Word of mouth is an important medium to be considered. Ideas and facts can be given currency by word of mouth. Here group leaders are strong factors in giving currency to ideas. The public relations counsel often communicates the ideas he wishes to promulgate to group leaders whose espousal of the idea he wishes to obtain.
The direct-by-mail campaign and the printed word afford the public relations counsel channels of approach to such individuals as he may desire to reach. Large companies have available for such purposes lists of individuals arranged according to innumerable criteria. There are geographical divisions, professional divisions, business divisions, and divisions of religion. There are classifications by economic position, classifications by all manner of preferences. This classification of his public into the right groups for the proper appeals is one of the most important functions of the public relations counsel, as we have pointed out. The direct-by-mail method of approach offers wide opportunities for capitalizing his training and experience along these lines. Telegraphic and wireless communications would of course come under this heading.
CHAPTER II
HIS OBLIGATIONS TO THE PUBLIC AS A SPECIAL PLEADER
It has been the history of new professions—and every profession has been at some time a new profession—that they are accepted by the public and become firmly established only after two significant handicaps are overcome. The first of these, oddly enough, lies in public opinion itself; it consists of the public’s reluctance to acknowledge a dependence, however slight, upon the ministrations of any one group of persons. Medicine, even to-day, is still fighting this reluctance. The law is fighting it. Yet these are established professions.
The second handicap is that any new profession must become established, not through the efforts and activities of others, who might be considered impartial, but through its own energy.
These handicaps are particularly potent in a profession of advocacy, because it is engaged in the partisan representation of one point of view. The legal profession is perhaps the most familiar example of this fact, and in this light at least a trenchant comparison may be drawn between the bar and the new profession of the public relations counsel.
Both these professions offer to the public substantially the same services—expert training, a highly sensitized understanding of the background from which results must be obtained, a keenly developed capacity for the analysis of problems into their constituent elements. Both professions are in constant danger of arousing crowd antagonism, because they often stand in frank and open opposition to the fixed point of view of one or another of the many groups which compose society. Indeed it is this aspect of the work of the public relations counsel which is undoubtedly the foundation of a good deal of popular disapproval of his profession.
Even Mr. Martin, who on several occasions in his volume talks with severe condemnation of what he calls propaganda, sees and admits the fundamental psychological factors which make the adherents to one point of view impute degraded or immoral motives to believers in other points of view. He says:[44]
“The crowd-man can, when his fiction is challenged, save himself from spiritual bankruptcy, preserve his defenses, keep his crowd from going to pieces, only by a demur. Any one who challenges the crowd’s fictions must be ruled out of court. He must not be permitted to speak. As a witness to contrary values, his testimony must be discounted. The worth of his evidence must be discredited by belittling the disturbing witness. ‘He is a bad man; the crowd must not listen to him.’ His motives must be evil; he is ‘bought up’; he is an immoral character; he tells lies; he is insincere or he ‘has not the courage to take a stand’ or ‘there is nothing new in what he says.’