Handshake With Sam
While Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, steered his company’s growth over its first thirty years, he never let anyone forget that with such tremendous success come certain moral responsibilities. He led by example, and he did business with a handshake.
Today’s Wal-Mart has lost Sam’s way. That’s why we’ve proposed a new contract with Wal-Mart’s current leadership—to help Wal-Mart take its place as a responsible business leader for the new century.
Wal-Mart’s PR Dollars At Work
Posted by Media Team
Edelman is checking our help wanted ads, which is not surprising since one of their own staffers applied for a Wal-Mart Watch job not too long ago.
But what is surprising is that Edelman is bringing up job descriptions at all, considering that their client has been burned repeatedly by careless, sloppy job postings that jumble the happy talk message they’d rather be pushing. Consider these recent slip-ups:
Wal-Mart Begins Quest for Generals in P.R. War [New York Times, 3/20/06]
Wanted: two people to help defend the nation’s largest retailer against critics. Requirements: plenty of experience managing a crisis. Wal-Mart Stores has begun circulating two senior-level job postings — both in public relations — and if the language used to describe the positions is any indication, the giant discount retailer is on the P.R. equivalent of war footing.
Wal-Mart Seeking Senior Manager for Banking Services [Cox News, 5/22/06]
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. confirmed Thursday it is seeking a senior manager to oversee “new strategic initiatives” in the mortgage business, but said the move does not signal an expansion into retail banking. Some bankers, lawmakers and Wall Street analysts disagreed, saying they believe the executive search shows the retail giant is planning to move into full-service banking, despite promises to the contrary to federal regulators.
Wal-Mart To Hire Ethics Director As Image Makeover Continues [Cox News, 3/4/06]
Candidates must be “able and willing to take a difficult or unpopular position if necessary,” according to the job description posted on the Web site of an executive search firm, Martha Montag Brown & Associates, in Pasadena, Calif.
Doesn’t Wal-Mart have larger PR problems to address? Shouldn’t they focus on damage control for their own postings that keep getting leaked to reporters?
Wal-Mart PR: All Mixed Up, Don’t Know What To Do
Posted by Laura Jack
From Dow Jones Newswires:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s growing public-relations machine has been sending a few mixed signals lately.
Earlier this month, Arizona’s attorney general sued Wal-Mart for consumer fraud, accusing the world’s largest retailer of consistently overcharging customers and failing to post prices on its shelves. Immediately after the lawsuit was filed July 6, Wal-Mart spokesman John Simley sounded a conciliatory note, saying the company was “committed to working with the attorney general to resolve this issue.”
Last week, however, a Wal-Mart-funded group called “Working Families for Wal-Mart” took a distinctly different tone on its Web site, paidcritics.com. In a blog entry, the group called Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard a “career politician and twice-failed candidate for governor,” and quoted an editorial in a Phoenix-area newspaper that warned Goddard “better have his facts straight.”
Looking to defend itself against union-backed critics that have attacked its labor practices, Wal-Mart is beefing up its public-relations efforts. The Bentonville, Ark., retailer isn’t just hiring more corporate spokespeople. In addition to building a lobbying team in Washington, Wal-Mart over the past year has assembled a “war room” staffed with political campaign veterans. This week, the company hired a former nun who has helped mediate conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Wal-Mart has strong incentives to boost its media savvy. A 2004 study for Wal-Mart by McKinsey & Co. found that as much as 8% of Wal-Mart customers no longer shopped there because of “negative press they have heard.” But for all of its growing sophistication, Wal-Mart has made a few awkward stumbles in its recent communications, and some feel they’ve been getting conflicting messages from the different arms of Wal-Mart’s growing apparatus.
Read the rest of this story ...
Associated Press On Paidcritics.com
Posted by Laura Jack
From the 
Associated Press:
Activists say that, after a year’s worth of Web-based Wal-Mart bashing, they’re winning a public relations battle against the world’s largest retailer. The company says, though, that every week 127 million shoppers endorse the way it does business.
Experts declare there is no clear winner - and that the public will soon tune out the chatter.“When you get to the point where you have escalating blog wars, it gets to be a little like political ad campaign season. I use my remote to mute every single one of those ads,” said Patricia Edwards, who helps manage retail funds for Wentworth, Hauser and Violich investment counselors.
Unions last year launched two political-style campaign groups to malign Wal-Mart over business practices they say treat workers poorly. Wal-Mart supporters have countered with their own attacks, questioning the union’s motives.
The brawl is escalating.
Paidcritics.com was started last week by Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group funded primarily by Wal-Mart, to reveal “the real motives of the union leaders behind the campaign against Wal-Mart”.
Read the rest of this story ...
Wal-Mart’s Hired Guns Firing Blanks
Posted by Media Team
The millions of dollars Wal-Mart is paying to high-powered PR firms seem to be providing them little in return. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott’s idiosyncratic support for a higher minimum wage – ridiculed by critics on the political right and left – coupled with the fallout from the internal memo leaked by Wal-Mart Watch have been the most recent gaffes on the part of Wal-Mart’s public relations team. And that was all just this week.
From public relations industry newsletter, PR Fuel
Rarely a day goes by when Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, doesn’t drum up some kind of press. Last month, the company was being showered with praise for its relief work in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. (Business Week reports that PR giant Edelman helped Wal-Mart drum up positive press from bloggers, which translated into mainstream media coverage.) With a positive glow surrounding the company for the first time in a long time, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott decided publicly to back a higher federal minimum wage (Wal-Mart often comes under fire for not paying its employees much) and a new health care scheme for employees. (Again, Wal-Mart often comes under fire for having a poor benefits package, unlike rival Costco.) For a moment, it seemed that Wal-Mart was going to get nothing but good press for two weeks in a row. And then it happened.
Yesterday, a story in The New York Times reported that in a memo to the company’s board, a Wal-Mart executive suggested that the company lower its health care costs by hiring more part-time employees (most of whom are not eligible for benefits) and “healthier, more productive employees.” The memo has been widely criticized, with Wal-Mart bashers saying Scott’s stance on the minimum wage is “laughable” in light of what others in the company are saying. While it’s often difficult to draw comparisons between Wal-Mart and any company, in this situation it’s not so hard.
First, the leaked memo proves that Wal-Mart has an internal security problem. More often than not, leaks come from disgruntled employees and are designed to embarrass a company. Second, Scott’s stance on minimum wage is certainly an about-face, and rightfully was greeted skeptically. When it comes down to brass tacks, Scott’s comments on minimum wage are akin to a gun manufacturer pushing for gun controls. Said another way, no one is buying.
It’s important that people who speak publicly on behalf of a company maintain a consistent message, and Scott certainly went off message. While his intentions may have been honorable, there is too much evidence that suggests Wal-Mart cares little about minimum wage earners, and cares more about its bottom line. By going off message, Scott merely made himself look foolish.