Pass the popcorn; when ethics fails, no amount of PR fixes it
KPMG Australia is having a very bad few months indeed. Misuse of confidential client information, the treatment of a whistleblower, and governance failures serious enough to trigger leadership resignations, regulatory scrutiny and parliamentary pressure. Commercial consequences are likely to follow.
It has been widely labelled a PR crisis. I need to disagree; it isn’t. It’s an ethics crisis with PR consequences, and the difference matters more than ever right now.
Here’s my thoughts. PR can help an organisation communicate through a crisis, but it cannot manufacture the values that were missing when the crisis began. Once a story crosses from business problem to public interest story, no amount of polished messaging, legal caution or careful positioning compensates for a lack of responsibility. Good crisis communications can reassure people, reduce speculation, bring clarity and show an organisation is listening. It cannot substitute for character.
There’s a bigger shift sitting underneath this one. For a long time, size and status did a lot of the reputational heavy lifting. If you were a big four firm, a major bank, a household name, people extended a kind of default trust. That default is gone. The public has watched enough “untouchable” institutions fail on the basics, honesty, care, plain competence, that size no longer reads as safety. If anything, it raises the bar. People now assume a large organisation has more to hide, not less, and they are quicker to believe the worst when something goes wrong.
It is a great time for firms in the mid-tier and boutique sizes to capture the non-believers and show they live their values.
This is the distinction every firm in legal, financial services and property needs to sit with before a crisis arrives, not during one. Good crisis planning starts with governance, not messaging. If the conduct won’t survive scrutiny, no communications strategy will save it, and being big won’t buy you the benefit of the doubt it once did.
A shrinking media, still finding its voice
Elsewhere this week, the end of the financial year brought a reminder of how much pressure the Australian media sector is under. Junkee co-founder Tim Duggan fronted the National Press Club arguing the local media ecosystem needs active protection, tax offsets, platform payments and AI royalties among them, if it is going to survive at all. It follows Southern Cross Media’s confirmation of up to 300 redundancies and Seven Network’s rollout of an internal AI tool converting news scripts into web articles within minutes. (I made a video about this one; will post on Instagram).
Fewer journalists, more automation, and an industry publicly debating its own survival. For firms relying on earned media, this is the operating environment now. It rewards those with a genuine point of view and a track record worth trusting, and it has little patience for anyone whose story doesn’t hold up. In other words, pitch actual news, not what you want to advertise.
The thread connecting both stories…
Reputation isn’t something PR builds from the outside. It’s what remains when the spin is stripped away, and it’s no longer handed out on trust in a logo. Get the governance and the conduct right, and good communications can carry that further than ever. Get it wrong, and no amount of communications expertise, or brand recognition, will carry you out.
Amanda Lacey
Amanda Lacey is the founder and director of Popcom, a Sydney-based PR and strategic communications agency specialising in professional services. Follow Amanda on LinkedIn and Instagram.
To speak with Amanda about your firm’s communications strategy, contact amanda@popcom.com.au