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High up in the Swiss Alps this week, an influential public relations executive issued a stark warning to the world’s corporate and political elite. Public trust is “plummeting”, Richard Edelman declared, prompting a global “descent into grievance”.
For the 25th year, the PR agency Edelman released its annual “trust barometer” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The survey asks respondents in dozens of countries if they trust governments, NGOs, media outlets and corporations.
Edelman promotes this exercise as an objective gauge of public trust. A foundational tenet of the survey – and the advice Edelman derives from it – is that it measures whether people trust elite institutions and those who lead them.
But the barometer might be similarly revealing in reverse: as a reflection of what corporate and political elites think of ordinary people.
“I just think that’s a fundamentally flawed premise,” Edelman, the agency’s CEO, told me in an interview on Monday. “I mean, we survey ordinary people, and we say what we find. And in this case, we found 20% of them highly aggrieved.”
Edelman says “economic fears” are to blame for this “age of grievance”. But, from the post-election market “Trump bump” to the giddy enthusiasm of billionaires excited to see fellow billionaires running the US government, these economic fears do not necessarily extend to the executive class.
“I don’t want people to presume that this Trump presidency will be bad for PR,” Edelman told PRWeek after the election. “I think there will be deregulation, lower taxes, and budgets will get loosened up again.”
The intersection of such prosperity amid grievance presents Davos-goers with a combustible dilemma – to which, Richard Edelman wrote in Fortune, “economic optimism” may be the solution.
I asked the CEO what, exactly, he means. Optimism could be an outcome of policy changes, like helping workers unionize or raising corporate taxes to fund public services. But optimism could be the product itself: a message, marketed and sold to the public, that things aren’t actually so bad.
“For me, optimism is rooted in reality,” Edelman told me. “And we need to make people feel as if they can actually have a bright economic future. It has to be higher wages, reskilling, affordable products … I want optimism not to be some vague notion. I want it to be tangible, based on observed reality.”
Optimism as an antidote to distrust is not a new prescription from the firm. In 2023 Edelman suggested companies and media outlets move away from scaring people about climate change – and instead “invest in optimism” and “lean into solutions”, among a number of ideas.
The climate crisis certainly needs solutions. Edelman, though, has earned millions working for fossil fuel companies and industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute (API) – including running “astroturf” campaigns that helped defeat, well, solutions to the climate crisis.
I asked Edelman how he squares the company’s recommendation for climate solutions with its work for oil and gas interests seeking to undermine public support for legislative and regulatory climate solutions. “Look, on the API – in that period of time, when Obama was president, there was a whole move for energy self-sufficiency,” he said. It was “more drilling, more fracking, all that. We were doing PR as part of that. It wasn’t to slow down regulation. It was to talk about that.”
(According to PRWeek, Edelman worked for API as early as 2005. API’s tax filings show it paid Edelman more than $75m in 2008, the year before Obama took office.)
I asked Edelman, does he think his company and its peers in the communications industry could be contributing to public distrust.
“I take our reputation really seriously,” he said. “And we have a very high bar for work. Not just who we work with, but what we do. And I just want to reassure you that we could take a lot of other clients, and we don’t. And we make choices, and we’re proud to work with the people we work with.”
During an Edelman webcast last September, Liba Wenig Rubenstein, director of the Aspen Institute’s Business Roundtable on Organized Labor, offered executives one concrete idea for building trust and instilling optimism: engage in good faith with employees’ efforts to unionize. Rather than seeing unions as a threat to profits or control, Rubenstein suggested that executives interpret them as an earnest expression of workers’ commitment to their company.
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At the end of the event, Edelman did not mention unions. Instead, he encouraged executives to show employees “that there’s value to being optimistic.”
“That it’s not just hope, but it’s actually possible …” he said. “We need people leaning in … We want them to advocate for us, stay with the company, and be positive on social.” (Two months after the webcast, Edelman laid off about 330 people – more than 5% of its workforce.)
I asked Edelman what he made of Rubenstein’s suggestion. “Each industry, each company has to make the decision about unions,” he replied. “The basic premise I want to go back to is, we need people to feel as if they have better wages and that they have affordable products and things like this. So I’m not going to opine about unions. That’s up to each one of our clients.”
The trust barometer defines “grievance” as “a belief that government and business make [respondents’] lives harder and serve narrow interests, and wealthy people benefit unfairly from the system while regular people struggle.”
Edelman disputed the suggestion that his firm’s remedies for these grievances could be intended simply to convince people that things aren’t as bad as they think. “I really want to challenge that,” he said, insisting that “this is not some head-fake in a basketball game”.
The CEO pointed to what he called “a real problem of lack of facts – agreed facts.”
“We don’t have a good information system,” he said. “We have a ‘mass-class divide’. We have a sense that the political system doesn’t work. Questions about capitalism. So we’ve pointed out all those things … our truth to the Davos crowd.”
Speaking truth to the Davos crowd matters. But Edelman is among this crowd’s higher-profile members. His PR agency depends on persuading clients – some of whom are also part of this very crowd – that Edelman can persuade people to trust them.
The Davos crowd benefits disproportionately from economic and political systems that many ordinary people have rightly concluded are not for them. And the Davos crowd has a disproportionate say over whether solutions to this conclusion advance beyond optimistic promises that carefully avoid interrogating who has power in society and who does not.
The “global leaders and changemakers” passing through Edelman Trust House this week might find it unsettling to consider their own culpability in this “grievance-based society”.
For everyone else, however, the unease on the slopes in Davos this week is an invigorating reminder that people – even those without a World Economic Forum badge – still have power. That’s a reason to be optimistic.
