The Increasingly Silly Art of the Spin
And I'm not just talking about the latest on tariffs. Have you seen the outrageously absurd spin Chinese companies have been using when listing in the U.S. in recent years?
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Cheers,
Herb
On the agenda…
How to spot spin when you’re being spun.
Nobody is more blatant at silly spin than the latest crop of Chinese companies listing in the U.S., including the one that went pubic TODAY!
Where some people see ghosts, I see spin.
It comes from decades of covering businesses, where the art of spin is a way of life… where executives or their minions will look you in the eye and tell you to your face the exact opposite of the truth.
I can see it, feel it, hear it before they say it. It’s a curse, but one I’ve taken advantage of throughout my career.
Part of it is intuition; part, experience; almost all, common sense.
What Spin Is
The core of spin, when there is a crisis, is simple: It’s to control the message. That’s straight from the Crisis P.R. 101 handbook.
I would argue that the market’s wackiness today (I’m writing this on Thursday morning, the day the market tumbled after Wednesday’s outta left field record-breaking rally) is the result of spin gone bad.
Not to make this political, but..
With the tariffs, it seems almost everybody could see the spin. It wasn’t hard, because there were simply too many inconsistencies in the stories coming from the administration.
They couldn’t keep their stories straight. I said as much on social media a week ago, when I posted..
In the end, they simply lost control of the narrative. As a result, the narrative kept changing to finally – yesterday – the newest narrative that praised the President for having “great courage.” (Pro tip: You can always tell poorly crafted spin when the same phrases come from different people.)
Which Gets us to China…
Or better yet, the latest crop of Chinese companies listing in the U.S…