Citizen Brand

Click for Respect

 

Want an easy way to help fund the fight against family violence?  Go to GiveRespect.org and join the Geoffrey Beene Challenge. All you have to do is click where it tells you and Geoffrey Beene will donate $5 in honor of your visit to the site.

A world full of respect can be a world with a lot less violence.

Show some Respect

We could all use a little more respect in the world today.  The economic crisis, a war that won't end and a presidential campaign that is growing bitter is wearing us all down.  We are scared, tired, worried and a tad mad right now.  We are a little more testy than usual and probably looking on at others who might not agree with our point of view as being out of touch if not down right dumb for not seeing things our way.

So we need to all dig down a little deeper and find it in our hearts, heads and souls to show the people around us a little respect.  Respect is the foundation for the campaign now underway from our client, the Family Violence Prevention Fund.  It's easy to get involved.  Go to GiveRespect.org and join others at a rally; text respect to others; donate at the site; or, go to Macy's, the campaign's lead corporate sponsor, and buy Respect bracelets for the people in your life that matter to you.

Let's hope our presidential candidates can show us some leadership in the Respect arena during the rest of their campaign.

Campaign for Respect

It has been two years since Barkley begin working with the Family Violence Prevention Fund  to help start a movement.  A movement that would make it easier for all of us to become involved in fighting violence against women and children.  This week, the movement takes its first steps.

Friday is National Respect Day.  The home for this movement can be found at giverespect.org.  Or you can get involved by texting respect to the people you care about via six major mobile carriers.  Or you can buy a Respect bracelet at Macy's.  The Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco 49'ers will celebrate Respect at games this weekend.  There are many ways to get involved.

At the core of this campaign is a simple idea.  If we each stop and think about how we can show another person a small sign of respect each day, will the collaborative result of all of us showing respect become the beginning of an antidote to violence?

Go to the website and listen and begin to understand how your simple act of respect can be the beginning of a movement.

Early warning signs

So many have said so much about the horrid events at Virginia Tech.  One important fact I want to focus on is the information that has emerged about the gunman having stalked female students in the past.  We need to learn from this tragedy that people who stalk other people need to be viewed as serious threats to society.  Esta Soler, the founder and president of our client the Family Violence Prevention Fund , explains it better than I can in a statement on their website today.

"The Murders at Virginia Tech
April 17, 2007

"There are still many unanswered questions about the horrific violence Monday at Virginia Tech," Family Violence Prevention Fund President Esta Soler said Tuesday, "and troubling indications that the shooter had stalked women and that the first murder may have been a domestic homicide. That would be no surprise; the Justice Department tells us that, on average, three women are murdered each day in this country by their husbands or boyfriends. We saw a brutal domestic homicide of a pregnant woman at the CNN Center in Atlanta just this month. We aren't doing nearly enough to stop domestic violence, which frequently escalates to homicide and often involves bystanders and children."

"We need answers about what happened at Virginia Tech," Soler continued. "We need to know whether the shooter had stalked or committed violence in the past, if he had a legal right to have a gun, and whether the police discounted the danger because they thought the first murder was a domestic homicide. Whatever the answers, there is no question that we need more research and more prevention, to keep guns out of the hands of batterers, to understand what causes violence against women to occur and to escalate, and to change attitudes."

"The last Congress failed to fund the new programs in the Violence Against Women Act -- campus-based initiatives, support for children who witness abuse, programs to train health care providers to recognize batterers and victims and intervene to help them, and prevention programs aimed at changing attitudes toward women," Soler concluded. "The new Congress must do better. We need full funding for the Violence Against Women Act, and to do much more to stop violence and change attitudes."

Well said.  Let's tell Congress that one way to honor the lives of those that died at Virginia Tech is to step up and fully fund the Violence Against Women Act.

PRWeek/Barkley Cause Survey

There is much going on at our company these days.  We simplified our name; added a rocket to our logo; and we are getting ready to move into new digs in a building that Howard Hughes once roamed around in when he owned Trans World Airlines.

