Consumer campaigns in corporate public affairs management: The case of climate change and the German energy industry

Autori: Inga Schlichting ( Department of Corporate Strategy, Deutsche Bahn AG, Berlin, Germany)Citation: Inga Schlichting , (2014) "Consumer campaigns in corporate public affairs management: The case of climate change and the German energy industry ", Journal of Communication Management, Vol. 18 Iss: 4, pp.402 - 421DOIhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JCOM-02-2011-0020Downloads: The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 43 times since 2014Abstract:Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use expert interviews with communication managers of the German energy industry to analyze the strategic aims and challenges of consumer campaigns as a relatively new phenomenon in German public affairs management. The analysis is based on structuration theory, which is used as a theoretical framework. This framework helps to conceptualize the different logics of action within non-public and public paths of public affairs management, their stakeholders and respective instruments.

Design/methodology/approach Expert interviews with German public affairs managers from multinational and regional energy corporations as well as industry associations were conducted regarding their communication in the context of climate regulation. Based on this data, the study reconstructs managers strategic considerations about why to engage in consumer campaigns, and analyses the challenges they see with them, and the strategies they employ to handle these.

Findings Managers perceive the importance of the public path of regulative intervention as growing along with a strong media orientation of political authorities. Against this backdrop they describe the bypassing of critical journalists and the engaging of critical individuals and minorities as the strategic aims of consumer campaigns. They portray a lack of credibility as the main challenge of such campaigns and relativising the corporations societal efforts as well as allowing public critique as most promising strategies to handle this challenge.

Originality/value The contribution of the study is twofold: first, it adds to the scientific analysis of consumer campaigns as a rather new phenomenon in German public affairs management. Second, practitioners may utilize the results as impulses for their own communicative strategies in the context of public affairs management.

Keywords: Structuration theory, Climate change, Consumer campaigns, Expert interviews, German energy industry, Public affairs managementPublisher: Emerald Group Publishing LimitedArticle1. IntroductionSection:Climate regulation constrains the scope of economic actions particularly in energy intensive industries (Stern, 2006, p. 196). At the same time, regulation also advances new markets for sustainable technologies (Nelson, 1994; Jnicke, 2008). As a consequence, corporations have taken strong public affairs measures to influence climate regulation during recent decades from direct lobbying to extensive media campaigns (Cho et al., 2011; McCright and Dunlap, 2003; Levy, 2005; Haufler, 2006; Kolk and Pinkse, 2007; Harris, 2009).Some industry organizations have also engaged in extensive consumer campaigns that directly address private individuals in order to promote a certain viewpoint on an issue or to mobilize socio-political action, The Swedish energy corporation Vattenfall, for example, collected signatures in major European cities to urge the United Nations climate summit to commit to a fair climate treaty (Vattenfall, 2008). Similarly, the German Industry Association (BDI), together with the multinational energy corporations RWE, EON, ENBW and Vattenfall, launched a signature campaign to leverage the use of climate friendly nuclear power plants as an economically efficient and affordable clean energy source (BDI, 2010).This mirrors an analytically interesting development in German public affairs management: while media relations have constantly gained relevance as a public affairs strategy (Berg, 2003, pp. 273-275; Hetzel and Marco, 2007; Priddat and Speth, 2007, pp. 28-29; Sebaldt, 2007, pp. 289-290; Siedentopp, 2010, pp. 245-250), addressing and mobilizing private individuals still remains the domain of NGOs[1] and has thus far hardly been used by industry organizations (McGrath, 2005, p. 97; Sebaldt, 2007, p. 105; Kppl, 2008, p. 210).Public affairs handbooks, for their part, paint an ambivalent picture of mobilizing private individuals for corporate public affairs purposes. On the one hand, it is claimed that such campaigns can boost public pressure on political authorities and therefore merit greater attention as a public affairs instrument (Althaus, 2007; Thomson and John, 2007, pp. 63-65; Kppl, 2008, p. 214). On the other hand, authors stress the risk of losing control over self-encouraged public debates and of provoking critical counter-initiatives (Milbraith, 1963, pp. 249-252; Watkins et al., 2001, pp. 173-175; Merkle, 2003, pp. 140-141).In Germany, the campaigns mentioned above and other similar initiatives[2] have indeed triggered a landslide of public criticism. The press and various NGOs accused the industry of instrumentalizing the public (Der Klimalgendetektor, 2008; Report Mainz, 2008) for corporate purposes, and of greenwashing (Mller, 2007; Greenpeace, 2008; Slavik, 2009) harmful business practices.The aim of this study is to analyze the strategic aims and challenges of consumer campaigns as a relatively new phenomenon in German public affairs management. In this context, consumer campaigns are defined as corporate