A better image? Be careful what you wish for

I have read this article several times now and I still don’t know whether to laugh, cry or go fishing. I don’t fish, but I’m prepared to learn if it takes me away from reading about the ‘image of shipping’.

There are some good points in Gary Howard’s piece, but there is back story too. Not least is the work done by shipping industry lobby groups and their PR consultants with the journalist concerned to place the original story (and more like it) in a title sympathetic to the cause.

That must have seemed a clever approach, particularly given an agenda that sought to apply some ‘nudge’ to the issues around SOx, NOx and PM, let alone carbon emissions.

For the PR agency concerned, the trick was to walk a line that met the journo’s news agenda and deliver a story that could be used to say to the industry (and IMO in particular) ‘look, the world is watching’.

Now the unintended consequences of the internet have come into play. Six years on, well after the revision of Marpol Annex VI, the adoption of more ECAs and a global sulphur cap, shipping is discovering that today’s media doesn’t follow the rule of chip paper.

This stuff is out there for ever, free, shareable, commentable and subject to little of the context and background that the shipping industry would seek to apply.

And the air emissions topic is pretty straightforward compared to say, scrapping, flags of convenience, crew abandonment or ballast water, all of which are regulated to some extent. Imagine trying to convey those to a general audience and still come away with a positive spin.

For more than a decade, the shipping industry has been complaining that it has no public profile, that no-one understands how important it is.

It’s true that recruitment is the primary driver for a better image, but I suspect the kind of people prepared to work at sea are probably smarter than the average internet commenters. To those ashore, the arguments might seem pretty remote.

Until and unless shipping has a collective change of heart about its business model, its approach to the world economy and its relationship to the population it serves, then a better image is more delusion than ambition.

Plenty of industry leaders have tried to persuade their own colleagues to support PR campaigns and positive marketing and too few have expressed any kind of interest in doing so. Sit in a few industry conferences and it quickly becomes clear why.

Yes, shipping has a low public profile, but I suspect it would not know what to do if it had a higher one. As a result, many in the industry believe the status quo is better than the alternative.

The challenge is the way the internet works: articles like this will continue to resurface and people who are utterly uninterested in the details or the context will continue to comment on them.

It’s truer than ever that there’s nothing harder to find than yesterday’s newspaper. If only more people still consumed media that way, then shipping’s PR problem would be easier to ignore.