Ron Culp is a friend and former client of some 21 odd years. His personal story is remarkable. It is a teaching moment for anyone considering a career in the PR world. His blog, Culpwrit.com, is one of the most popular around among those looking to get their careers off the ground.
And here we are at the front end of another school term, perhaps the beginning of that all-important senior year for those ramping up to liftoff in the real world. So let’s explore some of the best advice you’ll ever hear on how to optimize that final season and get ready for the rest of your life.
Ron graciously consented to let me peel back the veneer and get closer in on the grist that helped propel his life through remarkable experiences as head of corporate communications at two the most iconic companies in the world – Sara Lee and Sears. From there he moved to the agency business running the Chicago office of financial and merger/acquisition specialist Sard Verbinnen and then moved on to Ketchum Public Relations as regional chief and head of its North American corporate practice. We will also bring you up to date on the dawn of the latest chapter in Part II.
So you may want to take notes. Here we go:
Ron landed on the fundamental point about college life, your life; any point in life – all you have is time and your choices about how to spend it. “The central marker of my college experience was involvement in extra-curricular activities. You can basically split your life between doing your studies and managing your social life. Or you can follow a slightly different path,” he said. In Ron’s case, with dramatic results connected to his choices. His point is simple but profound — you can choose to be passive or really active. It’s a clear choice. A conscious decision.
In our business contacts and relationships matter, and Ron started developing his connections while in school. “I’m still hearing from people in my network that began in the college years. Just today I received a text from a guy I went to school with who 40 years later wanted to convey an opportunity I might be interested in.”
What was the Ron model?
o President of his dorm
o Editor of the campus newspaper
o Statewide chair of the College Republicans group
o Student member of the School Board of Trustees
o And through this connection involved in other University committees
Chief takeaway – this decision set in place a life-long devotion to raising your hand, saying yes and getting involved. The benefits are tangible and compelling – career altering in fact. Ron claims the social life can be woven through all of these activities and thus it’s not just a singular slavish focus on nose to grind stone.
But make no mistake this habit of his was a deal maker for a future filled with great opportunity. “As you can imagine through my school paper experience, I’m interviewing the Mayor. I’m meeting the Gubernatorial candidates during an election. I enjoyed being in that space because I was interested in politics and thought it might lead me in that direction. It did.”
What’s going on here? Can you see the theme? Ron secures meaning, enjoyment, interest that fuels his passions FROM his involvement in all these activities beyond the classroom. To be sure it was purposeful. He’s a purposeful guy. The advice: get involved – no, really involved. All you have is time. How you invest it will make the difference later in where you get to go, what you get to do.
Tomorrow’s post will bring a focus on Ron’s career choices and key moments along the path that helped shape his trajectory. Stand by for more.
In our last post we talked about five ways to become a credible source of brand-owned media (content creation). Foremost in that discussion was an important point: how to become a TRUSTED, and therefore valued, source.
An article today at Marketing Daily stresses the point about credibility. Why does this matter?
There are so many voices, so many places to get information the consumer is now in search of what is reliable, bankable, believe-able in the midst of all this noise. Recent studies show an increase in consumer preference for traditional media sources like newspapers because of the trust factor. There’s still an underlying sense that professional media organizations continue to employ highly trained staff and have ethical standards that require them to fully verify a story’s assertions and details before publishing.
Nonetheless, we are at an important inflexion point in media where brands can affordably become a source of content themselves. It’s transformational. And while this is both inevitable and unstop-able in the scheme of things, it’s also vital we understand the consumer’s underlying needs and concerns as this marketing communications picture continues to evolve.
Validate, corroborate and prove the assertions brands make…
What do consumers want? They want validation of what’s being said from sources they trust and respect. You’re saying yeah, but isn’t the “real person like me” supposed to be the nexus of validation? That’s changing. In the midst of so much media content, thought and opinion – consumers are looking for voices they believe to make sense of it all and provide guidance.