campaigns on regulatory issues that directly address private individuals in their socio-political roles as consumers, voters or supporters of NGOs. Based on expert interviews with managers from the energy industry, the study addresses three research questions:RQ1. What is the relevance of strategic communication in the public sphere in public affairs management?RQ2. What are the aims of consumer campaigns in this context?RQ3. What risks are involved in such campaigns and how do managers handle these risks?The study proceeds in four steps. First, a structuration theoretical model of corporate public affairs management is developed to conceptualize the different logics of action within the non-public and public paths of public affairs and to identify the specific role that consumer campaigns can play in the latter path. Second, the methodology is discussed and the case of the German energy industry lobbying on climate regulation is introduced. In the following section, the results are presented. Finally, the conclusions of the study are discussed, as well as its limitations and implications for further research.2. Conceptualizing corporate public affairs managementSection:From a broad management perspective, public affairs can be conceptualized as any corporate effort that aims to align organizational and public policy in order to broaden a corporations scope for economic action (McGrath et al., 2010, p. 371; van Schendelen, 2010). However, owing to the range of scientific disciplines that have contributed to the subject particularly strategic management, political communication and public relations research (Kppl, 2008, p. 210; McGrath et al., 2010) there is neither a grand theory of public affairs (Windsor, 2005, p. 401), nor an integrated framework for its organizational functions and instruments. In this study, Giddens (1986, 1990) structuration theory is used as a theoretical framework. This approach helps to conceptualize the different logics of action, instruments and stakeholders of corporate public affairs management and thereby to integrate the multidisciplinary literature on the topic.Using structuration theory, the regulatory environment of an organization can be conceptualized as a set of social structures. According to Giddens (1986, pp. 25-28), social structures are sets of recursively organized rules and resources that form the properties of a social system. Structures function as both the medium and the outcome of social activity: they are constantly reinforced in the course of social action a process, which Giddens terms duality of structure. As the agents of social structuration, individuals have the potential to strategically intervene in the reinforcement of social structures. This intervention can follow different logics of action, depending on which resources are available to the actors and on which rules they address (Giddens, 1986, pp. 5-14). Following this idea, corporate public affairs management can be conceptualized as a management function that aims to intervene in an organizations regulatory environment by enabling different social resources and addressing different types of social rules (Zimmer, 2001; Zimmer and Ortmann, 2001). Depending on the focus of action, a public and a non-public path of public affairs can be distinguished, in which different instruments are used to address different stakeholders (Figure 1).The following sections outline the different logics of action within the non-public and the public paths of public affairs management, discuss triggers for the public path and analyze the specific role of consumer campaigns in this context.2.1. The non-public versus public path of public affairs management The non-public path of public affairs management comprises all measures often known as direct lobbying. Here, the logic of action is to enforce authoritative and allocative resources in direct negotiations with political authorities (Zimmer, 2001, pp. 395-398; Zimmer and Ortmann, 2001, p. 36). According to Giddens (1986, pp. 31-33), this path addresses the domination dimension of social structure.Authoritative resources refer to a corporations power to control the scope of action of political authorities. A particular source of this power is corporate insider or expert knowledge relating to specific industries. Politicians depend on this knowledge to develop policies that help strengthen the national economy, a situation, which places corporations in a strong negotiating position. Allocative resources refer to corporate control over material objects in the course of economic action, such as running production sites, paying wages or investing capital. In doing so, corporations command a crucial component of national economies, which further strengthens their negotiating position. Additionally, they are able to use their financial assets to directly sponsor political parties.Management research on corporate political action has focused considerable analytical attention on the competitive advantages that a company can gain through the enforcement of these resources (Obermann, 1993; Boddewyn and Brewer, 1994; Hillman et al., 1999; Hillman, 2003; Dahan, 2005; Bonardi, 2008; Obermann, 2008; Siedentopp, 2010). The studies found that the information approach of offering expert knowledge and the financial incentive approach of sponsoring political parties are the most effective public affairs strategies to influence policy outcomes and to enhance corporate profits (Hillman et al., 1999, pp. 833-835; Hillman, 2003). As such activities usually take place outside the view of the public, other scholars labeled this path as inside (Kollman, 1998), interaction (Dahan, 2005, p. 51) or the access-strategy (Schuler et al., 2002; Beyers, 2004) of public policy intervention.The public path of public affairs management, in contrast, comprises all measures that address the general public in its role as a political constituency. Here, the logic of action is to shape the meaning of social rules through strategic communication. According to Giddens (1986, pp. 21-22), rules are the techniques or generalizable procedures of social action. Social rules can be informal, like a common understanding, norm, or value, which according to Giddens refers to the signification dimension of structure; or they can be formalized like sanctionable laws or regulations, which refers to the legitimation dimension of structure.Strategic action within the public path aims to interpret corporate activities as compliant to social rules in order to foster corporate social legitimacy (Zimmer, 2001, pp. 398-403). In communication science, this process has been described as strategic framing, to select some aspects of a reality and make them more salient [] to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation (Entman, 1993, p. 51). As this strategy mostly addresses the broad political constituency, others considered this path to be the constituency-building (Hillman et al., 1999, p. 834), bottom-up (Buchholz, 1992; Obermann, 1993), outside (Kollman, 1998), voice (Beyers, 2004) or pressure strategy (Dahan, 2005, p. 51) of public affairs.While many studies found direct lobbying to be the most effective public affairs strategy, many scholars also argue that the public path of public affairs has constantly increased in relevance. Potential triggers for the public path are discussed in the next section. Before continuing, however, it is important to note that both paths are interdependent. Strategic communication depends on resources, not least in terms of funding. Likewise, direct lobbying is an act of communication in which meaning is assigned to resources. However, despite this overlap, the focus of action within the paths remains distinctly different.2.2. Triggers for the public path Stage and type of issue Early studies suggest that the selection of a public affairs strategy depends on the stage of the issue life cycle (Ryan et al., 1987; Buchholz, 1992). Strategic communication in the public sphere would be most likely in the public opinion formation stage, during which the constituencys awareness of an issue is rising. Direct lobbying, in contrast, would be more effective during the public policy formulation stage, when the issue has become politicized and is subject to governmental regulation. More recently, however, scholars suggested that strategy choice should instead consider the type of issue to be addressed (Bonardi and Keim, 2005). With respect to widely salient issues that attract significant public attention, corporations should indeed pursue strategic communication in the public sphere. However, this should not be restricted to promoting their particular viewpoint, but also advocate alternative issue perspectives to prevent critical counter initiatives.Public criticism Political communication and PR scholars state that a rising level of public criticism and a lack of public trust in modern corporations is also likely to trigger the public path. It is argued that globalization has strengthened the political power of corporations, while the scope of national governments has declined. As a consequence, a growing number of NGOs play the public field strategically to advocate peoples interests and mobilize them against corporations (Doh and Teegen, 2003; Leif and Speth, 2003; Beyers, 2004, p. 235; Kleinfeld et al., 2007, p. 14). An enhanced level of corporate communication in the public sphere, the authors argue, can be seen as a direct response to this development (Grunig et al., 2002, p. 61; John and Thomson, 2003). By framing their activities as compliant to social legitimacy standards, corporations would attempt to regain public trust (Bentele, 1994; Grunig, 2006, p. 166; Hoffjann, 2011), prevent regulations (Schranz and Vonwil, 2007) and thereby also foster their access to political decision makers (Wehrmann, 2007, p. 54; van Schendelen, 2010, p. 306).Empirically, however, the determining factors for the public path of public affairs management remain unclear. Corporations are most likely to use non-public and public instruments at the same time (Zimmer, 2001, p. 403; Schuler et al., 2002, p. 667). Against this backdrop, the first research question is:RQ1. What is the relevance of strategic communication in the public sphere as a path of corporate public affairs management?RQ1a. What are the triggers for the public path?RQ1b. How does it relate to the non-public path?2.3. Consumer campaigns as an instrument within the public path Once a corporation has decided to choose the public path, different communication instruments can be employed. Scholars often point to the key role of press relations in influencing public opinion (Grunig et al., 2002, p. 337; Jarren and Rttger, 2009, p. 40). Press relations address journalists as mediators of public discourse. However, in their dual role as gatekeepers and opinion leaders, they also function as autonomous political actors (Page, 1996; Schudson, 2002). Hence, the likelihood of a particular issue perspective being covered by the press depends on the political focus of the journalist and also of their media organization.Consumer campaigns, in contrast, directly address the broad political constituency of private individuals as a means of influencing public opinion independently from journalistic reporting. Individuals, in