PR top tip: when the world thinks your workers are heroes, go along with it

[danohu]

I thought the nuclear industry had the best PR money could buy. Maybe not in Japan. Here's a spokesman of the Tokyo Electric Power Company, managing to make his employer sound as uncaring as possible. He's talking about the workers inside fukishima, exposing themselves to high radiation levels:

Some people call them heroes. But we don’t think they are heroes. They are doing what they should do as TEPCO employees.

[via the BBC Global News podcast today, though the interview seems a few days older, and is also in the Economist]

Comments

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

That's probably supposed to be interpreted as "All TEPCO employees are heroes, not just the ones on the front line."

Although it doesn't come across clearly enough for PR.

[gerald_duck]

Perhaps they regard it as tactically prudent to give the impression that going to such efforts to protect people, property and the environment is just in a day's work for their staff because otherwise people will worry about what happens if a nuclear reactor staffed by non-heroes ever goes foom?

[kaberett.livejournal.com]

During GCSE Geography, it was dinned in to me that the Japanese work ethic can be summed up as "what's good for the company is good for me". I've no idea how widely applicable that actually is today (or ever was...), but viewed through that lens the quotation seems a lot less... callous, at least to me.