Then identify the main issues. Do not be confused with “symptoms.” Identify the key decisions to be made.

Step 1: Read the cases thoroughly with a view to understanding the Public Relations issues illustrated by each case. Make sure you discriminate between information which is relevant and that which is superfluous and/or ambiguous.

Step 2: Define clearly and concisely the basic problems (or issues) in the cases. Then identify the main issues. Do not be confused with “symptoms.” Identify the key decisions to be made.

Step 3: Use the information and facts provided in the case to analyze the situation. This would include understanding the situation, an analysis of the environment (if applicable)– for example, are there particular strengths and weaknesses, external opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis), etc. that should be mentioned?

Step 4: Based on your analysis from step 3 above, identify possible alternative strategy solutions to cope with the problem(s)/Issue(s) you have identified in step 2 above. State any assumptions you make, and feel free to make assumptions in order for the strategies to work. Evaluate the pros and cons of each alternative considered. This should form the main focus of your attention in the case analysis.

Step 5: Recommend a course of action (if appropriate), selecting the alternative proposed in step 3 above. Which would you consider most appropriate to solve the problems you have identified in step 2 above taking into consideration the analysis made in step 3? Include some specifics regarding how the recommendations may be implemented by the marketing team. Note: You should edit your recommendations based on the latest web-information that you can access by going to the company’s website.

Case Study The Silence of the Lions

The Nittany Lions of Penn State University were synonymous with two things: a winning football program and a legendary and revered coach.

Joseph Vincent “Joe” Paterno was Penn State’s beloved “JoePa,” the head coach for 46 years. During that period, the man who originally planned to be a lawyer coached five undefeated teams, won two national championships, went to 37 post-season bowl games, and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach.

Joe Paterno and his football program were Penn State University. No one on the campus they called “Happy Valley”—including the university president—outranked the coach. And no institution on campus had more clout than the vaunted Nittany Lions football program.

Until it all came crumbling down.

investigation by a grand jury for inappropriate conduct with a teenager who was part of a football program that Sandusky helped coach. The paper said the investigation had been ongoing for 18 months. ESPN picked up the story, but it died shortly thereafter.

Second Mile defended its founder and the organization, pointing out that the program had a spotless record in behalf of the safety and well-being of the children in its care. The organization talked of its background checks, child line checks, and similar safeguard processes.

For its part, Penn State and its well-respected President Graham Spanier, who had helped improve the school’s academic standing to rival its reputation on the gridiron, were decidedly lowkey about the Sandusky investigation.

The story stayed controlled for six months and then exploded on the national stage. The New York Times’ November 5 frontpage headline said it all: Former Coach at Penn State Is Charged With Abuse

The story explained how a grand jury investigation had revealed that over a 15-year period, the now 67-year-old Sandusky had sexually abused eight boys in his care. Sandusky was arrested and released on $100,000 bail, charged with 40 counts of sexual abuse (Figure 13-9). Gary Schultz, Penn State’s senior vice president for finance, and Tim Curley, the school’s athletic director, were also charged with perjury and failure to report to authorities what they knew of the allegations, as required by state law.

President Spanier, who acknowledged that he had been made aware of the 2002 incident, issued a statement expressing “complete confidence” in how Schultz and Curley handled the situation.

One who wasn’t charged but whom Penn State watchers wondered about was the school’s 85-year-old head football coach. Paterno, according to the grand jury, learned of one allegation of abuse in 2002 and immediately reported it to Curley. While the coach wasn’t implicated by the grand jury, it remained unclear whether Paterno ever followed up after his initial report.

Penn State shower room by the coach. When, in 2002, a former player and then assistant coach witnessed Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy in the locker room shower, he reportedly alerted Paterno, who told Curley.

After the horror of the grand jury report, events quickly escalated.

While students converged on the campus home of Coach Paterno to show their support, Paterno himself tried to take control of the rapidly deteriorating situation by securing a better contract and announcing that he would serve one more year as coach and then resign.

It was too late.

On November 9, four days after the grand jury report went public, the Penn State Board of Trustees announced that Spanier had resigned and that Joe Paterno—the most hallowed name in college football coaching history, a statue of whom stood triumphantly outside Penn State’s Beaver Stadium—had been fired. Ultimately, Jerry Sandusky was found guilty on 45 of 48 charges and will spend the rest of his life in jail. In January 2012, two months after he had been fired, Joe Paterno died of complications from lung cancer. On July 22, 2012, in the final blow to his reputation, Joe Paterno’s seven foot, 900-pound statue outside Beaver Stadium was removed by forklift, because, said Penn State’s new president, the statue had become “a source of division and an obstacle to healing in our university and beyond”

Case Study Linsanity

For one brief shining moment in the early months of 2012, there arose a basketball phenomenon that spread beyond sports to embrace the entire world.

Jeremy Lin, an obscure, unheralded, 22-year-old Asian American, evangelical Christian, backup point guard—a Harvard graduate, no less—came off the bench for the New York Knicks and lit up the New York sky with hard court exploits that left mouths agape throughout the globe.