this context, have multiple stakeholder roles, like citizens, neighbors, consumers or employees. Hence, individuals influence on the regulatory environment encompasses a variety of social actions, like discussing issues with other people, voting for a political party or buying a certain product. As such, the term consumer-campaign is used in a broad sense in this study.Like any communication campaign, consumer campaigns in corporate public affairs focus on a single issue and are limited in time. To attract the broadest public attention, they integrate a number of different communicative techniques, which are adopted from marketing, advertising, PR and social movement campaigns (Atkin, 2001, pp. 56-57, Paisley, 2001, p. 5; Rttger, 2009, p. 9). With respect to the scope of mobilization, two main categories can be distinguished.Issue advertising Issue advertising campaigns are limited to the promotion of a certain standpoint on an issue or interpretation of a corporate action (Sinclair and Irani, 2005, p. 59). They were first conceptualized in marketing literature as a communicative instrument to induce greater public trust in products and services (Sethi, 1979). Since the 1980s, issue advertising has also been discussed as a public affairs instrument used to influence public policy debates and legislative outcomes (Cutler and Muehling, 1989; Nelson, 1994; Brown et al., 2001; Sinclair and Irani, 2005; Miller, 2010). Issue advertising campaigns appear to be a common public affairs instrument in the USA (Brown et al., 2001; Miller, 2010, p. 87). However, there is little knowledge of their use in European or German public affairs. Likewise, little is also known on the effects of issue advertising in public affairs. Some studies revealed positive impacts on community stakeholders (Miller and Sinclair, 2009; Miller, 2010). Others found that recipients evaluate a firms credibility as issue sponsor with respect to their perceived compliance to overall legitimacy standards (Sinclair and Irani, 2005).Grassroots mobilization Grassroots campaigns aim to mobilize private individuals to take a specific socio-political action. As they are most common in legislative contexts, such campaigns are often defined as any effort to organize, coordinate or implore others to contact public officials for the purpose of affecting public policy (Milyo, 2010, p. 2). Typical instruments include sending letters to congress people or collecting signatures for petitions (Merkle, 2003, pp. 146-147; Kppl, 2008, p. 214; Milyo, 2010, p. 2). However, in a broader sense, grassroots campaigns can mobilize a wide range of other social activities, particularly consumption decisions. German corporations, for example, have urged consumers to accept rising energy prices and cut back their energy consumption in order to protect the climate (Vattenfall, 2008; RWE, 2011a).As with issue advertising, scientific knowledge about the implementation and effects of grassroots mobilization in the context of corporate public affairs management is scarce. Most studies are descriptive and limited to the US perspective (Castellblanch, 2003; Nisbet and Kotcher, 2009; McGrath, 2005, p. 97; Sebaldt, 2007, p. 105; Kppl, 2008, p. 210). Among the few studies that do exist, the consensus view is that American corporations regularly engage in grassroots mobilization campaigns, while in Europe and Germany this strategy remains the domain of NGOs. Against this backdrop, the second set of research questions reads:RQ2. What is the strategic aim of consumer campaigns?RQ3. What are the risks connected to consumer campaigns and how do managers handle these risks?3. Method: expert interviews with managersSection:Expert interviews with managers from public affairs and PR departments of German energy corporations and associations were conducted during fall 2010. As a qualitative research method, expert interviews aim to reconstruct social and organizational processes and situations (Glser and Laudel, 2009, p. 13). Experts, in this sense, possess a technical, process-related or interpretational insider knowledge relating to the social context in which they act (Bogner and Menz, 2002, p. 46; Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr, 2008, p. 132; Flick, 2010, p. 215). In this study, the expertise of interest was the managers assessment of whether, why, and with what strategic aims an organization should pursue the public path of public affairs management in climate regulation.3.1. The case: German energy industry and climate regulation Energy production in Germany is primarily based on fossil resources like coal. However, the German government is committed to achieving reductions in CO2 emissions. In 2000, it released a green energy act in order to subsidize renewable energies. When this study was conducted, the parliament was debating a new energy act that considered extending the use of nuclear power plants to further foster CO2 emission reductions. This extension would earn extra profits for the four leading energy corporations[3] that operate most of the plants. As a consequence, these corporations intensely lobbyed the government to enact the extension. The political debate led to strong public criticism, particularly of the incalculable risks related to nuclear energy (tagesschau.de, 2011).3.2. Sampling The sampling (Figure 2)[4] aimed to address two objectives: it should represent the maximum share of the German energy market and enable controlling for the potential influence of public criticism. In total, 15 managers of 14 organizations were invited, of which 11 agreed to participate. The managers represent about 75 percent of the