An interesting PR question

As the Cummings incident will inevitably fade over the next couple of weeks, it leaves me with an interesting thought about PR. Traditional business PR wisdom says if you are caught out making a bad mistake, own up to it quickly, apologise, and public anger will quickly subside. However, the one obvious drawback with that approach is that if your misdemeanour is really bad, you might have to take some remedial action you don't want to do.

I think in recent years a much better strategy has been developed which gets you to the same final place without the cost of any remedial action. The strategy is to simply double down on defending yourself against your misdemeanour, without necessarily resorting to coherent or justifiable defences, because as long as you can survive the public outrage for about 3 to 5 days, you will be OK. It is interesting to explore the mechanics of why this strategy actually works and I think it goes something like this.

No matter what the incident is that causes you the problem, the condemnation by the general public will never be universal simply because it is absolutely impossible to get universal agreement on any topic within a human population. Therefore even if the majority of people feel you have committed a breach which requires some remedial action, there will always be a significant minority who will strongly disagree with that majority.

Those who critique your action can't keep repeating themselves or asking for remedial action for more than a few days so the longer you can hold out, the more pressure will be put on your critics to drop it and "move on". In fact if they don't do that then they must come across as overly obsessive or judgemental because there are so many issues that demand our attention. For me this has been a really interesting revelation which I have witnessed multiple times in both UK and of course USA politics.

So my final question is does this new rule only apply to politics or could big business adopt it as well? Really what I am asking is my statement "it is absolutely impossible to get universal agreement on any topic within a human population", which underpins the effectiveness of this new PR strategy, always true or does it only apply in certain contentious areas like politics, religion and morality?