Key branding principles behind Public Relations

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Question - are PR practices changing?

Answer - the growth of online investment in communications based on the growth of the Internet as a communications tool is making PR an ever more critical element of the overall communications mix

Key points

Public relations used to be viewed as the most under-exploited of communications media, and it is especially suitable for branding. It is based on the view of focus customers as a community, and a successful brand develops its own community. It therefore feeds, and feeds upon, normative effects - the fact that lots of people of a certain type (your type of focus customer grouping) endorse the brand. Therefore, the right kind of public relations endorsement can be highly beneficial and, as a bonus, relatively cheap to build.

The negative is that public relations is also a many-headed monster out for a good story, and the more famous you are, the more of a target you are too. PR classically goes through a cycle of:

• promising newcomer
• newcomer who made it
• star
• idol on a precipice
• fallen idol
• "whatever happened to......? or "the one who bounced back"

If you use PR extensively, you have to be prepared for the full cycle, to take advantage of "windows of opportunity" and to respond rapidly to adverse publicity. Building close relationships with key journalists will help. The good news is that trusted brands tend to bounce back from PR crises quickly unless their core values are undermined.

Good PR practice would include:

• concentrate on your focus customer segments
• always have as your objective the enriching of the brand experience
• do not ever let the trustworthiness of your brand be undermined
• do not let your core values be undermined
• build strong relationships with influential journalists/spokespeople
• associate yourself with specific topics so as to be "front of mind" as a source of stories on those topics
• publish press stories which can be published without reworking
• make brand executives available for interview
• have back-up response systems in place & well-rehearsed crisis management procedures

The new media

The increased use of the Internet for brand marketing communications has blurred the definition of what is or is not PR.

Search engines, and especially Google and Yahoo! are key targets for all PR campaigns nowadays given that the average American is logged as performing around 100 Internet searches a month.

Electronic PR submission tools can bounce your story into all online media at great speed and provide strong tracking and measurement interfaces.

Blogging is a new form of PR tool, whether you distribute your own blogs or link into the top bloggers - Disney recently announced plans for the new Harry Potter entertainment park via seven of the world's top bloggers and reached 350 million people within a few days with a minmum of investment.

Social media sites, such as Twitter in particular, are seen as new platforms for PR distribution. President Obama made heavy use of Twitter during the 2008 presidential election.

The reformed structure of world news generation is also having an impact. Most news media are cutting back on the number and experience of their editors, and so attractive stories are rapidly repeated around the world as everyone takes stories from everybody else.

Measurement

Most companies track:

• number of mentions
• amount of airtime
• number of column inches
• whether the message was positive, neutral or negative

However, it is difficult to work these measures up into a predictive model, because:

• some highly negative messages can have a positive impact on the brand, because they increase awareness. Research suggests that a PR crisis rarely has a long term impact on strong brands
• there may well be no standard message (especially if the "story" ends up consisting of articles written by people not associated with your organisation - e.g. TV, radio, press, bloggers, customers etc.)
• the message can take up different amounts of space in different places
• some people delivering the message have greater credibility & impact than others

However the growth of the Internet as a PR medium, and the proliferation of electronic tools being developed round this, is making the measurement task considerably easier than it was. New 'market research' tools have been developed to trawl the Internet collecting and analysing brand mentions within competitive contexts and these are bound to become ever more critical measurement systems.

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