Linsanity was born.

And the public relations ramifications were breathtaking.

Intervention from On High

Jeremy Lin began as a high school phenom in Palo Alto, California, attracting attention as a tall—6′3″—Asian American basketballer who led his team to a state championship. He was offered no college scholarships but went on to star on an over-achieving Harvard team and set many Ivy League records.

Nonetheless, Lin wasn’t good enough to be drafted by a single National Basketball Association (NBA) team. But he persevered and tried out anyway, gaining a spot with the Golden State Warriors.

Lin barely played in that rookie year and was subsequently cut by the Warriors in year two. He found a temporary position with the Houston Rockets, but that team, too, felt obliged to cut the young Ivy Leaguer before the season. So Lin toiled for a time in the NBA’s Development League, where the Knicks—the league’s perennial underachievers—picked him up, looked at him in preseason, and then sent him back down.

One day in January 2012, after toiling admirably for the Erie BayHawks in the D-League, Lin got a call that would change his life forever. The Knicks recalled him as a fourth-string backup. But again, Lin played only 55 minutes in 23 games, mostly at what the players called “garbage time,” when the game was out of reach.

Once again, Lin so much feared being cut that he asked a chaplain at a pregame prayer session to pray for him.

Evidently, the chaplain did.

With the Knicks suffering injuries and poor play, the Knicks coach, in “desperation,” inserted his fourth-string point guard into the lineup.

The results were instantaneous and miraculous.

Lin lit up the court with baskets from all over and dazzling passing. The Knicks, losers of 11 of 13 prior games without Lin in the lineup, went on a winning streak with the young point guard at the helm.

And Jeremy Lin never looked back.

From Nowhere to Everywhere

Lin’s play for the Knicks that winter was “off the charts.”

He regularly scored 20 points a game against the best and highest paid players on the planet. His play was electric, with alley-oop passes, daring drives, and crushing falls to the floor after making circus shots.

On February 14, with less than a second remaining in a game with Toronto, Lin launched a three-point shot that won the game.

    Lin became the first NBA player to score at least 20 points and have seven assists in each of his first five starts. Lin scored 89, 109, and 136 points in his first three, four, and five career starts, respectively, all three the most by any player since the merger between the American Basketball Association and the NBA in 1976–77.

The New York media ate it up with new headlines every day.

    ■ “Linsane”

    ■ “Lincredible”

    ■ “Linsational”

    ■ “Linvincible”

    ■ “Lintoxicating”

The puns were, well, “Lin-itless.”

Within three weeks of his first game as a starter, at least seven e-books were being published on Lin, and the Global Language Monitor declared that “Linsanity” had met its criteria to be considered a bona fide English-language word.

International media also flocked to New York to see the Asian savior. Indeed, with the retirement of 7′4″ Yao Ming from China, Jeremy Lin seemed poised to inherit Yao’s mantle as the most popular athlete in China (Figure 14-8). In rapid order:

Lin’s name was the most searched athlete on the Internet in China, eclipsing basketball’s Kobe Bryant and soccer star Ronaldo.

■ While Lin’s U.S. twitter account attracted 6 million followers (not too shabby), his Chinese twitter account attracted 26 million followers!

■ In 2011, China’s Vivid Magazine named Lin one of its top eight influential Chinese Americans.

■ Lin’s Chinese name, “linshuhao,” was put up for auction in China for 260,000 yuan, or $41,080 (again, not too shabby).

■ Lin signed a two-year marketing partnership contract with Volvo to serve as advertising spokesperson in China and other Chinese-speaking Asian areas.

In addition, Lin and his marketing/public relations team quickly moved to trademark the word “Linsanity” for use on T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, energy drinks, duffel bags, fruit juices, nightshirts, scarves, socks, underwear, sandals, visors, bandannas, footwear, and action figures, all listed on Lin’s trademark application. The trademark would provide him with legal protection against others who wanted to stamp, sew, or print the “Linsanity” name on their merchandise.

With continued prominence on the court, the international marketing and public relations opportunities for Jeremy Lin would be astounding.

The Next Challenge

As in most fairy tales, Jeremy Lin’s magic season ended abruptly as an injury caused him to miss the last months of the Knicks’ season.

In the off-season of 2012, Lin was the subject of a bidding war between the Houston Rockets—Yao Ming’s team in a city with a huge Asian American population—and the Knicks. Eventually, the Rockets, who had once before cut Lin because they saw no future for him, signed the player to a three-year contract, the Houston general manager admitting that the first time around, he “made a mistake.”

The price of Lin’s new contract?

Twenty-five million dollars.

Not bad for a young man who, a year earlier, didn’t know where his next paycheck was coming from.

The moral: Everybody loves a Linner Seitel, F. P. (05/2013). The Practice of Public Relations, 12th Edition. [VitalSource Bookshelf Online]. Retrieved from https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/97812699869