Daily Doc: PM, Sep 13, 1984: Dealing with Issues Indirectly: Constituencies
Daily Doc: Dealing with Issues Indirectly: Constituencies
Title: Workshop - Dealing with the Issues Indirectly: Constituencies
PM, Sep 13, 1984
Bates #: 2025421934/2000
May 15, 2000
This is a transcript of a workshop given at Philip Morris' (PM) 1984 Corporate Affairs World Conference in Rye Brook, New York, wherein PM employees got a lesson in how to work through third parties to achieve credibility, power, leverage and gain access to places they otherwise could never gain access. It is a fascinating look into the building blocks of Philip Morris' now widespread corporate strategy. As the speaker says, to be successful Philip Morris had to be willing to:
"...create vehicles to ride on, to put things together in fact to invent things that didn't exist before, coalitions, associations, institutes, seminars, meetings, all kinds of things like that."
This is exactly what PM has done, through the creation of front groups like the National Smokers Alliance, the Associates for Research in Substance Enjoyment (ARISE), Healthy Buildings International (HBI), and the many other "designer front groups" that PM employed to bring its message to the public in a stealth manner.
One of the most telling passages in this document, though, is the following example. The speaker is boasting about what is arguably PM's biggest "success story"-- how PM deftly manipulated one of its most credible and powerful potential enemies--the fire-response community--and turned them instead into an extraordinary ally FOR their cause who would, remarkably and at the most crucial times, support PM's interests over the public interest on the issue of self-extinguishing cigarettes:
"Example. The self-extinguishing cigarette. Who would normally be involved in the self-extinguishing cigarette on the other side of the fence? Probably the fire-fighting community. As you know in the United States, we have put a huge amount of time into helping all the organized groups of professional and volunteer fire-fighters. They get such help from us that is monumental. And then when we need them to stand up and say, not cigarettes that cause fire in 99.9 percent of the cases, we get their cooperation. But that's because we have cultivated them and helped them achieve some of their goals and we have seen that they are a potential enemy that has real credibility. That's the greatest credibility, your potential enemy. We had turned them around and made allies, third party defenders for ourselves."
CITATION
Title: Workshop - Dealing with the Issues Indirectly: Constituencies
Type of Document: Transcript
Author: BLAKE,J; DOWLING,J; FLORIO,D; MERRITT,W; MILLER,A; ROTHERMEL,T; WOODWARD,G
Recipient: N/A
Date: 19840913/E
Site: Philip Morris document site: http://www.pmdocs.com
Page Count 67
Bates No. 2025421934/2000
URL: http://www.pmdocs.com/getallimg.asp?DOCID=2025421934/2000
Search criteria which led to discovery: "Rye Brook and action"
QUOTES
...So the whole question of getting third-party assistance and enlisting this whole third-party concept in our defense structure is to give us clout, to give us power, to give us credibility, to give us leverage, to give us access where we don't ordinarily have access ourselves...
...First, this whole business of third-party defense depends upon creativity. If you are not going to be creative about it...you can't be successful. If you're not going to be willing to create vehicles to ride on, to put things together in fact to invent things that didn't exist before, coalitions, associations, institutes, seminars, meetings, all kinds of things like that, you cannot be successful. Creativity....
It's like a savings account. The analogy is an important thing. One has to keep making deposits into the savings accounts. Goodwill deposits, deposits of getting to know people, deposits of listening to their problems...And you make those deposits into the savings account so that when you have to make a withdrawal, the bank balance is there. You can never put yourself in the position of having to go to a third party, an uninvolved party on an immediate basis and hope they drop everything and come to your defense. It isn't going to work.
You have to try to understand whom you have to neutralize in advance, who is a potential threat to you and then how do you make common cause with that category of individuals or companies or group or whathaveyou so that you can neutralize them.
Example. The self-extinguishing cigarette. Who would normally be involved in the self-extinguishing cigarette on the other side of the fence? Probably the fire-fighting community. As you know in the United States, we have put a huge amount of time into helping all the organized groups of professional and volunteer fire-fighters. They get such help from us that it is monumental. And then when we need them to stand up and say, not cigarettes that cause fire, in 99.9 percent of the cases, we get their cooperation. But that's because we have cultivated them and helped them achieve some of their goals and we have seen that they are a potential enemy that has real credibility. That's the greatest credibility, your potential enemy. We had turned them around and made allies, third party defenders for ourselves. All of this involves a process of logic. To find common ground, to find your natural friends; to find your natural enemies and if possible, the ways in which you can neutralize them... [2025421943-44]
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