Every year, the Mackinac Policy Conference sets the tone for Michigan’s business and political conversations. This year, much of the conversation we heard centered around one issue: “Michigan’s house is on fire.”
Everywhere we turned, people were eager to talk about how Michigan has quietly fallen from a top-15 state to the bottom 10 on critical measures: education performance, per capita income, and population stability. As the Detroit Regional Chamber President and CEO Sandy Baruah put it: “It’s really hard to fix a problem if you don’t know the problem is there.”
He’s right. And as communications professionals, we’d add one thing: it’s even harder to fix a problem if you think communications is the fix.
Here’s a truth we’ve learned: no amount of good PR can fix bad decision-making.
When a company is facing regulatory scrutiny, a leadership failure, a product recall, or a reputational hit, the first instinct is often to call a communications firm. And yes, you should. But what the best communications counsel will tell you before drafting a single statement is this: What is the actual problem, and has it been solved?
A press release doesn’t fix a policy failure. A media strategy doesn’t repair a broken product. A carefully worded statement can’t substitute for accountability. Communications can shape how a story is told, but it cannot change what the story is.
The same applies at the state level. Baruah noted that Michigan’s struggles aren’t a branding problem. They’re a decades-long policy problem driven by what he called the “Michigan U”: a pattern of whipsawing back and forth between policy approaches without staying the course long enough to see results. You can’t message your way out of that. You have to change it.
At Bellwether PR, we use the RACE process — Research, Action Planning, Communication, Evaluation — as the foundation for every client engagement. It’s a framework that keeps us honest about the role communications actually plays.
- Research comes first. Before we write a single word, we ask: What is the real problem? What do audiences know, think, and feel? What are the facts? What is the organization actually doing or not doing? We do this not to craft a narrative, but to understand the full reality. Too many organizations skip this step and jump straight to messaging. That’s how you end up with communications that feel tone-deaf, because they are.
- Action Planning is the second step, and it’s the one most people forget is part of our job. An effective communications strategy must be grounded in what the organization is doing, not what it’s saying. If an organization has a genuine problem, the action step is to work with leadership to ensure corrective measures are taken before anything is communicated. A statement without action is spin. Action without communication is a missed opportunity. They go together.
- Communication is where our expertise lives: the press releases, the media pitching, the stakeholder messaging, the op-eds, the social strategy. This is often what people think of when they think of PR. And it matters enormously. But it only works when it’s built on a foundation of real research and real action. Michigan’s business community, as Baruah noted, needs more than good talking points. It needs common ground, policy consistency, and substantive results. Communications can amplify those results, but it can’t manufacture them.
- Evaluation closes the loop. Are the messages landing? Is the problem actually resolved? Is public sentiment shifting? Evaluation isn’t just about measuring media hits. It’s about honestly assessing whether the underlying issue was addressed, whether additional actions are warranted, and whether the communications strategy served its purpose.
When an organization is in the middle of a reputational challenge, the temptation is to win the argument: to be completely right, to never concede, to fight every angle. That instinct almost always makes things worse.
The organizations that navigate challenges well are the ones willing to acknowledge what’s true, take ownership of what went wrong, commit to specific, credible action and communicate it clearly and consistently.
Michigan’s challenges are real, and they deserve the kind of honest reckoning the discussions at this year’s Mackinac Policy Conference demand. The same principle applies to any organization navigating a difficult moment: acknowledge the problem, understand it deeply, fix it substantively, and then communicate.
If you skip the first three steps, no communications strategy in the world will save you.
That’s what we believe at Bellwether PR, and it’s what drives the RACE process we bring to every client. Smart communication starts with good decisions. Our job is to help with both.