Corporate Intelligence
Major PR firms, usually international operations, advertise their services clearly: "The role of communications is to manage perceptions which motivate behaviors that create business results." Helping clients to manage issues by combined influencing of public attitudes, public perceptions, public behavior and public policy, Corporate Intelligence is a means of protecting corporate power against democratic forces mainly through advertisement and public relations. To manipulate opinion and policy to their advantage and to confuse the public, corporations spend billions on hiring PR firms to cultivate the press and to manage spin control. Beyond advertisement Public Relations applies advanced media relations methodology and uses authority transfer and third party techniques voicing their messages through "trusted sources" or "independent experts". Corporate Intelligence offers a broad range of services, from using polls and applying psycho geographic profiling based on operations research to find out what images and messages will resonate with target audiences, to active spying on critics, discrediting opponents or co-opting citizens' groups.
Commercial Public Relations and crisis management firms routinely apply counterintelligence strategies to neutralize grassroots activist groups. In operation plans activists are sometimes divided into four categories: radicals, opportunists, idealist and realists. Deactivation of a social activist group is achieved by a three step strategy of isolating the radicals, cultivating and educating the idealists into realists and finally co-opting the realists. The "radicals" who usually have an agenda of political empowerment and social justice are marginalized and discredited. The idealists are exposed to reeducation and psychological persuasion. Pragmatic realists and opportunists are manipulated through trade-offs and perceptions of "partial victories". Manipulating citizens groups and fake grassroots mobilization, so called Astroturf, as well as Viral Marketing schemes have become a routine practice for agencies specialized in Public Affairs.