Review: ‘Trust Me, PR is Dead’, by Robert Phillips

I wanted to like this book. I wanted to believe it. But quickly its account of the business world came across as simplistic and naive.

Let’s start with the title: Trust Me, PR is Dead. This is clearly unexpected for someone like me, who receives dozens of phone calls and emails weekly from living and breathing public relations people. The other day I was even bought lunch by a PR, whose only symptom of being dead was a certain lack of conversational spark.

Of course, the author, Robert Phillips, is making the broader point that PR, spin or “managing the message” is inadequate in today’s complex world. Given that Phillips once ran the European operations of Edelman, the world’s biggest PR company, this is controversial.

His argument is that companies can either earn trust through real public leadership (think Unilever’s sustainability push) or just accept they are “asshole brands” (the Ryanair of old). Anyone in between is a phoney who will be exposed — on social media, by whistleblowers or, like banks, by their egregious business practices. “Old PR paints lipstick on pigs,” Phillips writes.

Maybe, but it also paints lipstick on humans — some of whom look a lot more attractive as a result. And that is one of Phillips’ shortcomings: he never addresses those instances where a bit of good PR might suffice. Recently, tour operator Thomas Cook was criticised over its handling of the death of two children during one of its holidays: it did not need to overhaul its business model, it needed better communications advice.

In fact, Phillips inadvertently disproves his own argument. He writes admiringly of Apple because Tim Cook says he did not consider the return on investment when considering adapting the iPhone to the needs of blind people. Hold on — is this the same Apple that keeps billions of dollars in cash offshore, thereby avoiding US tax, and which lagged behind other phonemakers in admitting it used ruinously-extracted tin? It seems Apple’s PR worked so well that even Phillips was fooled.

He is not fooled by Sir Richard Branson, however, whom he describes as a “phoney” and a “careful PR construct”. But he never reconciles that with Sir Richard’s success: good PR has made him millions.

There is another way that Phillips undermines his own point. He rails against intermediaries, such as traditional book publishers, proudly noting that his text was published by Unbound, a crowdsourcing platform. Unbound has many virtues, but a reader of Trust Me may wonder whether it received a sufficiently rigorous edit. The argument is dropped almost randomly across 278 pages, like chunks of a drunk’s kebab.

Trust Me is a missed opportunity because Phillips’ general thrust is worthwhile. He rightly argues that businesses should be answering key social and environmental problems. The difficulty is that he tries to link all this to the future of the PR industry, something that is fairly tangential.

When the ebook version came out earlier this year, it divided opinion in the PR sector. This edition does not answer its critics — let’s hope Phillips writes a follow-up that does.

Henry Mance is the FT’s media correspondent

A reference to the editing of the book has been amended since original publication