Have you ever heard of Charles Dawson? If you had been living in 1912, you would have recognized his name because he was established worldwide as the premier archeologist of his day. He spent time seeking out artifacts and fossils primarily in the British Isles. His amazing discoveries filled museums and the newspapers. He found bones of three previously undiscovered dinosaurs (one of which was then named in his honor), a petrified toad encased in a flint rock, and an ancient boat made of very well preserved timbers, among many other items. However, his greatest discovery was known as the Piltdown Man. He was digging in a gravel pit in southern England when he found two skull fragments that looked human beside a jawbone that looked to be from an ape. This was believed to be the oldest evidence of man ever found, plus it was the link that had been missing in the fossil evidence in the evolutionary process of changing from apes to human. His scientific dating process reported that the Piltdown Man was 500,000 years old. The skull was called Dawson’s Dawn Man. Charles Dawson was hailed as one of the greatest paleontologists the world had ever known.

The public swallowed it all. The scientific community did too. The only problem was that everything that Dawson claimed to discover was revealed to be a hoax. Nearly 40 years after the news of his Piltdown Man made him the toast of the town, further testing revealed that the bones were actually around 100 years old and they didn’t belong to each other. Dawson had planted human skull fragments and an orangutan jawbone in the quarries where he claimed to have found them. Did everyone believe Dawson? No, there were skeptics who argued that the facts just didn’t line up. One strike against the authenticity of Dawson’s claims was that no other bone fragments or fossil evidences were found at the same quarry where he found the Piltdown Man. However, public sentiment was that Dawson was a great discoverer and most of his detractors were shouted down in academic circles and cast aside as ill-informed idiots. In 1912, you either got on the Dawson bandwagon or you were marginalized as scientific deniers.

What do you do with the truth when a hoax is believed by the general public? If you think this sort of thing doesn’t go on any longer because we have a more informed public, you may want to rethink your position. If anything, our speed-of-light communications technology has made truth harder to find, not easier. Our worldviews are shaped by half-cooked lies that become the agenda of extremist groups that are looking to knuckle under the thinking of everyone. Unfortunately, this has impacted business in a big way. Pressure to contribute to causes that are not in line with your business mission or to change your corporate culture from outside groups is the reality of our time. Those who resist are in for a barrage of bad publicity at best. The attempt to shut down businesses who do not comply is, unfortunately, all too common. What can you do to stay out of the fray? Maybe you cannot. If you are in charge of your corporate marketing and communications, here are a few things to consider.

First, never take action on anything that is out of line with your corporate values. That includes posting items on social media, training your staff, funding charitable organizations, etc. If you don’t have corporate values defined, you should take some time to do so. Where do you draw the line in what you will not allow into the culture of your company? Tell your employees what the values are, make sure your vendors are aware of them, take steps to make them a part of your everyday operations, inform every new job applicant of them. Hire people who accept them. Don’t allow outside influence to take over this part of your business. Stand firm in this.

Don’t get into a shouting match with people who just want to shout back. There is plenty of that going on in our society and it doesn’t help when corporations get into a verbal spat with groups of people who have no interest in doing business with you.

Keep the truth in front of your customers. Cultivate a relationship of trust with them. There have been a number of assaults on businesses to drive a wedge between them and their customers. For instance, the grocery chain Trader Joe’s was accused of being racists in their branding by special interest groups who tried to get Joe’s customers to disengage. They started an online petition. It did not work. Trader Joe’s has built a great relationship with their customer base. But the corporation also did not immediately cave into these demands to change or try to placate a group of people who were not their customers. Instead, they informed the public of the processes they use in building a brand, and that customer engagement was a big part of that decision making process, not petitions.*

If you are in charge of corporate communications, make sure you put your customer first. There are all kinds of special interest groups with the aim to make you say you believe what they are pushing – be it true or not. Stand on your corporate values. Cherish the relationship between you and your customers.

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Bare Bones of the Great Ape-Man Hoax, by Ray Setterfield, www.onthisday.com, April 24, 2016

How Your Organization Can Resist Woke Social Pressure, by James Lindsay, https://newdiscourses.com, August 7, 2020

*A Note About Our Product Naming, https://www.traderjoes.com/announcement/a-note-about-our-product-naming, July 24, 2020