For anyone in the PR/media business, this video is a painful watch.
To watch Adobe’s global CEO, Shantanu Narayen, fiddle around aimlessly with the order of the water bottles in the table, his scowl that plays peekaboo oh-so-often and his posture that seems to indicate that he’s mighty pissed with the questions, but has to go through the motion because he is there, in the scene of action… I couldn’t help but cringe at the video.
Beyond all that, the other thing that made me cringe even more is what he said. But, before I get on that, a few other things to note.
Adobe is one of the companies, along with Apple and Microsoft, that has been summoned by the Australian Parliament to appear before its committee investigating price hikes on technology products sold in Australia. The news came out on Monday – February 11th.
The press conference where Adobe global CEO fumbled on pricing-related questions was on February 14th.
Now, I completely understand that events like an office inauguration are planned much in advance and there are so many things that go into arriving at the date and making the event happen. So, cancelling a pre-announced event in the wake of the Parliamentary committee summon would perhaps raise more questions than stop them.
So, kudos to Adobe for sticking to the date.
Where they could have possibly done better homework is in media training the CEO, to face pointed questions on pricing, coming so close to the news of the enquiry. I’m sure that he’d have been briefed adequqtely about the situation and the kind of questions that could be posed to him. But, the point here is not to blame Adobe’s PR agency (agencies) in Australia, but to talk about the way PR agencies, in general, handle media training.
The main tools of the trade when it comes to media training were the nuances of how to handle journalists. Techniques like bridging, using the key messages multiple times, in context, packaging, using numbered lists to make a point clear and so on. The sad part of this Adobe event video is that the CEO seems to be pedantically following the rules with limited real-time adaptation to the situation.
Sentences like, ‘it?s important to remember…’, ‘I think the message that I?m trying to send all of you…’, ‘we just think that?s phenomenal value for our customers…’ and so on just seem like the perfect phrases to antagonize the media present because they fly in the face of Monday’s news.
It is easy to blame the CEO in hindsight, but what the PR agencies out there need to think about is how to make this media training business seem more human. The Adobe CEO was following the rule book to the T and that seemed to be his undoing in this case. The last page of the rule book should ideally be, if all else fails, ‘be human’. That means add empathy and say whatever is legally permitted, in terms of an apology and a follow-up to look into it. All, with a mild smile so that the posture doesn’t let you down.
But, in the end, after all the effort from the PR agency and the Corporate Communications team, it is the senior executive who has to face the battle. The best support to give him/her is to offer that parachute in the end if everything fails. The parachute should ideally help the executive in coming out of the situation gracefully, even if he/she conceded defeat from a factual perspective.
The article in Delimiter has a helpful ‘Opinion/analysis’ section that has tons of tips on how he could have handled the situation better. Those are very good points!
You have to wonder why the executive didn?t at least attempt to make the smallest effort to placate angry Australian customers. He could have, as senior Adobe executive Mark Phibbs did in 2010, give a reasonable answer about the dynamics of the local market (also, here?s some other Adobe comments from 2010 on the matter which went further than Narayen?s). He could have apologised to customers, but said that due to Adobe?s business operations and the higher cost of selling products in the Australian market, the price needed to stay where it was. He could have simply said that the problem wasn?t one for Adobe alone and that it needed to be discussed on an industry wide basis.
However, he said none of these things. Instead, Narayen treated Adobe?s Australian customers with complete contempt, flat out stating that Adobe didn?t want Australian customers to buy Creative Suite; it wanted them to buy Creative Cloud instead. The reason why is probably obvious to many customers ? if you buy Creative Suite, you pay Adobe once and can use the same software for years ? products like Photoshop don?t go out of date that quickly and remain functional years after you bought them. However, if you sign up for Creative Cloud, you?ll be paying Adobe, month in, month out, year in, year out, to use the same software forever, on a subscription basis. And you won?t own the software at the end of that point.