Fraser Seitel John Doorley
(L to R) Fraser Seitel & John Doorley co-authored this article.
A few years ago, we authored a book called “Rethinking Reputation.”

Our premise was that in a communications age dominated by incessant social media, where the Internet can’t be turned off and cable TV and talk radio drone on non-stop, traditional marketing and advertising have lost their clout.

In such an environment, we posited that the only communications answer for a politician or a celebrity or an athlete or a CEO or an organization wishing to improve credibility is the practice of public relations.

Once just the icing on an effective communications campaign, public relations now stands at the center of business strategy, the most powerful and valuable communications force in the 21st century.

We defined positive public relations in our book as beginning with proper performance and good behavior and then communicating that reality to the public; in other words, “doing good and getting caught.” At its best, we said, “Public Relations works to develop relationships for mutual benefit.”

We cited many examples of positive and negative public relations but ended the book with one company we believed had come the furthest in “rethinking” its reputation, changing its image and beginning to recapture lost credibility.

That company was ExxonMobil, the much-maligned energy giant, whose former CEO Rex Tillerson is Donald Trump’s choice as U.S. Secretary of State.

While Exxon’s critics have made their case against Tillerson with great emotion and vitriol, it’s also important to recognize how the company became more open, less insular and basically changed for the better under his watch.

In 2006, when he was named Exxon’s CEO, Tillerson inherited a company that had experienced public relations ignominy in the form of the nation’s most disastrous oil spill to date, when an Exxon tanker dumped 260,000 barrels of oil into the pristine waters of Alaska’s Bay of Valdez; affecting 1,300 square miles of water, damaging some 600 miles of coastline and killing as many as 4,000 Alaskan sea otters.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the company’s public relations response was a case study in what not to do in a crisis. Exxon was slow to respond, tight-lipped and served up as its public face, a taciturn and uncomfortable lifetime engineer, CEO Lawrence Rawl. Exxon’s halting crisis response was pummeled in the press, and even Rawl publicly acknowledged the company’s “public relations disaster.”

In the wake of that Valdez “disaster,” Exxon began to rethink its reputation and emerge from the shadows. Among other refinements, according to company executives we interviewed for our book, Exxon: 


• Upgraded the public and governmental affairs function, which in the past had largely been a fire-fighting afterthought, to report directly to the management committee.

• Implemented an exhaustive, quantitative study of its “image” among informed publics, including analysts, politicians, environmentalists, reporters. Predictably, study findings were horrible, but at least they provided Exxon with benchmark data and a communications roadmap for improvement.

• Organized off-the-record, get-together meetings around the world with environmental leaders, NGO officials, human rights advocates and others for the sole purpose of beginning a “dialogue.” The sessions marked the first time most of the participants had ever met anyone from Exxon.

• Recruited former reporters to build relationships with energy beat reporters and help “introduce” management to them; to begin to change Exxon’s generally hostile relationship with the media.

• Introduced the energy industry’s first multi-weekly, online blog to discuss matters it thought important for public consumption.

This more ambitious public relations initiative grew stronger under Tillerson, when ExxonMobil began to morph from its closed, guarded, reactive posture to a more open philosophy in explaining its views on issues of public concern.

Now what about climate change, the issue that Exxon’s most virulent critics seize on, challenging the company’s motives and charging it with purposely deceiving the public with tobacco industry-like duplicity?

While neither of us is qualified to opine on “motives” or “purposeful deceptions,” we can cite Exxon’s evolving public record on climate change, especially under Tillerson.

• For decades, the company’s scientists studied the risks of climate change, documenting their discussions in company papers made available to the public through the University of Texas Archives.

• In 2006, when Tillerson became CEO, Exxon acknowledged that after years of scientific uncertainty, climate change was a reality and that human activity contributed to it.

• In 2008, the company announced it would discontinue contributions to climate-denying groups, such as the Capital Research Center, Committee for Constructive Tomorrow and the Institute for Energy Research, among others.

• In 2009, Tillerson announced that Exxon Mobil would support a federal carbon tax to help reduce the consumption of carbon-based fuels.

We conclude our book by suggesting that merely refining public relations philosophy and tactics aren’t enough to build a long-lasting, positive reputation. Rather, to accomplish sustained credibility requires proper performance and behavior over time.

ExxonMobil, under Rex Tillerson, may not have satisfied every observer with the extent or pace of change it adopted in recent years.

But any fair-minded analysis of the company and its former CEO would have to give ExxonMobil credit for becoming more transparent and engaged in the public discussion of energy issues, more concerned with public perception and more committed to improving its reputation among all of its diverse constituencies.

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John Doorley, Visiting Associate Professor at Elon University, and Fraser P. Seitel, Adjunct Professor at New York University, are co-authors of “Rethinking Reputation,” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2012.