Brand Vandal ten years on
“The book has the cover of a cheap thriller, and it is written much like one. The blunt language is clearly designed to shock” - Financial Times.
It’s the tenth anniversary of Brand Vandals written by Steve Earl and I in 2013. It tells the story of how organisations can build a reputational defence through their actions and by communicating with publics or audiences using paid, earned, shared, and owned media.
The book followed Brand Anarchy, published two years earlier, describing how modern media, notably social media, could be weaponised to destroy reputation. I caught up with Steve to reflect on the impact of the two books a decade on.
Alastair Campbell said Brand Vandals deliberately exaggerated the reputational landscape in a review in The Financial Times. It called book a cautionary tale and acknowledged our call for organisations to understand the internet as media and build social and owned media channels as means of defence.
“Brand Vandals was a work for its time when big companies were bricking it about the reputation risk created by social media from miscreants and opponents. It outlined how better listening, better preparation and ultimately better behaviour could form effective defences,” said Steve.
History has shown that we in no way underestimated the reputational impact of social media. We got a lot right in both books, but we also had a couple of misses.
We recognised the opportunity for algorithmic-driven media to create echo chambers or “baying mobs”, but we didn’t envisage the harm and toxicity that would result within society.
“Few of us could have foreseen the acute new risks of misinformation and media 'abuse' that polarisation and geopolitics would bring over the next decade,” said Steve.
Communities can have both good and bad intent. This polarisation drives attention and is the fundamental premise of social media platforms.
We highlighted the opportunity for owned and social media to be weaponised against individuals and organisations but not the extent to which this would occur.
But we failed to foresee the unethical behaviour of bad actors and nation-states to corrupt public conversation deliberately by using social media as a channel for misinformation.
In the intervening period, there is an extent to which social media has played an unknown role in UK and US elections and the Brexit referendum.
“The book set out how to upgrade communications operationally and get senior leadership to understand how to counter risks. What it hasn't done is provide an asset in enabling corporate affairs and communications heads to be better valued by the board,” said Earl.
“One little book could never do all of that on its own, but there's a bigger missed opportunity across the whole public relations sector in not using social media to gain a better understanding of reputation risk and management,” he added.
Brand Anarchy and Brand Vandals describe the moment in time when the internet disrupted corporate communications and public relations. We’re still figuring out the implications while trying to understand the upcoming wave of disruption created by artificial intelligence.