Outside influencers, experts and credentialed knowledge brokers facilitate this desire for validation. Brands proclaiming their expertise in a subject area is one thing, following the same rules professional media organizations employ to verify assertions through expert quote-able sources is entirely another.
o This is how we make it true, real, credible for the consumer. We in effect borrow equity from the third parties who have established their own credibility in a subject area relevant to our business.
Content creation is not merely an option for brands these days. It’s vital and important as the media landscape continues to evolve from “talking at” people to conversation. How you go about doing it will spell the difference between success and discovering you have no audience because trust has not taken root.
One of the greatest marketing evolutions in the Internet era: brands have acquired the ability to be content creators – publishers, producers of their own media. This fits perfectly with the other great strategic upheaval — brands can no longer simply imprint messages and attempt to exert “control” over consumer behavior by pushing messages at consumers.
As I write this, many brands still believe this will work.
The brand/consumer relationship is tougher to build now and demands a more selfless form of engagement. It requires singular devotion to understanding and mining relevance to the consumer’s lifestyle interests and passions. Brands-that-matter to their users can earn permission for a relationship by connecting tangibly, emotionally to activities and interests their consumer already cares about.
So doesn’t it stand to reason that working hard to become a source of valuable, interesting, engaging, entertaining information about these lifestyle passions could be important? For a fashion or jewelry brand it’s the opportunity to tap into that creative self-expression that is at the core of what drives a fashion-focused person. For the food brand it might be enabling the culinary creativity, learning and emotional payoff going on everyday in the kitchen (experimenting with new dishes, tastes and techniques).
In virtually every category insight research can help you unearth this unique emotional grist that drives the most devoted fans and followers. And from there is an enormously powerful opportunity to cement that relationship by casting the brand as an enabler and provider of stories and content that offers intrinsic value – How? Information, ideas and experiences that help the consumer enjoy, do what they do better and connect with others that share their interests.
Trust is the key to engagement…
But the word trust looms large in this. How does a brand successfully establish itself as a trusted and valued source? Here are five ways a brand can develop a respected and reliable channel of rich-content media:
1. The value of respected outside voices
In the news business, outside quote-able sources are employed to validate assertions made in a news story. Similarly, outside experts, influencers and knowledge-brokers can bring their own credibility and cachet to the story telling in brand-owned media. Bring in the experts as contributors and steer clear of putting them in a compromised position of endorsing or directly selling your product.
2. The type, tone and tenor of the content matters
Watch the overt selling. Your media mission is to be helpful, useful. Think like a magazine editor or TV producer working to build exciting, interesting stories that add value to the reader’s lifestyle. Operate like a traditional media organization focused on reader and viewer benefit. Take a reportorial approach to the content. If the communication comes off like reporting and informing rather than persuading, you’ll earn the attention of your best followers.
3. Identify the storytellers
Create an editorial board of editors and contributors. If you identify and position the writers and producers, you humanize the entire interaction for your audience. You also create an environment for trust to take root because the contributors are identified and thus “real people” are engaged in the communication.
Create an editorial board of editors and contributors. If you identify and position the writers and producers, you humanize the entire interaction for your audience. You also create an environment for trust to take root because the contributors are identified and thus “real people” are engaged in the communication.
4. Transparency
How do real friends speak with each other? Honest, straightforward, real, open communication is fundamental between true friends. Treat your audience with the same respect. When issues and complaints arise, don’t hide or spin. Be matter-of-fact. Admit mistakes – probably the hardest thing to do, but also the most refreshing and endearing behavior you can show. Nobody’s perfect. No one expects your organization or brand to be perfect.
5. Be entertaining
You can’t bore your customer’s into loving you and coming back for more. Valuable, useful information is a prerequisite. How that information is served up can vary from tedious to fun and interesting. Make them laugh and make them cry. Video may be the most powerful medium available and offers the magic of words, picture, sound, music, personalities and color. It’s a bite-size world we live in now so keep it short. But most of all keep it entertaining. Mainstream media is working overtime to achieve this and so should you.
