thunderous impact, every traditionally published book would be a bestseller, right? But as Kristen McLean's comment on

Lincoln Michel

's publishing stats article makes clear, the majority of frontlist (newly published) books sold less than 1000 copies during the 52 weeks ended August 24, 2022.