How To Shout Down Criticism Without Lifting A Finger
A Practical Guide for Problematic Entertainment Brands.
Let’s suppose you ran a publicly-traded entertainment company with both domestic and international obligations in terms of broadcast content and live event production. Hypothetically, of course!
If you operated a business like that and had (hypothetically) innovated a direct, passive, reoccurring pipeline into your rank-and-file consumers’ bank accounts, you’d probably feel like you and your children and grandchildren, either through continued flow of the pipeline or a sale to a larger production entity, were set for life.
In fact, if you ran a hypothetical business like that, you’d really only have three problems: labor, reputation and potential regulation.
Let’s say that (again, hypothetically), you had all but eliminated the threat of regulation by revealing the recipe to your secret sauce and cozying up to de-reg-minded politicians.
That leaves labor and reputation as your only true areas of weakness, even if – say – someone with a wallet big enough to give you a run for your money in terms of production and turn the key on venues you’d successfully locked competitors out of for years suddenly jumped into the market.
In fact, the only way either of your two remaining areas of weakness could really hurt you in such a strong, hypothetical position would be if someone articulate, clear, passionate, and knowledgeable about your business was able to tie them together in a way that made regular people – both your customers and the public at large – suddenly care about the anti-labor policies you had consistently employed for decades in order to build your empire.
Having been so exposed, your best defense of a largely indefensible position would be to mobilize the minority of your labor force that was extremely satisfied with both pay and positioning (or eager to defend you to in an implied quid-pro-quo to improve either one or the other) to shore up your reputation.
In a non-unionized industry where talking about pay has been historically discouraged and the power structure is stratified based on a secret recipe of talent, drawing ability and ease-of-working-with (for you, the boss, of course), you probably wouldn’t even have to say anything to create a core group of passionate defenders who had enough accumulated equity with your audience (in part due to the way you have portrayed them through your product) to both proactively and reactively police public perception for you through direct interactions with fans, media members, disgruntled former coworkers and other would-be stone-throwers on social media.
In the age of influence, it wouldn’t take many charismatic individualist mountain climbers (folks who are really “over,” to use the language of professional con artists) to maintain the faith of your core audience and turn the easily-led into obnoxiously loud evangelists who wouldn’t just turn a blind eye toward your warts – they would actively explain to close friends and total strangers alike that said warts were, indeed, exotic beauty marks.
If you could pull that off, you would have successfully eliminated the only real potential threat to your business. You’d just have to hope everybody was either dumb enough not to see the plan at work or simply disinterested in holding people to account.
Luckily, though, there are a lot of those things going around.
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