Sometimes companies and public figures are surprised by the ferociousness of the public reaction to something they do.  They wonder why someone else did the same thing a few months earlier and did not suffer the wrath of the chattering classes and general public.  Why something that was okay a few years back is now taboo.  Or why someone else is suddenly a hero for doing something you’ve been doing for years. 

Knowing how the public is going to react is important when selling products, which is why companies do extensive product testing and test marketing.  And politicians and think tanks use surveys to test, and sometimes advocate, ideas.

But when it comes to certain ideas such as “this company is paying its unionized employees enough” or “that oil spill was not our fault,” it’s a bit more complicated than taking a survey to understand the cost of the loss of reputation versus the costs of making one move versus another, e.g., settling versus instigating a strike; the total cost of a spill versus the cost of using safer drilling techniques.

Of course, gross incompetence or obvious neglect will always be met by public reprobation, as the current BP oil spill and the reaction of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina. 

But what about events that are not so cut and dry, like the reaction to a strike, to an attack on a flotilla, or to an airplane full of people sitting on a tarmac for six hours?

There are in fact several principles we can infer from the thousands of cases of public reactions to events and actions over decades, and for the historically inclined, over centuries. The first and most important principle is that virtually all people and organizations, at least in our society dominated by the free market and the politics of selfishness, act in their own self interest.  Self interest explains why in strikes of food workers against supermarkets, sentiment is usually with the workers, but in strikes of transit workers against mass transit systems, sympathy is typically with management.  In the case of the food store, people can go elsewhere, whereas in the case of mass transit, people are just left high and dry if the strike cripples service. The transit strike profoundly hurts the public’s self-interest but the supermarket strike does not.

While self-interest or perceived self-interest typically shapes how the public will react to an event or action, other forces are also at play:

• The self-interest of more powerful groups, which often can get their voices heard more readily in the news media, which then shapes how everyone else thinks.
• How the public has reacted in the past.
• The news media’s lean on similar events.  To lean how the news media covers this issue, you have to study the media’s past reaction to similar cases, and not depend on existing myths.  For example, many corporations and individuals still believe that the mainstream news media has an anti-business bias, yet the studies my agency has made over the past 20 years to predict how the public would react to moves our clients were making all showed that the tendency of most mainstream news media is to present stories with a pro-business bias (except in cases like Enron’s egregious illegality). 
• The perception of completion, which means the public has grappled with this issue and thinks it’s been solved.  Perception of completion is why Jetblue got hammered two years ago for keeping people in a plane on the tarmac for hours.  There had recently been an uproar about lengthy tarmac delays and the public thought the industry had solved the problem, mainly because airlines said that they had.  Then Jetblue had to go and do it again.    

One part of our crisis planning for clients is to model the possible ways that important audiences such as customers, employees, stockholders and the general public will react to a corporate announcement that may be controversial or represents bad news.  Included in the model is a breakdown of how the action or event will affect each target audience and how the client benefits each.  Occasionally, this analysis reveals the hidden cost of the move in probable loss of reputation and business.  In these cases, the prudent client has modified the course of action to accommodate the likely public reaction.