Bausch & Lomb Sets a Standard in Excellence that Just Might Not be Enough

Now for the record, I can be a crabby bitch. Considering PR's status quo, especially here in the blogosphere, it's hard not to be. To accuse me of picking on the self-inflated Me2FlyingRevolutionMidgets is understatement. I admit it. But that said, however rare it might be, I do absolutely recognize excellence. Ironically, that's probably at the root of my lack of mercy for the losers Gnomes, Baradell, French and friends.

Anyway, late last week Bausch & Lomb's CEO Ron Zarrella and his team were an overwhelming example of how to do PR right. Granted Zarella's a paisan and I may be a little biased, but he's also proven to be quite the genuine article. At least for now, he's a communications God in my book.

Here's how I came to that conclusion. Below is a loose case study for your review. Here you'll find a brief chronology of events and an analysis from a PR perspective. Note, for the record, this is not a comprehensive analysis by any means but rather an overview. Frankly, it's opinion and purposely incomplete so as to invite others to comment.

This just in from Bloomberg News...

President George W. Bush's immigration plan is a "public relations campaign, with no long-term solutions," Mike Honda, a Democratic congressman from California and vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said.

In a nationally televised speech Monday, Bush said he will send 6,000 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexican border and endorsed creating a temporary worker program to ease the strain caused by the flood of illegal immigration. Bush would boost the number of Border Patrol officers to about 18,000 by the end of 2008, which would more than double the size of the force since he took office.

"At a time when our country needed a detailed, long-term solution, we instead received short-term window dressing fixes," said Honda Saturday in the Democrats' weekly radio address.

You know the Industry is in trouble when you're characterized (dis-ed) by politicians no less as being empty and frivolous.