What’s the end game? Once a respected source, you have an open channel of communication that’s direct. And with content that’s got their attention – a long way from the good old days of beating people over the head with repetition and self-serving messages you hope and pray will break through the noise. Ten years ago brands could only dream of creating such a relationship. Now it’s possible.
From editorial shotgun to building influence and engagement
By Robert Wheatley
There may have been a time when massive distributions of press releases or video and audio news releases would have been the principal component in mainstream consumer media PR plans. Those days are gone.
Have you fully made the strategic and tactical shift to focus on a different view of engagement and communications? Do conversations and relationships sit at the forefront of your campaigns, more so than looking for gross impressions and measurement yardsticks based purely on audience number delivery?
Is Internet based communication, outreach and community building getting the budget priority or is mainstream media still grabbing the spending spotlight?
At a recent meeting of the Association of National Advertisers, Coca-Cola CMO Joe Tripodi was quoted in coverage of the event saying that conversations are now more important than impressions. To be sure effective message delivery has always been a vital consideration – nonetheless mass or “tonnage” of placements was also a major part of the editorial results story.
Think Different…
• We are now participating in the era of relationship-based marketing.
• Where influence is earned based on the brand’s ability to mine relevance with the target consumer’s lifestyle.
• And true communication is a not only an outcome of optimizing the intersection of earned media and owned content, but also developing and investing in conversational tools. The crux of this effort is more peer-to-peer than loading the communications shotgun for another outward facing message blast.
Quality of contact is important and quality builds from a base of reciprocity. How do you know if your thinking is right on this score? Ask yourself this question: am I actively looking for ways that my brand can act and operate to improve my best customer’s lifestyle and enable/facilitate their personal interests?
Pay-to-Play
Even mainstream media channels are in a state of transition as audience stats once employed to lure in advertisers gets thinned by the splintering of consumer attention — mostly to places where opt-in engagement work well because the content to consume is not about overt selling. That said, increasingly the lines between editorial (church) and paid (state) are blurring. Just as computers and TV are merging into one platform so is the ability to purchase alignment of a brand message within the content side of media — digital, print and broadcast.
This is tricky because a fine line exists here between useful, valuable, helpful messaging and something less than that. Nevertheless we can expect to see more of this ahead.
The Future…
Editorial media outreach is and will remain a relevant and significant part of the PR value proposition. That said, the strategic approach has changed from big distribution plays to focus on customization, relationship development, unique angles, exclusives and narrowcasting. And operating in parallel to earned media is a growing layer of direct forms of communication (and conversation in social platforms) where quality will forever outweigh quantity as the principle driver of effectiveness.
PR experts are content creators now in opt-in channels where relevance spells the difference between aggregating an audience of followers — or not. More strategy is required. More focus. More understanding of consumer desires and passions. More targeted, interactive media activity.
Aside from any social, moral or environmental priorities, your primary goal in business is…. to sell more products, more often at better prices. Success often assumes you have a relevant brand in a healthy category with the right value proposition. But wait, how brands connect with consumers is in a state of change.
Now we learn the consequence of our whipsaw economic environment is a thorough re-evaluation of what matters, what people care about. Gone are the remaining vestiges of consumption for its own sake and consumer’s defining themselves and their lives on the basis of the products they acquire.
In its place comes a soulful desire for greater life meaning. A refined sense of purpose. A drive for community and social engagement.
• Are you witnessing this change?
• How will this impact how you position your brand?
• How you go to market?
• What should your brand’s message be about?
• What tools you should use to reach out?
Please share your views and opinions. You agree, disagree? Why?
A backwards glance shows seismic shift in the PR world
By Robert Wheatley
It was without a doubt one of the most powerful PR campaigns I’ve ever been associated with. An entirely new product category created from scratch off a compelling, dynamic public relations strategy. Yes, I said PR — not advertising or sales promotion. Over $100 million in sales (and that’s in 1994 dollars) was achieved and an 84% share of market within 16 months of launch. It was the introduction of First Alert brand carbon monoxide alarm products.
