Thursday, December 1, 2016

Bank of England looks to quell currency backlash

The Bank of England’s shiny new five-pound note is making a splash—but not in the way that its communications team wished.

The new currency is touted as “cleaner,” “safer” and “stronger” by the bank’s PR campaign:

However, word quickly spread that the notes contain a small amount of tallow.

Forbes contributor Tim Worstall explained:

The latest little piece of outrage in my native Britain is that the new plastic (actually, polymer) £5 notes contain tallow. Tallow is derived from beef or sheep fat and is thus not normally considered to be right for those of the vegan or vegetarian persuasion. The outrage being of course that it’s pretty difficult to avoid animal products if they’re actually baked into the legal tender of the place you happen to live.

The backlash online grew after the Bank of England confirmed on Twitter that the notes contain tallow:

One U.K. citizen launched a petition to remove tallow from bank notes. At time of publication, the petition has more than 117,000 signatures.

RELATED: Keep your cool in a crisis with these steps.

On Thursday, the Bank of England issued the following statement:

The Guardian’s Chas Newkey-Burden wrote:

And for a growing number of people, this issue is problematic. Veganism is soaring. According to a survey earlier this year, 542,000 Brits – almost 1% of the population – are vegans, up from 150,000 in 2006. The health benefits of a plant-based diet are increasingly recognised, and so are the environmental and welfare costs of consuming animal products.

Some still see us as extremists, but a growing number recognise there is nothing more extreme than what animal agriculture is doing to the planet and its non-human residents.

Newkey-Burden continued that although many have responded to the controversy with snark and derision, those upset over the use of tallow are raising an important issue:

In response to news about the fiver, Twitter has been doing a great trade in baffled tweets, with vegans dismissed as “morons”, “whiners” and “fannies”. Some have, hilariously, pointed out that one is not actually supposed to eat bank notes, while other jokers have offered to take the notes off the hands of anyone upset by this bombshell.

We should welcome the humour and the attention it brings to this issue as an opportunity to educate people about veganism. Because, just as we didn’t know we were handling banknotes containing cow products, most meat-eaters know little of the horrors of the industry they are funding: the chicken slaughterhouses where workers rip the heads off live birds; the abattoirs where cows are alive as their heads are skinned and their legs sawn off; the factory-farm workers who systematically attack crate-bound pigs with lead pipes. It is from this world that tallow emerges.

However, Worstall argued that it’s impossible for organizations to cater to every consumer’s belief system and preference:

The underlying economic point here isn’t in fact about the Bank of England and or bank notes though. It’s that the modern economy is simply too, too, complex to ever be able to live fully according to such a moral standard. This is true whether we’re talking about Hindu, Jain, Jewish religious matters, or other moral ideas like vegan and vegetarian. There are just too many layers of production, too much complexity, for it ever to be possible to isolate an entire production process to ensure that it meets any one of such sets of moral strictures.

The crisis can stand as an important lesson to brand managers: Take note of your entire audience when scanning for a potential PR threat. It might be those you count as “outliers” that threaten your organization’s reputation.

It also poses a question to PR pros: How do you accommodate your audiences’ ranging self-interests—or how do you decide which are important to note?



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