Gossip and rumour are all around us.

Overheard conversations, online reviews, print and social media, chatter around the office lunch tables... And sometimes this noise affects how people think about an organisation or brand.

It’s clear that there are some topics of conversation that have a strong impact on public opinion, such as how a company or organisation responds to issues of sustainability, gender and diversity. These are the areas most likely to lead to loud public condemnation.  

However, gossip or rumour doesn’t need to lead to ‘cancellation’ to have an impact. Below the radar of the big stories, people are influenced by many things they hear about you – all of which can be enough to turn their minds against you.

Human factors in gossip

We are a highly social species and our success is a function of our ability to live together collaboratively and reciprocally. If when humans first started to live in large groups everyone had to find their own food each day, it would not have been very efficient. Reciprocity allows us to specialise in tasks that are for the good of everyone.

Gossip is a hardwired behaviour that works to keep members of our social groups in check by letting us know who can be trusted. Trust is an essential ingredient of reciprocity. Academic studies show that we spend a significant amount of our time gossiping.

In our modern world, media has extended the range and scale of gossip but it still touches a primitive nerve.  

One human factor which amplifies gossip is confirmation bias. Once you've heard a rumour, read a bad review or seen some bad PR, you see evidence of it everywhere. Algorithms supercharge this by feeding you more of what you've seen already. It happens unconsciously but that doesn't make it less influential – instead, it makes us feel more convinced.

Hurdles to overcome

The dominant hurdle to overcome with gossip is trust. The source of trust has become something other than your organisation or brand, and is often non-specific (people can’t remember where they heard the negative perspective). Because of this, it can feel to people like they've heard it in lots of places which gives it more credibility. That's how confirmation bias works.

The other hurdle is that bad news is like a magnet. If someone hears one bad thing about you, they'll be hyper-sensitive to anything else, even if the stories are from different timeframes. Reading a bad review about customer service can quickly spin out to include a gender pay gap or pricing policies.

Strategies for changing minds  

There is only one job to be done to change a mind that has been set against you by gossip – to change the frame of trust. You have to become the source of trust, even if that might mean putting your hand up to take responsibility for some negative behaviour.

Of course, the gossip may be completely untrue. It could have been misattributed, intentionally malicious, or innocently misunderstood. Nevertheless, you still need to re-establish yourself as the source of truth.

A good example of a company doing that is Oatly milk. Fckoatly.com compiles all of Oatly’s negative reviews and PR onto one website, addressing negative stories about the brand and their corporate behaviour and inviting you to click on an ‘I hate Oatly’ button.

However, by compiling so many negative stories in one place, Oatly runs the risk of falling over another hurdle: argument efficiency decline (AED). AED occurs because our brains create an average of arguments – so if you have a point that is 90 per cent persuasive, a second point that is 50 per cent and a third point 25 percent, your overall persuasiveness will be near 50 percent. This is why skilled lawyers and debaters will tell you that it is better to focus solely on your strongest argument rather than try to dismantle every argument the opposition throws at you. 

It's unclear at this stage if Oatly's strategy will fall victim to AED or successfully shift the mindsets of detractors and grow their share of the category. However, one thing is clear – they are attempting to reclaim their place as the source of trust, which, ultimately, is the only move you can make when faced with gossip and rumour.