German energy market. With respect to exposure to public criticism, interviewees can be located on different sections of a criticism scale regarding economic and political superiority, CO2 emissions and nuclear risk (Liedke, 2006; Adamek and Otto, 2008, pp. 51-82). Due to organizational structures, the interviewees were responsible for different public affairs instruments.3.3. Interview guideline and coding An interview guideline was constructed based on theoretical conceptualization. In consecutive sections, the relevance of the non-public and public paths of public affairs management, triggers for the public path, as well as aims and risks of consumer campaigns were investigated. All interviews were conducted face-to-face, with the exception of one telephone interview. The interviews lasted 45 to 75 minutes, were audio recorded and transcribed for the purposes of analysis. Theoretical coding (Strauss and Corbin, 1990; Flick, 2010, pp. 387-402) was used to analyze the data. In a first step, the material was coded according to major categories that had been deduced from the conceptual framework. Next, subordinate categories were derived through a process of open coding to refine the set of categories and clarify their causal relations.4. ResultsSection:Even though the managers represent different sectors of the energy market and act in different areas of public affairs management, they share a similar understanding of the relationship between the non-public and public paths of corporate public affairs and of the role that consumer campaigns play in this context (Figure 3). The following sections discuss what relevance managers see in the public path of public affairs management and how they evaluate the strategic aims and risks of consumer campaigns in this context.4.1. Relevance of the public path Managers described the public path of public affairs management as continuously increasing in relevance. In their view, this increase is mainly due to a growing media orientation of political authorities who more frequently adjust their political decisions to daily media coverage and opinion polls a process, that has also been discussed as mediatisation of politics (Kepplinger, 2002; Schranz and Vonwil, 2007). This process, in turn, weakens political assets like expert knowledge and economic power. Accordingly, many interviewees reported lobbying-meetings where they were unable to achieve their interests even though they had insider knowledge to offer, could outline the economic consequences, and were even able to convince their political counterpart on a personal level:My impression is that public opinion [] play[s] a very important role. In conversations behind closed doors, [politicians] admit, It is clear that this [decision] does not really make sense, but voters want it [] and hence, we have to do it (IV2, 49; similarly IV6, 26; IV3, 21; IV1, 27)[5].Against this backdrop, the public path was described as an alternative strategy to intervene in the regulatory environment. By addressing the mass media, managers aimed to redirect their public affairs strategy towards those stakeholders that are of growing relevance to politicians, who seek public feedback on a daily basis. This alternative route is either taken when primary resources cannot be enforced or in situations where the organization is lacking these resources in general.In line with the structuration theoretical framework, interviewees described the logic of action within the public path as a process of strategically altering the meanings of social issues, norms or values. Most aimed to ascribe a new meaning to existing issues by offering a new interpretation to it or, in the words of Giddens, constructing a new signification (Giddens, 1986, p. 29). Managers from the nuclear sector, for example, aimed to displace the risk connotation of nuclear power by promoting its interpretation as a carbon-free climate protection technology. Others aimed to reinterpret business behaviors as socially legitimate:Our corporation is confronted with two accusations. The first is: You are a company that harms the climate! And the second is our huge size. And this spot addresses both issues (IV7, 28).However, on a more general level, interviewees still described authoritative and allocative resources as the most powerful assets of public affairs management. Most said politicians are particularly open to authoritative resources, like expert arguments (IV3, 19). Managers from the smaller renewable energy sector, in contrast, viewed allocative resources, which they would lack, as the most powerful. Hence, paraphrasing Giddens, the domination dimension of social structuration still seems to be most important to intervene in an organizations regulatory environment. This, in turn, maintains politicians as the key stakeholders of public affairs management and direct lobbying its core instrument.Triggers for the public path Managers perceived the relevance of the public path to be strongest during the issue stage of public controversy, as politicians are most sensitive to public opinion in this phase. In the managers view, the controversy stage was in many cases driven by environmental and consumer NGOs that often lack other resources and hence encourage public controversies as their main political strategy. As a transmitter between the political and the private sphere [and] an organizer of the public (IV 6, 18) NGOs were said to easily attract the attention of the mass media and use this to mobilize the public against the corporate sector. Public controversy, in turn, encourages counter-initiatives on the corporate side. Against this backdrop, NGOs ranked