Tesla dissolves its PR department
electrek.co
electrek.co
https://jalopnik.com/teslas-pr-department-hasnt-responded-to...
And that their own jobs board has positions posted two weeks ago for "Marketing & Communications", PR positions all across China, and for "Community Relations Partner"?
This "news" is pure fabrication.
https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/?keyword=Communication...
The article explicitly explained that personnel from PR moved into External Relations.
The headline is far more sensational than the article. But that's been standard practice for centuries, not "pure fabrication"
What's the difference between Public Relations and External Relations?
That's a logical fallacy: Argumentum ad antiquitatem [0]
So yes, in a way we are holding them in certain high regards.
"The essential feature of this disorder is recurrent, intense, sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies, of at least six months' duration, involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child."
"The age of the person is arbitrarily set at age 16 years or older and at least 5 years older than the child."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgmzwn/most-child-sex-abuser...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09249...
My point was any PR =/= good PR.
Well, so long reddit (and thanks for all the memes)
It's exactly what I thought when I read the headline
There's your problem right there. Why bother answering questions from some whining car blogger or lamestream media outlet when Tesla can 100x its messaging impact with a select group of YouTubers and Instagram influencers? If people want the truth about Tesla, Elon will tweet the facts, light one up with Rogan, or harness a cabal of anonymous Reddit users to put the message out there.
Easy!
That's absolutely traditional PR for an automaker. "Arranging test-drive promotions" means deciding who is eligible for test drives, viewing what is published on YouTube, and deciding if the person will be eligible next time. Even if no words are spoken/written to the YouTubers beyond logistics for the test drive, it is effectively PR.
It's telling they are keeping the most lucrative PR, video product promotion. It sounds like they mainly don't like dealing with the business press. But their investor relations department is going to end up picking up at least some that burden (even if just in the form of ignoring questions). Tesla still has to disclose quarterly earnings figures and its executives will still conduct calls around those earnings releases. They may only allow questions from financial analysts but any member of the public can listen in.
> On 5 August 1888, 39-year-old Bertha Benz drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old respectively, in a Model III, without telling her husband and without permission of the authorities, thus becoming the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance, though illegally. [...] The novel trip received a great deal of publicity, as she had sought. The drive was a key event in the technical development of the automobile.
Elon dismantling PR makes sense. Probably they rubbed him the wrong way too often. Why bother.
TL;DR - They manage one single external voice. There's value in that. As other point out, Musk is a communications study in and of himself.
When the other car manufacturers finally catch up to Tesla, the negative perception of the Elon Musk brand may drive some buyers away from Tesla.
Wasn't that his public goal?
Steve always use his brand to sell Apple. Elon always use Tesla to sell his brand.
https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/18/20811014/apex-legends-iron...
But as Tesla doesn't pay for advertising (unlike its ICE competitors), the incentives are not aligned, so Tesla and the press had bad relations for a long time.
It's also great to talk to the press when the story and the company's goals DON'T align. If a company is being investigated or impacted in some negative way, then not commenting looks worse on them.
The press tends to be antagonistic toward any big company. Good PR counteracts that, in part by finding and helping the members of the press who like the company.
No company was better at PR than Apple under Steve Jobs. They carefully groomed key reviewers and helped build up a pro-Apple ecosystem of media properties.
Edit: I should add that Apple's PR under Steve Jobs was led by Katie Cotton, and her dept. was famous for rarely responding to direct requests for comment on the news of the day.
Simple: PR teams are some sort of equivalent to the "triage" at emergency rooms. Basically they scan incoming requests for stuff that could land the company in hot legal water or signalize a coming shitstorm (e.g. if journalists ask for information regarding potentially damaging stories during their research), misdirected customer service stuff (pretty common, especially in companies ... not exactly known for decent CS reps), youtubers/other influencers looking for merch gear, shareholders inquiring about financial or other information, movie makers / photographers interested in showing off company products, reps of athletes wanting a sponsorship deal... all of this usually goes through the PR dept who forward it to the appropriate departments or answer on their own.
The key role / function of a good PR team is that the individual departments don't get flooded by bullshit (you don't want to waste the expensive time of the legal dept on a youtuber wanting a Tesla for a rap music video).