We are now simply known as Barkley.  It's the name most people have referred to us for years.  And in mid-November, we move into our new offices in the Crossroads Arts District of Kansas City in a building that was once TWA's world headquarters.  Howard Hughes put a rocket on top of the building to signify his dream that someday TWA would take passengers into outer space.  We have put the rocket back on the building as we bring this classic retro modern building back to life.

For us the rocket signifies our company's desire to explore and discover new ways to help our clients succeed.  One of the growing ways we are doing that is through cause branding.  And for the second consecutive year, Barkley Public Relations has partnered with PRWeek Magazine to sponsor a survey on the state of cause branding.  If you have not seen it yet. you can read it or download it at our website - www.beappr.com.

This year, we tried something new.  We conducted a consumer survey, PRWeek's first ever.  We talked with members of three different generations - Gen Y; Gen X; and, the Boomers.  We learned that all generations continue to see the growing importance of corporations partnering with non profits to further causes through education, awareness and funding.  There are differences as you would suspect there would be.

Boomers are more trusting of companies in general while the Gen X'ers (30-41 years old) are the most skeptical and trust corporate motivations the least.  Two thirds of all respondents said it is important to know why a company has chosen to support a particular cause.  And by almost a three to one margin, all respondents said a company should support a variety of causes as opposed to supporting only a single cause.

Almost two thirds (64%) of all respondents said they have purchased a branded product because it supports a cause they believe in.  And almost nine out of ten said it is important for companies to support causes or charitable organizations.

I encourage you to take a look at the entire survey and accompanying article in the October 23 edition of PRWeek.  Please let us know what you think of the data and give us feedback so we can make the 2007 survey even better.

We Should not be Shocked

Life moves so quickly these days that the news events run into one another and bump each other off the front page and out of our collective consciousness.  It has been only days or weeks since the horrific scenes from schools in Colorado and Pennsylvania and yet, we have all moved on to other news events.  What seems important today will be forgotten by next week.

Our company is now working with a great new cause, the Family Violence Prevention Fund.  For over two decades, this great organization has been focusing its efforts on the senseless violence against women and children that surrounds us every day.  There is so much work to do in this area and it's not an area that some corporations may think is good for them to get involved with as a cause.  We hope to help make that change.  Is there anything more important?

Today's New York Times has a thought provoking column from Bob Herbert.  One of our new friends at FVPF pointed us to it.  Here it is.  It says it all.

Why Aren’t We Shocked?

By BOB HERBERT

“Who needs a brain when you have these?”

— message on an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt for young women

In the recent shootings at an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania and a large public high school in Colorado, the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls.

Ten girls were shot and five killed at the Amish school. One girl was killed and a number of others were molested in the Colorado attack.

In the widespread coverage that followed these crimes, very little was made of the fact that only girls were targeted. Imagine if a gunman had gone into a school, separated the kids up on the basis of race or religion, and then shot only the black kids. Or only the white kids. Or only the Jews.

There would have been thunderous outrage. The country would have first recoiled in horror, and then mobilized in an effort to eradicate that kind of murderous bigotry. There would have been calls for action and reflection. And the attack would have been seen for what it really was: a hate crime.

None of that occurred because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?”

An ad for Clinique moisturizing lotion shows a woman’s face with the lotion spattered across it to simulate the climactic shot of a porn video.

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

A girl or woman is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so in the U.S. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count. We’re all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society’s casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels — objects — and never, ever as the equals of men.

“Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible,” said Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of the women’s advocacy group Equality Now.

That was never clearer than in some of the extreme forms of pornography that have spread like nuclear waste across mainstream America. Forget the embarrassed, inhibited raincoat crowd of the old days. Now Mr. Solid Citizen can come home, log on to this $7 billion mega-industry and get his kicks watching real women being beaten and sexually assaulted on Web sites with names like “Ravished Bride” and “Rough Sex — Where Whores Get Owned.”

Then, of course, there’s gangsta rap, and the video games where the players themselves get to maul and molest women, the rise of pimp culture (the Academy Award-winning song this year was “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”), and on and on.

You’re deluded if you think this is all about fun and games. It’s all part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse in normally quiet Nickel Mines, Pa.