Branding expert Laura Ries writes on Walmart's new advertising campaign to convince Americans they aren't jerks after all...

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, started a new ad campaign yesterday designed to defend its reputation and praise its record, as an employer and corporate citizen.

Come on, who are they kidding? Not me, that’s for sure.

After being hammered for decades by bad PR for the low wages and benefits it pays its workers, Wal-Mart thinks a few slick advertisements will repair its brand? Management must be drinking the Kool-Aid served by their ad agencies down in Bentonville.

Advertising messages cannot change the mind of a consumer. And most consumers believe that Wal-Mart is a great place to shop for low prices but not the best place to work.

Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the US. They treat their employees badly. When you're the largest employer, you can't conceal things like that and you can't make the fact that people despise you for it go away just because you run some shiny ads. So what does Laura suggest?

Wal-Mart should learn from its own mistakes. The company was unable to change any minds when it used advertising to try and move the brand upscale to sell expensive wine, clothing and jewelry. So it is unlikely to be successful using advertising to convince people it is a good place to work. Advertising cannot change a human mind.

So how can Wal-Mart repair its image? First they need to do something. Something big. Then they can use PR. The media gives the message the necessary credibility to get into the mind of the consumer.

Saying to “do something” to get PR sounds easy, but obviously it is hard. Powerful ideas are not always easy to come by. That is why sometimes the best ideas are those you steal. Or shall I say recycle.

Leaders should lead and set the standards for the whole industry. In 1914, Henry Ford shocked the world by paying his workers $5 a day instead of the standard $2.34. By doubling the working wage he made buying his cars affordable for his own workers. While Ford was initially ridiculed by the Wall Street Journal and other business leaders, the move is legendary in terms of building consumer trust, support and loyalty.

Wal-Mart could easily do the same thing. Wal-Mart could introduce a new Wal-Mart minimum wage at twice the federal minimum. Moving the minimum from $5.15 to $10.30. That would be dramatic change. And it would be the start of a program for building back worker support and consumer affection.

Laura continues, with some other good ideas for Wal-Mart and it's worth your while to head on over. But reading that made me think of another business - the one people usually compare Wal-Mart to when looking for a contrast. Costco. Costco's in the news again, because Costco's founder supports... increasing the minimum wage.

The chief executive of Costco Wholesale, the nation's largest wholesale club, yesterday became the most prominent member of a new organization of business owners and executives pressing Congress to approve an increase in the federal minimum wage.

Jim Sinegal, a maverick entrepreneur who founded Costco in 1983 and has resisted Wall Street pressure to cut wages and benefits for his 130,000 employees, said he signed onto the effort because he thinks a higher minimum wage would be good for the nation's economy as well as its workers.

"The more people make, the better lives they're going to have and the better consumers they're going to be," Sinegal said in an interview. "It's going to provide better jobs and better wages."

Ford said it before Sinegal, but some truths don't change.

At this point Wal-Mart's got a problem. The places they want to expand into, the metropolitan centers, don't want them, and have activist groups fighting hard against them. They're a flashpoint, and the other similiar stores, like CostCo, don't get nearly the same opposition.

When Walmart moves into really deprived rural areas it often brings in goods and services people really couldn't get anywhere near. It provides a real service. And if it treats its workers badly - well, in many of these places, sadly, that's par for the course. People used to backbreaking rural work just shrug and take it.

Most city neighbourhoods don't need what Walmart offers, and as many smaller municipalities have discovered, Walmart can actually be a sink - the underpaid workers wind up needing social assistance, needing Medicaid (which Walmart knows, it counsels its staff on how to sign up), and so on. They're poor, they can't make ends meet and they wind up being a net drag on the municipality. And when they kill a swathe of smaller stores around them they often wind up actually lowering the municipality's tax assessments.

They're poison for any community which already has a retail sector that is offering the same range of goods and services they offer.

And Laura is right - if Walmart wants to clean up its image, then it first needs to work on substance. Want people not to think you treat your workers like shit? Raise their wages. Reduce the turnover rate. Pay them their overtime. Don't lock them in the store.

Etc... This isn't hard, this is ethics 101 - the Golden Rule. Would the Waltons want to be treated the way they treat their staff? Does their religion have something to say about that? Perhaps they should act on it, eh?

What Walmart is currently reaping in terms of problems caused by its negative image is what it has sown. And fixing its PR problem will only occur if it fixes its practices.

The problem is that Walmart really does compete on price and selection. Who goes to Walmart for anything else? And paying workers more is easy - but reaping the benefits of paying them more is harder than just increasing wages - if it wasn't, GM workers would be thrilled with GM, who, after all, pays very well. But they generally despise GM management, and with good reason.

So Walmart is right to be wary of just raising wages - and yet, it's the first step without which nothing else will work.

Maybe they should spend some time figuring out CostCo makes it work. Or maybe, frankly, they should just write off having a good reputation. Cheap has worked for them, and it'll continue to work for them, until it doesn't (almost every great retailer eventually goes belly up.)

But Laura's right - if it's a problem they're serious about, then they need to take the bull by the horns and do something dramatic, Christian, and right - like paying their workers a decent wage. And who knows, maybe it will work. Let's give Sinegal the last word:

"In my view, some of these industries that pay minimum wage are constantly turning their people," Sinegal said. "They spend more on turnover than they would in paying the additional wages."