highly as both triggers and stakeholders of the public path of public affairs management.The perceived increase in relevance of the public path can also be explained with regard to Giddens concept of the dialectic of control (1986, p. 16): Giddens states that in modern society all forms of social dependence offer some capacity for the dependents to control their superiors as is the case with small NGOs challenging the corporate sector: corporations do control vast amounts of social resources. However, being expert systems, they depend upon the trust of laypeople, who act outside the system (Giddens, 1990, pp. 26-29). This trust refers to their faith that the expert system serves overall societal interests. Accordingly, the withdrawal of trust is laypeoples core source of social control. According to Giddens, the logic of action of withdrawing trust is to trigger public critique. With the recent globalization, corporations have experienced continuous gains in social power and also an increased risk of provoking critique and losing legitimacy.Integration of the public and non-public paths Managers who were the subjects of strong public criticism particularly representatives of leading corporations and the nuclear industry portrayed a mixed strategy of direct negotiations with political authorities and NGOs and of strategic communicative in the public sphere as the best approach to public affairs. While the former involved direct lobbying of political authorities and NGOs, the latter would aim to rebuild trust of the broad public constituency, which was also seen as an important precondition to fostering direct access to the political decision makers (IV6, IV7, IV2, IV3). Managers of small corporations, in contrast, often described NGOs as their allies and portrayed joint public campaigning as an important public affairs strategy. This should help to overcome their lack of political resources and also serve as a backdoor for engaging in direct lobbying (IV5, IV10). Hence, all managers portrayed initiatives of the non-public and public paths as complementary strategies.4.2. Strategic aims of consumer campaigns With regard to consumer campaigns, the managers described different strategic aims.Bypassing journalists When it comes to the agents (Giddens, 1986, p. 5) engaged in the framing of social issues, journalists were portrayed as the most powerful forces. They were said to enjoy comparatively strong public trust and therefore wield considerable power to intervene in public opinion. Most managers, however, complained that journalists often lack balance and advance anti-industry clichs which one even termed riot-journalism (IV6, 32). Managers from big corporations and industry associations in particular believed that they did not receive a fair chance to have their issue perspectives covered in the media. Against this backdrop, managers portrayed consumer campaigns as a means of bypassing a critical press and of defining issues independently of journalistic reporting:If you look at the present media landscape, you can see that the messages of [] industrial corporations do not reach the public anymore. When [Chancellor] Merkel says this campaign is outstanding, because it puts supporters of nuclear energy in a position to express their opinion, this really speaks volumes! And that is what the whole purpose of the campaign was (IV7, 20).Among the different types of consumer campaigns, signature campaigns were considered to be an instrument to aggregate public opinion (IV4, 56) and make a standpoint more valid and credible (IV8, 37) in order to influence public debate (IV2, 61). However, managers with experience of such campaigns were unsure whether they were applicable for other industry branches (IV7, 22). Some were concerned that such campaigns could exploit consumers for political purposes (IV6, 40; similarly IV10, 44). Only few considered using issue advertising to bypass the critical press (IV7, IV8).Instead, the managers were in consensus that journalists still function as the most important addressees within the public path of public affairs particularly due to their strong agency role described above. Accordingly, most of the managers acknowledged that it was hardly possible to fully bypass critical press and hence advised focusing on persistent media relations (IV6, 38; similarly IV3, 55).Responding to critical individuals Well-organized groups of critical individuals were portrayed as another powerful agent within the public sphere. The managers stated that even small minorities were able to influence public opinion and intervene in the regulatory environment by strategically mobilizing public controversies an aspect which has also been discussed as the power of sub-politics by Ulrich Beck (2007). In this context, many interviewees referred to the example of the German railway project, Stuttgart 21[6]: We live in a social environment [] in which [industry] projects cannot be enforced over and against the opposition of minorities, but only by means of public participation (IV1, 39). The managers argued that minority groups could easily block industry projects, even when they had already passed regulation. With respect to the construction of a new power plant, one manager reported:A referendum among 3,500 community stakeholders was enough to say: We wont live in a good neighborhood! Of course, this had dramatic consequences on our projects, as well as on the lifecycle of our projects (IV7, 16).Against this background, managers reasoned that the logic of action within the public path could not be limited to persuading individuals with eye-catching campaigns. Rather, corporations needed