I doubt that any country in the world spends as much per head of the population on worthless PR as Dubai – and it is hard to think of any country that does such harm to its image when then things go wrong.
Watching the television news about the murder of a supposed terrorist in Dubai I was struck by the hopelessly incompetent way Dubai was handling the matter. Senior policeman were quoted as refusing to talk to the press and the Al Bustan Rotana Hotel tried to ban television crews from the premises.
No one is blaming Dubai for what happened. There is no question of bad security at the Al Bustan Rotana – no hotel in the world is going to be able to stop an international hit squad. Yet the more they hide from the issue, the more it looks as if they feel themselves to blame in some way.
When there was a case of plutonium poisoning by alleged Russian spies in London, police officers gave proper interviews to the press and the Millenium Hotel in Grosvenor Square allowed journalists full access.
It is frequently said that the Arabic mentality has a problem dealing with any form of negative news. The initial reaction is to deny or avoid the issue. Unfortunately this is at odds with Dubai’s aim to become “world class”. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to play to their rules and that means being rather more open when things do not go to plan.
The debt default by Dubai World earlier this year will go down as a classic in bad PR. They made a bad situation much worse by refusing to be open. Senior expats at Emirates did not help by foolishly suggesting that people were failing to understand the financial strength of Dubai.
What was there to misunderstand? A company linked to the government announces that it cannot pay its debts. That looks clear enough and does not indicate a country with massive hidden assets that foreigners are failing to appreciate.
Air France have won much praise from inside the PR industry for the way they handled the crash of their flight from Rio. Emirates have come within inches of having two major disasters of their own. One can only hope that their disaster planning is to world, rather than local standards.
Since the hotel that was the scene of the murder is so anxious to avoid publicity, here is a link to their website – www.rotana.com/property-9.htm
As they say, no publicity is bad publicity…
Tags: PR