Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

A company that made artificial knees hired Malloy the week an FDA report was released suggesting that the knees were failing far more quickly than predicted and that the resulting complications had contributed to one death. The two orthopedic surgeons who had invented the device, which, having enriched them beyond the dreams of avarice, was now poised to ruin them, were turning on each other. One insisted almost dementedly that the device was working exactly as intended and that, since any response to the charges only gave them further credence, they should be ignored. The other, whose lawyer seemed to have all but moved in with him, said that silence equaled guilt, but that there was a way, in these matters, to apologize without actually admitting anything, a way that only lawyers understood.

“This is what happens when people’s attorneys get involved,” Arturo said at the Fishtank meeting where this new business was introduced. “They specialize in selfish thinking. So what does he suggest we ask people to believe about these failing knees?”

“Acts of God,” Shelley said, “was I believe the phrase he wanted us to use.”

Arturo snorted. “There are no acts of God anymore,” he said. “Americans believe in negligence. Helen, what do you think?”

This was a question Helen had never yet heard in the weeks of her employ. “I’m sorry?” she said.

“About the notion of the non-apology apology. You’re supposed to be the apology expert. This is the word from on high, anyway.”

Everyone turned to look at her. “Well, it has to be sincere,” she said, reddening. “It has to be sincere and thorough. If it gives off the whiff of having been vetted by a lawyer, to me that’s worse than saying nothing at all.”

“But it will kill them,” one of the other group members said. “If they get up there and say hey, our bad, our knees don’t work the way we thought they would, no way they stay in business, at least not with this product.”

“So, Helen, you’re suggesting we counsel our client to embrace their failure?” Arturo said.

Helen, unused to being asked to justify her instincts, faltered, and there was an awkward pause.

“I can sort of see it, actually,” Arturo said at last. “If you want to be resurrected, you have to be dead.”

The following Wednesday, Helen was gathering her things to leave for home and maybe make Sara a decent dinner for once when Arturo popped up unprecedentedly in her office doorway, his hand on the shoulder of a miserable-looking Ashok. “We’re looking for the sorry maven?” Arturo said brightly. Poor Ashok, on a cold streak as it was, had been battling all week with a roomful of unsmiling dogmatists who handled in-house PR for Pepsi. New York’s city council, they were reliably informed, was about to reintroduce a bill to establish a so-called sin tax on sodas, which, even if it didn’t significantly harm their sales, would lump them in with cigarettes and gambling and open a sort of moral door that everyone agreed should stay shut if at all possible. Such was their panic that Ashok’s mild proposal, at a meeting that morning up at PepsiCo headquarters in Purchase, of a “two-pronged approach”—one prong of which was admitting that it was theoretically possible for a person to drink too much Pepsi — had led to their demand that he be fired.

“I’d like you to go up there tomorrow,” Arturo said. He was composed and smiling, but the expression on Ashok’s face hinted at a recent closed-door reaming. “The two of you, though I think it’s better if you do all the talking. Mr. Malloy tells me you’re good at apologizing, so let’s see those mad skills in action, okay?”

He didn’t have that last bit quite right, of course, but Helen saw that Ashok’s job might be in the balance, and so she said okay. The next day she sat at a conference table across from six people in suits; their designated spokesperson was, refreshingly, female, though whether that might make Helen’s own task easier or harder, she had no clue.

“Obviously we have to get on an attack footing as quickly as possible,” the woman said. She looked about twenty-two, except for her taut corporate hairstyle, which was forty or forty-five. “We should paint this as the work of an out-of-control government. In that folder I brought you”—she reached over and tapped it—“are some polling numbers on various key phrases. ‘Nanny state’ is second highest but also shows the highest increase since the last time we polled. We’ll want to hit that one hard.”

Helen flipped listlessly through the research. “Americans Against Higher Taxes?” she said. “What is that?”

The Pepsi woman looked confused. “That’s the nonprofit we established to serve as sponsor for our TV and print ads against the bill,” she said. “To make them look like PSAs.”

Helen pinched the bridge of her nose. “I feel like you’re reacting emotionally,” she said. “In terms of long-range thinking, I know you know better than this. This kind of aggression ultimately gets you nowhere. Soda is not particularly good for you; in conjunction with other things that are not good for you, it can affect your health. You can keep contesting the facts, or commissioning new studies. But do you really want to keep bailing the boat, or do you want to get in a different boat?”

The Pepsi woman sat stone-faced.

“Well, whatever, the point is you have to adapt. Fifty years ago cigarettes were being marketed for their health benefits, for goodness sake, but if you tried that today you’d be laughed out of business, right? So here’s what you do: you admit it. You take away their weapon. You admit your complicity in the sins of the past, because that way you take the past out of the conversation. You resolve to conduct yourself differently in the future, and then — you know what? — you conduct yourself differently in the future. This is how you stay in business. People relate to brands as if that relationship were emotional. So you have to play the role they want you to play, you have to personify it, and ask forgiveness the way you would if you were talking one on one. The first thing you do is kill off this ridiculous Americans Against Higher Taxes. People are too smart for that nowadays. You can’t predicate your PR strategy on the idea that people are morons. Whose gem was this idea, anyway?”

“Yours,” the Pepsi woman said irritably.

Helen did not look over at Ashok. Instead she got them to agree to at least try to draft a hypothetical release in which they applauded the motivations of health-minded politicians and looked forward to playing a leading role in helping Americans of all ages live longer. They’d call it The Next Century Initiative or something forward-looking like that. She wasn’t positive they’d be able to go all the way through with it, but the look on Ashok’s face as they rode back to Manhattan in the town car — the look of a man who’d been called down from the gallows — made the day feel like a success in any case.

The next day — again, just as she was packing up to leave for home — he walked into her office and gently shut the door behind him. “I just wanted to say thank you,” he mumbled.

“No problem. They’re living in a kind of bubble up there, that’s all. Sometimes you have to explain your client to people, sometimes you have to explain people to your client.”

“Right. So listen, I was thinking that, being at home with your daughter, you probably don’t get out much—”

“I don’t know that it’s as bad as all that,” she laughed, though in fact it was.

“—and I have these two premiere tickets for Code of Conduct next Tuesday night. Julie in Promotions gave them to me. I thought maybe you’d like to go.”