to convince critical individuals in direct dialogues: This is grassroots, the work we have to do! (IV3, 35). Web-based forums were discussed as a potential means of reaching a broad audience with limited dialogue budgets. Yet, most managers advised face-to-face encounters:Dialogue instruments on a web 2.0 basis [] can document a basic willingness to talk and they do actually channel this dialogue. But [] you will [] always have to pick some individuals out of the web dialogues [] and have some kind of a real direct talk with them (IV1, 43).4.3. Challenges of consumer campaigns and strategies to handle them Credibility as the main issue Most managers saw their lack of public trust not only as a main trigger but also as a main challenge of consumer campaigns. While journalists enjoyed good public trust and therefore had a strong impact on public opinion, corporate campaigns would frequently fail to do so as they were often not perceived as a trustworthy source. Accordingly, almost all managers, even from the renewable sector, reported severe credibility issues.The lack of credibility, however, was partly also seen as self-inflicted. Some stressed that oversimplification often caused credibility issues: Communication always needs shortening and simplifying []. But I cannot simplify it so much that it becomes false in the end. (IV8, 61). Others emphasized: We wont be evaluated by our campaigns, but by what we actually do! (IV6, 87) and advised backing every claim with a real corporate commitment: Whatever I say [], without being able to back it up on the basis of corporate strategy, will lead me to fall down at some point (IV1, 33). In this respect, authenticity was seen as an important directive within the public path of public affairs (IV7, 46; similarly IV8, 55).Relativizing corporations societal efforts In terms of a more elaborate credibility strategy, interviewees argued being more self-critical and actively acknowledging corporate shortcomings with respect to controversial issues could enhance their perceived credibility particularly as journalists and NGOs would otherwise focus on these shortcomings and use them as a hook for negative reporting and counter-campaigning (IV4, 60; IV7, 28; IV8, 59; IV6, 84; IV3, IV5, 40):The classifying of [good] corporate news with respect to overall business strategy should be one of our standard duties (IV8, 55).You can only be credible if you also add those aspects to your communication that wont earn standing ovations. [] Never pretend to be only good (IV6, 84)!This strategy resembles Keim and Bonardis approach of balanced-issue-promotion mentioned above. Similarly, PR scholars have suggested that the active acknowledgement of the negative aspects of corporate activities was essential to regain public trust (Bentele and Seidenglanz, 2008; Hoffjann, 2011). Studies on marketing and political communication found that such two-sided messages can indeed enhance perceived source credibility (Crowley and Hoyer, 1994; OKeefe, 1999; Eisend, 2007, 2010). However, this strategy is yet to be tested for corporate public affairs or PR campaigns (Eisend, 2008, p. 232).Allowing critique Another credibility strategy outlined by the managers is to encourage individuals to actively engage in an open dialogue and criticize corporate viewpoints (IV1; IV3; IV4; IV5; IV6; IV7; IV8; IV9): This is the big challenge: to develop a more participatory style of stakeholder communication (IV1, 53). Many saw online forums as an affordable instrument, but admitted not knowing how to handle the harsh public criticism that can accompany such a move. Only one manager reported positive experiences with online forums, which had been accepted as a sincere dialogue offer (IV9, 63) by the online community and helped to build a trust-based dialogue that allowed negotiation of the meaning of controversial energy issues.5. Conclusions and limitationsSection:This study employed structuration theory and expert interviews with public affairs and PR managers of the German energy industry to analyze the (emerging) role of consumer campaigns in the context of corporate public affairs management. According to the managers perceptions, enabling authoritative resources like expert knowledge and allocative resources like economic power is still the most powerful and effective strategy for intervening in the regulatory environment. However, managers report that such direct lobbying initiatives are being increasingly disrupted by public controversies, which they believe are often encouraged by NGOs and critical individuals that lack other resources. As managers see it, political decision makers are growing increasingly sensitive to such controversies. Hence, the public path of public affairs management gains in relevance. Here, corporate actors compete to frame the meaning of social issues and to interpret business behaviors as compliant to social legitimacy standards.Giddens concept of the dialectic of control (Giddens, 1986, p. 16) offers a plausible explanation for this perceived increase. Giddens assumes that in modern society withdrawing public trust and encouraging public controversy is the determining lever used by individual laypeople to control their superiors like corporations. This corresponds relatively closely with the perceptions of the German managers. In their view, NGOs and social minorities increasingly encourage public controversy to influence public opinion and thereby intervene in the regulatory environment. At the same time, managers see political authorities as increasingly sensitive to media coverage and daily opinion polls, which can lead to political decisions that differ severely from the consensus established between governments and corporations in direct lobbying negotiations.Journalists were still seen as the most powerful mediators of the public sphere and hence the key stakeholders of the public path of public affairs management. However, many interviewees, particularly from big corporations, complained that journalists are often biased towards anti-industry clichs and rarely cover the industry perspective on controversial issues with conflicting viewpoints. In this respect, consumer campaigns were portrayed as an instrument to intervene in public opinion formation independently from the critical press. Signature campaigns, for example, were seen as a means to aggregate alternative viewpoints and provide leverage to elevate them to the surface of public discourse.However, according to the managers point of view, consumer campaigns come at a price: in many cases they would severely lack credibility. In order to catch the attention of laypeople and get them involved in an issue, the managers stated that consumer campaigns require emotional language and the simplification of complex regulatory issues like green energy as an approach which would quickly be criticized as dishonest and unfair by critical observers like journalists or NGOs. On a more general level, managers warned that mobilizing private individuals to engage in socio-political action like signing an industry petition could also be condemned as a manipulative instrumentalization of the public, particularly when such campaigns pretended to support public interests in the first place.To address this issue, managers outlined several credibility strategies, which they have derived from their own and their competitors campaign experiences. Practitioners might reflect on these strategies for their own communicative work: 1. As a basic rule, any argument used in a public affairs campaign must be backed up by the respective business practices of the corporation.2. More specifically, and particularly with respect to environmental campaigns, corporations should not only promote their environmental achievements, but also acknowledge what is still missing from meeting their sustainability objectives.3. And lastly, critics should be encouraged and given space to communicate their criticism and engage in an open dialogue with the corporation.However, as the study is based on expert interviews, its focus is limited to the strategic considerations and perceived challenges of campaign-practitioners. It remains unclear what effects managers credibility strategies actually have on the perceptions of consumer-campaigns. Furthermore, the applicability of the findings to other industry branches might be limited as the data stems from a case study on the German energy industry. Future research should address these limitations and investigate the relevance of the public path of public affairs management in other industries. Quantitative research is needed to analyze the overall use of the relatively new phenomenon of consumer campaigns in German and European public affairs management. And lastly, the effects of such campaigns on citizens, journalists, NGOs and politicians should be examined.

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Notes In this study, the term NGOs refers to civil society organizations such as environmental or consumer groups and does not include economic interest groups like industry associations or trade unions (Brulle, 2010, p. 84; Kaldor, 2003, p. 589). The German energy corporation RWE launched the campaign Energy Giant in German TV and cinemas to promote the firms market superiority and conventional energy as economically necessary (RWE, 2009). The German nuclear power association Atomforum launched a print and online campaign to promote nuclear power as climate protection technology (Atomforum, 2008, 2010). The German energy corporation ENBW together with the French corporation EDF launched the campaign Au fil du Rhin (2010), a fake social movement that promotes the peaceful cooperation of nuclear power and environmental conservation along the river Rhine. In Germany, four multinational corporations share 82 percent of the mainly coal-based energy market (Statista 2009): RWE (31 percent), Eon (21 percent), Vattenfall (16 percent) and EnBW (14 percent). Numbers on turnover and energy production are adopted from organizational sources: Lichtblick: press release (Lichtblick, 2011); EWE: own correspondence with their press office (EWE, 2011); MVV Energie: annual report 2010 (MVV Energie, 2010); Stadtwerke Mnchen: own correspondence with the manager of corporate communications and the annual report 2010 (Stadtwerke Mnchen, 2011); RWE: annual report 2010 (RWE, 2011b) and the corporate website (RWE, 2011c); EON: annual report 2010 (EON, 2011a) and the corporate web site (EON, 2011b); Vattenfall: Facts and figures 2010 (Vattenfall, 2011a) and the annual report 2010 (Vattenfall, 2011b). Read: Interview 2, Paragraph 49. In order to assure full anonymity of the interviewees, interview numbers could not be included in the table of sampling (see Figure 2). Stuttgart 21 is a multibillion Euro construction project by the German railway corporation Die Bahn, anchored around a new high-speed railway across southern Germany and the relocation of the historic train station in the city of Stuttgart. It has been subject to enormous public opposition and has been accused of wasting public money, ruining public heritage buildings and damaging the landscape. Protests were particularly violent at times, and even the international press reported on the events (guardian.co.uk, 2010; Spiegel.de, 2010).