Outsourcing PR to the "fans" ... nope.
How is 'external relations' not 'public relations'?
There you go, do you need a PR deparment now? If it's your CEO doing that job, that's a bad use of the CEO's time.
Bad press happens. I'm sure journalists love it when companies engage directly with them but I'm not sure that it results in more favorable coverage on average.
They still have a blog and a Twitter account. If they want to make statements they can tell the public directly instead of favoring specific journalists with private communications.
Who is going to do that when you get rid of the PR department? I mean sure, someone can do it, but then they are doing PR work on top of whatever other work is on their plate.
Jokes aside, this is a good thing for our industry - if I wanted to argue to right-size a PR department I now have a clear example to point to.
Remember when people used to say Tesla doesn't do marketing?
The last few years of Tesla has been quite sobering for myself as I had my worldview flipped upside down. With Elon/Tesla, as more information has come out with time, it's been disenchanting.
I was sold a capitalist trying to save the environment by making a car affordable to the masses who is also going to have humans on Mars in a few months. I was inspired, now I'm disgusted in myself for believing it.
Full disclaimer: happy Tesla owner here.
My math is wonky, does that mean on average, a Tesla is just as polluting as a Fiat/Chrysler car?
Tesla was awarded tradeable regulatory credits. They didn't have any use for them, so they sold them. I suppose they could have just sat on them and refused to sell.
There are valid criticisms around the environmental cost of building electric vehicles. There are also valid criticisms of the regulatory environment that Tesla operates in. I'm not convinced, though, that it makes sense to expect Tesla to refuse to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unneeded credits out of principle.
The regulatory credit trading scheme is effectively the same as a system under which the government imposes extra taxes on FIAT/Chrysler while giving Tesla a tax break. Should Tesla refuse to take that tax break because the money is coming from FIAT/Chrysler?
But it means that buying an EV in the EU doesn't really help the environment as an individual action. The emissions are essentially locked in by government policy, although it's very aggressive.
I think this is better though. It doesn't rely on consumers being conscious of their externalities, because regardless of their choices the aggregate carbon efficiency will be improving steadily by the exact same amount year over year.
The program is clearly creating a vibrant BEV market and forcing economies of scale that will eventually make them profitable outside of compliance. It's a major win.
Buying an EV, buying its certificate and not letting anyone use it would mean you're not also allowing 10 ICEs to be sold. But that would really be going above an beyond.
And I don't think Tesla (as the only auto maker that could have this program) wants to draw attention to the dynamics at play.
This seems... dubious? The chronology is: Smart EQ: 2007 (in tiny numbers; niche non-mass-market product)
Tesla Roadster: 2008 (in tiny numbers; niche non-mass-market product)
Nissan Leaf: 2010
Renault Zoe: 2012
Tesla Model S: 2012
The Leaf was a big seller, and the Zoe outsells Tesla's entire line-up in Europe.
I think it would be fair to say that Tesla really sold the idea of a _performance_ electric car, but not electric cars as a whole.
Toyota RAV4 EV was released in 2003 though it was only available for lease (leasors could buy the vehicle at the end of the lease). Indeed, the RAV4 EV 2nd Generation is the reason Tesla exists as a going concern today; without Toyota's cash infusion, Tesla would just be another Faraday Motors in car history.
Ford released an EV truck in 1998.
And the US granddaddy of them all (excluding vehicles only available to fleets) is the GM EV1, released back in 1996.
Wow, hadn't realized that one sold that well; I had it filed in my head with the Smart EQ. I'd consider all the others on that list niche impractical devices, though. So the first practical one was probably the iMiev, not the Leaf, then.
Yes, GM deserves much more credit for the EV revolution than Tesla.
Traditionally companies have a hard time trusting that their customers will want the right thing.
The fact that this was ever considered related to journalism is hilarious.
Seems utterly absurd to be a company that actually builds something of value from nothing to be required to court and curry favor with individuals who only exist to talk about the work of creators and hope they talk about your work positively when instead you can just bypass them and be the master of your own narrative.
1. You can't do without some press coverage, because you want to sell to people who aren't already superfans.
Toyota sold 10.7 million cars in 2019 and has 803,000 Twitter followers. If their message only appears on Twitter, the vast majority of their customers and potential customers will not see it.
Of course, the press might find your tweets and report on them, but:
2. Given that you want press coverage, having friendly relations with the press is a good thing.
3. If you're a company, the status quo that you're generous with review units and access, and journalists aren't very rigorous or probing in their reviews, is just fine with you.
Firstly, this was Tesla’s PR team, not journalists. As a company, you’d think they would want people whose role is to talk to the public (consumers or journalists), as people not trained in that capacity doing so can quickly get you into trouble. One misstep can get you a visit from the SEC or cost you market share. Given Musk’s history of foot-in-mouth disease, this seems like a pretty awful business move.
Secondly, though your point about journalists and papers isn’t really hyper-relevant to having a pr team: journalists do the job of a) filtering out the noise (useless info), b) filtering out the lies from corporations, government, or people, c) investigating issues of public interest, and d) alerting the public when these issues are important or problematic. While individuals could do this themselves, we don’t all have the time, and it makes sense to have people who do this professionally (and better). The role of the free press has been this for a long time, and the calls against the press are a coordinated strategy by groups whose interests are opposed to knowledge being in public hands and who fear being investigated.
Btw I am referring to this post https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/j595ns/so_tesl... , it was stickied yesterday and I think is legit.
My only idea why you would do that is if you anticipate a lot of bad press so then your strategy is to label it as "fake news" or "shorting" and label critics as puppets and videos that show problems as deep fakes.
Let me know why do you think this is a good idea though.
P.S. I can enumerate random stuff some journalists did wrong, and bad/evil things companies did wrong, and horrible things marketing/PR done ... is not a proof to find some unrelated example, there needs to be some logic to it.
Now to address you actual point, what would a PR person do here exactly? "Tesla is investigating the issue and will not provide any comments at the current time"? They fixed the car so their internal metrics will ensure that whatever issue caused this will get fixed. It's not economically sensible to fix any percentage of cars right after delivery.
I understand that Tesla light passions and that PR has got (ironically) bad PR in the last few years, but I fail to see how your comment is related to the issue.
My point was this: OP said something like "press is evil, Tesla does not need PR"
My point: I would like that maybe 3 paid journalists contact the customer, the dealership and Tesla(so PR contact needed for Tesla) and 3 articles are published with this 3 different sources rather then each individual attempt to contact on it's own the involved parties and try to find the truth.
The same reason we need them for any other set of reasons: To do full-time work investigating different angles of current events and to provide, often, a less-biased report on things.
Of course, eliminating PR =/= eliminating journalists, so this comment is off the tracks anyway.
That's a hugely broad question. Many are.
This isn't what a journalist does at all though and I think they're pretty honest about this if asked.
At best they take the facts and induce bias to provide them in a way that is most palatable to their audience and mirrors the belief of their audience to get more views and therefore more ad impressions. At worst they see themselves as a class above normal people and their job is to ensure the people below them think the right way.
Essentially in a world where the actual events is transmitted via video over social media moments after they occur, seems pretty redundant that we need it filtered through biased individuals who's business only existed because newspapers used to be the most efficient way of doing that.
Yeah we should get our Tesla information from the unbiased source that is Elon Musk!
I have no idea why people are so naive, there are literally people in government who are trying to slow and impede the progress of technology because they want to retain the right to manipulate the public via centralized advertising, marketing and mass media.
Nearly every single technology company in the United States that has a large enough user base is partially taken over by people with an agenda to slow down the pace of technology. There are severely mentally ill people who literally believe they are in a war against technology devouring people's jobs. Most corporations aren't telling people this because it is embarrassing. There is a growing e-commerce company in NY that was partially taken over and the employees they hired believed that you had to be enslaved (yes, enslaved I'm not kidding) to people who do no believe in technology in order to participate in technology. This is a real thing but not a single company is going to admit this is happening because they want everyone to believe they are perfect.
The way this works is that they use these departments to control the people in these companies and slow down innovation by creating unusual amounts of frustration and screwing with the advertising and public relations of companies to give technology and people in technology a bad image.