Tax PR

Taxes have lousy public relations.

As taxpayers, the our most intimate experience we have is with the painful side of taxes, paying them.  With every pay day we get a reminder of how much we AREN'T getting in our checks because of taxes.  We have a very clear idea of what we think of taxes every year when we file our taxes or our extensions.

Tax Day (Photo credit: ChuckHolton)

The only time most people like reading or hearing the word tax is when it has the word free after it.

So this got me to thinking.  As a public relations and communications professional, I am often asked to shine a positive light on something that has a less than positive reputation with the public.  What would be the public relations steps for making taxes more acceptable to the general public?  This seemed like a worthy exercise.

My first thought is a standard of marketing: don't focus on the price, focus on the value.  What if with our tax bill we got an accounting of what our specific taxes went to purchase. I don't mean some meaningless pie chart that says that 12% of revenues were spent on boondoggles and whatnot.  I mean a very specific accounting of the things that my specific taxes likely paid for.  For instance, I imagine the tax bill would sting a bit less if I got a notice that told me that with my taxes, I paid for:

• a semester of hot lunches for a Kindergarten student in Kalamazoo, 
• paved 1/3 mile of the local highway outside of Kankakee, 
• provided medical care for 9 months to a senior citizen in Kansas City, 
• helped develop and support small businesses in Keelersville, 
• bought the fuel for two days of an Air Force jet stationed near Kannapolis and 
• helped to provide subsidies to a family vegetable farmer in Klamouth Falls. 

Of course, there is always the possibility that all of my taxes went toward a toilet seat for the Pentagon.  That would probably make me feel worse about my taxes.  

So then I started thinking about changing the language around taxation.  Like so many things that are viewed negatively by society, taxes have a vocabulary problem.  Rarely do we hear the word tax used in a positive light.  This is partially due to politics, but it is also because no one really LIKES paying taxes.  From Robin Hood to the Tea Party (1700's version or current version), taxes have been associated with the evil or despotic side of government.

What if the the IRS was responsible for collecting user fees and citizenship dues instead of taxes?  What if instead of taxes being withheld from our paycheck it was our monthly membership, like the health club?  I think that would only help if the fees and memberships were voluntary and we could discontinue them, like I hear some people do with health club memberships.

For me, one of the worst things about taxes is actually preparing them.  The US tax laws are a Gideon's knot of special rules, worksheets, penalties and deductions.  I speculated that if this were simplified it might make people feel more positive about taxes.  Then I read that 58% of taxpayers have their taxes prepared for them by someone else.  I suspect those people don't care how complicated the tax code is as long as their tax preparer is able to make things as painless as possible.

I was about to throw in the towel on this tax PR challenge when I hit on an idea.  A rather brilliant idea.  There is one aspect of taxes that is almost always viewed as positive.  There is one element in the collective taxing experience that people hope for and look forward to experiencing.  I am talking, of course, about tax refunds.

So, in my professional public relations opinion, if the IRS wants everyone to look more positively toward taxes, they should just collect 100% of our salaries as we earn them and every couple of weeks issue us a tax refund!

If you have some other public relations ideas on how to make taxes popular, please share them in the comment section below.

The views expressed above are not those of Blogger, Google, the Internal Revenue Service, 
the management and staff of Everything is Marketing, reasonable public relations practitioners 
or the author.  

Swimming like the sharks

The business world would be much healthier and more profitable if businesses saw innovation like sharks see swimming.

Sharks need to swim to survive.  They don't get to rest once they get their morning workout in or when they become the fastest swimmer in their part of the ocean or when they hit their quarterly earnings goal.  According to Professor James Kitchell, sharks have to swim to stay buoyant, to breath, to survive.  Business should innovate for the same reasons.

The innovation pattern is familiar to everyone except, apparently, companies going through it.  A company or an entrepreneur comes up with an innovation that happens to match the needs of the marketplace.  They start a company or a brand.  Sometimes, if they are lucky, the company or entrepreneur continues to innovate as their company or brand grows.

