Marketing & PR: Tied to Management Style

Management style can greatly influence the marketing and PR of a company. Most companies take the traditional top-down style of management and leadership. This fits the traditional type of marketing and PR -- one way communication where company message is carefully crafted and presented to the public through formal means, including TV, newspaper and magazine advertising.

On the other hand, there is another type of corporate leadership, with high value on stakeholder relationships (SR), which is showing itself to be very compatible with the web 2.0 world, as well as the new marketing model of 2-way communication with customers. See this article, SR Substance over PR Spin—Why So Many Have Forgiven Whole Foods' John Mackey.

The author, David Wolfe, talks about the management style of Whole Foods, which is all about collaborating with the various stakeholders -- employees, customers -- in their business decisions. This parallels the new world of marketing, where business decisions have input from customers, using systems made available by web 2.0.

So, in the recent debacle of Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey being found out for anonymously posting on the web (see our blog entry from July 19), there's a new twist on the end results. Instead of the expected great public outcry, there was an unusual level of forgiveness from the public.

So managment by collaborating with stakeholders effects the marketing and PR tasks. While Whole Foods' PR department does have a crisis to manage, their task is made much easier because the company's key stakeholders are already more favorably inclined.