Recently we heard from the Wall Street Journal that futurist Richard Dawson believes newspapers will be irrelevant by 2022. The reference point for this incredible shift can be more fully appreciated by briefly looking backwards to a moment in time when conventional print and broadcast media were popular and respected sources of news, information and influence on consumer behavior and public opinion.
Here’s the story of PR campaign media strategies that were built from a full-scale deployment of earned media tactics.
• And the approach is no longer as relevant. New businesses are now developed in an interactive, narrowcast environment without push-button scale-ability
The lesson: the old rules no longer apply. New media protocols, planning processes and program strategies literally demand a transformation of our beliefs about brand building, PR strategies, how PR firms are put together. Thus how we look at messaging, outreach, measurement and evaluation of ideas is different than it was even 10 years ago.
When editorial media ruled!!
It was 1993, the firm I owned at the time, Wheatley Blair, was hired by First Alert, the leading home safety products brand in the US. They had invented the residential smoke alarm category and literally owned the retail market for them. Rich Timmons, now principal and President of Wheatley & Timmons, was the global marketing chief at First Alert – a marketer who had followed conventional paths focused on TV advertising and who was going to do something unprecedented: launch the next biggest thing to come along in his company’s history through PR.
A new category: Carbon Monoxide (CO) Alarms
We were awestruck the moment we learned that CO poisoning was the largest source of accidental poisoning deaths in America.
First Alert had created the first affordable residential detector for this previously unseen and little understood hazard that claimed at least 1,500 lives every year and injured thousands more.
The Silent Killer
How do you convince Americans to protect themselves from a hazard you cannot see, taste, smell or touch? And after all, headaches are common and ubiquitous, right? We created a theme that dramatically defined the threat.
• Poison center physicians, indoor air quality experts, leading fire service officials and others were recruited to help explain the problem and support the solution
• We built the Carbon Monoxide Information Bureau to house the scientific and medical evidence
• Brought together consumers who had lost loved ones in CO accidents to personalize and make the hazard tangible and real
Launching a Media Tsunami
Media tours were conducted with CO survivors and coordinated with local fire department representatives. We booked medical expert appearances on TODAY, Good Morning America and all of the network news programs. Placed in-depth hazard education features in national newspapers and virtually every major daily in the US. Similar treatments on family protection were secured in women’s service, lifestyle and DIY magazines. We assembled an in-house TV news production department that was producing a regular flow of 90-second video news packages.
Our tracking on consumer media impressions within six months topped 700 million and grew to over a billion. There were 6 o’clock news stories in major markets about lines outside stores exclaiming that First Alert alarm products were sold out. A major trade publication featured a quote from a senior buyer at Walmart who described First Alert CO alarms as the “cabbage patch doll of the hardware department.”
A business was created. A category established. First Alert doubled in size. Thousands of lives were saved in the process. Importantly, editorial media in virtually all channels was the instrument of awareness, education and motivation. The decline of traction, audiences and the splintering of media into hundreds if not thousands of platforms of self-interest make this story simply a reflection of a another age in media communication.
The same product launch, repeated today would be wholly different and geared to empower individuals to spread the word as much as media properties are addressed to influence the influencers.
For First Alert we constructed a media machine that hummed and produced and delivered editorial attention. That is no longer the way communication operates. Yet many still attempt to apply the old rules of quantity thresholds to a world now devoted to the quality and personalization of encounters with communication.
Nine years after we began, the agency moved on to represent Kidde, the other leading category brand. We helped them secure the number one market share position. This dramatic video PSA was part of the effort:
Agencies that lead bring more value than order takers
By Robert Wheatley
Hugh MacLeod is a creative and insightful expert who regularly exposes the soft underside of the marketing world — and helps us laugh at ourselves. His thoughts, expressed as graphic images, can be down right powerful. Today’s post in some respects is a perfect foil for a few of his engaging ideas. (Check out gapingvoid.com – and subscribe to his daily image emails).