Eventually, though, success ensues.  Sometimes wild, highly profitable success ensues.  The problem then is that with success usually comes risk aversion.  You see, humans like success and we tend to want to hang onto it.  It is hard to force yourself to act like that hungry entrepreneur and throw caution to the wind to support new innovations.  It is much more comfortable to continue to ride the gravy train that your past innovations have put you on.

The problem with that is that there are always new gunslingers entering Dodge, ready to knock off the top dog.   Entrepreneurs who are still hungry have you in their sights and have nothing to lose by going after you.

A smart, successful company recognizes this and tries to knock itself out of the top spot with a new innovation.  But that is hard to do.  Ask Microsoft.  It wasn't that long ago when there were predictions that Microsoft would rule the world before long.  Then along came Yahoo and all of the sudden Microsoft didn't even rule their product category.  Then Google came into town.  And now Google has countless younger, more nimble companies nipping at its heals, trying to knock it off.  At times, business seems like a giant game of King of the Hill!

Like sharks, excellent companies figure out a way to continue to keep moving.  They innovate like crazy.  They fix things that aren't broken.  They keep swimming.


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The Many P's of Marketing: Privacy

Marketing has gotten more and more nuanced, as new technologies and strategies have opened up many options for marketers.  It is my contention that today, the marketing mix contains much more than the traditional four or five P's that are taught in school.  In this series I am exploring the Many P's of Marketing.

Privacy:  I like to think that I can use the Internet to fuel my obsession with the old TV shows "My Mother the Car" and "Cop Rock" (for the uninitiated, two creative, very short-lived TV shows) without having that obsession broadcast across my Facebook page, my Google+ site, or anywhere else I go.  I like to think that but I would be wrong.

It seems lately that not a day goes by in which we read about one tech giant or another who mines data from our emails or our app purchases or our searches to sell that data to advertisers who then use it to place ads that show up later in our email box or next to our apps or when we use search engines. On its face, this seems innocent enough.  These sites are searching what you spend time with so they can connect you with marketers who have something that matches your interest.  Facebook, Pinterest, and email, are all electronic formats which makes it relatively easy to mine content. That is how the boy and girl geniuses at Facebook and Google see it.

Many people, however, see it as an invasion of privacy.  Thinking of email like mail from the Post Office, many people expect the same privacy when an email or IM is addressed to them as they get when a letter is addressed to them.  It is common to see stories of a politician, teacher or other public figure who forgot that nothing is really private on the Internet and posted or tweeted or otherwise made public pictures or personal peculiarities that they meant to keep private.

I believe that privacy will be a currency of distinction between marketers in the next decade or so, just as specialization and personalization of messages were the currency of distinction in the 90's and early 21st century.  The marketer that figures out a way to keep customer information truly safe (or at least get us to believe that it is) will gain a significant advantage.  The marketer that figures out how to make her customers feel "data secure" will be able to collect more data and more unique data than her competitors.  The marketer who can make his customers and prospective customers feel safe sharing their personal information, will see fewer customers leave to try competitors, will enjoy greater customer loyalty and will have less need to sell customer information.

Some companies seem to have already identified privacy as important issue to customers, although I haven't seen any that are using privacy as a competitive advantage.  Rather they are using lack of privacy as a competitive weapon, charging lack of privacy against their competitors.  For example, Microsoft now tells us we will get "Scroogled" if we use Google for our email, citing Google's practices of mining emails for content.

One question that remains is how will consumers react.  To date, we have reacted to privacy issues much like we have responded to gas prices.  Everyone talks about how out of control the price of gas is as they fill the gas tank of their giant SUV.  Privacy issues have caused some tempests in Facebook's teapot, but hasn't really impacted the number of people who log onto the site in an almost religious fervor.  Perhaps more ads like Microsoft's will have some impact.  Perhaps not.

Regardless of whether they use it as a competitive advantage or a competitive weapon, regardless of whether consumers revolt or stay put, I believe we will hear more and more about privacy from companies in the coming years.  I think privacy will be one of the ways small and mid-sized tech companies will be able to squeeze out a competitive advantage against the giants in the industry.  I believe creating true data privacy and security is and will remain a truly sustainable competitive advantage.

Just don't tell anyone that I'm going to go watch Cop Rock!

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• Do you actually care about privacy?