The media here is full of it. Experience dictates that we can only expect it to get worse. Of course, I should be used to it by now since I’ve been through this same experience on so many occasions; but this time, it’s different. It’s different because they have started their attacks earlier this time, all predictably filled with empty rhetoric.
There is no escaping the endless and overzealous campaigning. Huge teams burgeon forth with even bigger budgets at their disposal and, it surely goes without saying, all having bought into the propaganda. They are now on a mission to spread their message far and wide with one single objective: to get others to buy into their rhetoric. Wining and dining, lobbying, cajoling, calling in favours, promising favours, all based upon what might be at the end of this carefully choreographed and scripted campaign. As ever, keeping the 24/7 news-hungry media well fed offers opportunity which they grasp with both hands and then some. The media not only wants to listen to them, it has to. A phenomenon for 2015 is an increasing number of high-profile celebrities who are openly supportive, one way or another, and of course, it’s just another way to manipulate the public.
We need to be on our game, ensuring that we have the right information and knowledge to be able to appropriately scrutinise and challenge.
If only we – the tanning industry – had access to a fraction of these resources, just imagine what we could achieve, but I can only dream about being in that position and now is not the time. We need to be on our game, ensuring that we have the right information and knowledge to be able to scrutinise and challenge appropriately. There’s no doubt that claims and promises will be made, left, right and centre; all carefully scripted and deliberately spun to manipulate the often malleable public … into ticking the right box come May 7, the date of our next General Election.
Well, what did you think I was referring to? The start of our indoor tanning season and the accompanying attacks from our anti-tanning campaigners perhaps? Yes, I do indeed see the similarities, and of course, this was the path I was attempting to take you down.
So perhaps, if one steps back to analyse our own industry’s challenge, indeed challenges, it is somewhat reassuring that our situation is not unique; far from it. Around the world you will find people who are firmly “for” or “against” a particular topic, idea, product, belief and so on. There are also those who for one reason or another are happy to simply sit on the fence and not have a particular view or opinion. However, everyone, apart from those with hardened, extremist views, is potentially open to persuasion. And persuasion comes in many guises; clearly not all of them are preferable.
So we must strive to address our challenges using the positive and preferable powers of persuasion fuelled by facts, not myths, and choice, not prohibition. That approach definitely gets my vote. ■