Great work falling from great ideas can transform the future direction and growth of business. Yet more often than not, by definition, it will require clients to stretch, to have faith and take risk. And none of this will see the light of day unless agencies step up to passionately support and defend solid out-of-the-ordinary thinking. This is often the price of strategic concepts that are unique, unexpected and disruptive (in a positive way).
An insightful article on this subject was published today by Cory Treffelett of Catalyst SF. You can read it here . In his excellent piece he accurately describes the difference between a vendor and partner style relationship between agency and client. Essentially the order taker vs. the leader.
Good agencies are in the strategic idea creation business. Clients make investments in programs and concepts that will grow business, build brand reputation and attract or retain new customers. No easy task. And I can recount over the years in virtually every instance of needle-busting results, innovative concepts always supplied the accelerant. Thus risk and leadership is demanded of the agency.
The path of least resistance is easily followed and at times it feels much safer to stay within the comfortable bounds of serenity — a quiet surf made calm by the absence of tough discussion that can whip up a big wave or two along the way.
Fear – collectively our greatest enemy
What stands in the way of great ideas and game-changing initiatives? It’s fear. Fear of rocking the boat. Fear of losing the account. Fear of failure. Fear of disagreement. Fear of ruffling feathers. Fear of slaying sacred cows. Fear of the unknown. Fear of folded arms and taught expressions. Fear of shaking heads. Fear not being loved. Fear of losing the budget. Fear of the boss. Fear of mistakes. Fear of conflict. Fear of perception leading reality. Fear of risk, of making the big bet. This insidious human condition interferes so many times, closing the gate on otherwise powerful moves that may occasionally require a willingness to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”
This is not a call to arrogance and conceited behavior by the way. What is in the client’s best interests at all times will be growth and development of their brand and their business results. The fact that innovation is often at the fulcrum of transformative periods only means that risk will be part of the mix in bringing these things to fruition. Clients who are challenged by their agencies to accomplish more through bolder initiatives are needed now more than ever. And are often in short supply for all of the reasons mentioned above. Just take the order, do the work and make sure everyone is happy and smiling all of the time? No great thing was ever accomplished by simply riding the existing wave. Blazing a new trail will be required of us.
Agencies and Clients Together Offer the Best Formula…
There’s an old saying, “an agency is only as good as its client.” Well in some end-game sort of reference I suppose this is true if all you ever hear is no. Should clients run from risk and punish their agency for bringing bold ideas then Houston, we have a problem!! Ultimately however, agencies have an obligation to bring this kind of thinking routinely. It should be the rule rather than the exception.
Clients can help this process by openly inviting and encouraging their agency partners to challenge them, to say no when its necessary, to think big, to look for new territory to trail-blaze. In essence to disrupt the category conventions and accepted brand behaviors that can deter major leaps ahead. Clients also acquire an obligation: to be willing to approve and fund campaigns with risk involved. And be prepared to accept a mistake along the way and learn from it.
This kind of healthy give and take — lively discourse built around discovery and epiphany — is essential if transformative programs are to get out of the developmental garage. Our daily mantra should be to make this quest genuinely a part of our culture and operating philosophy. To do less is to compromise the values and integrity of what we’re on the planet to accomplish.
Can we really fly blind and expect to be effective?
By Robert Wheatley
There are those great moments of clarity when something hits you. Often it can be something you already know, but your perspective and its horsepower (importance) will get injected with an entirely new level of “amen” when understanding adjusts or elevates a bit. Sorry to be oblique – this happened today while reading Brian Solis’ great book, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.” Yes, there’s a point here and a recommendation.
The emergence of social media has changed the game for PR communications, to be sure. For instance as we’ve heard from virtually every social media pundit, conversation is better than any attempted monologue in brand communication strategy. Frankly its just wayyyy more difficult these days to push messages at people and get any traction. So communication that’s truly effective is no longer one-way.
That means PR people no longer sit solely on a “dissemination” platform (press releases, editor desk-sides, spokesperson media tours) to move messages outward through various channels of non-paid or earned media.
Now relationships and dialogue with influencers and other forms of “democratized” media have to be layered into the brand outreach recipe. What over-arching strategic issue does this immediately recommend? Listening.
Let’s look at the fundamental “best practices” involved in relationship building. If the best conversationalists are always the best listeners, and if brands must form relationships with their best users based on behaviors that approach similarity to what we would call real-world friendships rather than “transactional” relationships, does it stand to reason we should be hearing our best customers?
If relationships are to work, they’re built from a foundation of shared interest. And as covered many times in this blog, we know that brand relationships are earned based on what a marketer does to correctly discern and understand the consumer’s passions and concerns. And then operate as an enabler, facilitator, educator an community builder.
Furthermore if the media landscape is littered with self-published content created by customers, then it only makes sense to know what they’re saying, good or bad.
So listening jumps to the front as an integral part of fundamental PR strategy in the digital age. Right? Yet more often than not it is at the tail end of consideration in plans and sometimes the first to fall off the budget truck when pressure builds to make some cuts.
Of course formal Web-based listening tools should be employed and made integral to PR plans. They should also, however, receive the priority they deserve to be preserved when sacrifices are targeted on the spending front. This takes understanding on both the agency and client sides of the table about the value of it. To do less in some respects is to say that pushing messages outward remains the first and most important path.
Relevant communication springs from understanding. And that’s an outcome of getting quiet for awhile, and paying close attention to the conversations going on all around.
I for one will feel more comfortable as we work harder and with greater resolve to build the listening tools into the front end of the campaign strategy, and not a final layer that almost invites elimination due to its perceived lack of priority.
This is the story (heads up this is a feature-style post) of crazy commitment, of all-nighters and pushing beyond the limits we often place in front of ourselves. The effort delivered success for a brand and taught a person (me) what you can accomplish when you’re willing to dispense with fear (and sleep) to do something big.
It was 1990 and I had just walked off the edge of the cliff. For 11 years, ten of them in a relative state of happiness and personal growth, I had been working for Ogilvy & Mather – a wonderful firm that invested heavily to teach its emerging talent how to create powerful communications ideas and how to run profitable agency businesses. My last year was not so fun, filled with trepidation around a career move I did not want (so ordered by my boss) to a city I had no plans to live in (sorry Windy City but at the time I was living in LA and had client roots there) doing work that was not so challenging (vast difference in point of view between West Coast group I ran – progressive – and the Chicago office of Ogilvy – conservative).
And then it happened. After seven already unhappy months Ogilvy was sold in a hostile takeover to Sir Martin Sorrel and the final unraveling began in earnest. By March of 1990, after just 15 months in Chicago, I resigned from the place I thought I would be for the rest of my career and started a firm from scratch, working out of my partner’s storage room in her apartment.
We had just convinced Sara Lee to take a big risk, too. To hire a brand new agency to represent this venerable and iconic business at a moment in its 50-year history when it was most vulnerable. Years of share and profit declines had finally caught up and the brand was on the ropes. We had been talking to Sara Lee about a relationship while at Ogilvy but a conflict arising from the New York O&M advertising office stopped the conversation dead in its tracks.
How to resolve a client conflict? Surgically remove the conflict by starting a new firm (thus producing said cliff to jump off of). Our deal with Sara Lee was unique: they would literally own our firm for a year as we agreed not to solicit any new accounts. In return we got the business and a healthy budget to get our agency in motion. What got us to the deal table? A very BIG idea — one that involved risk all around but had the potential to arrest Sara Lee’s decline.
This is the PR business, and if you want to secure the kind and quality of media coverage that can transform your business outcomes, you need to go big. Events make news. And we were about to do the mother of all media events.
Something extraordinary and disruptive for a brand that had been around since the late 1940’s: in six months time we built The First International Symposia on Dessert. We had struck a moment in food brand history when dessert was getting hit right and left by news of new reduced fat products and technologies, coalescing over concerns that dessert was a major contributor to growing American waistlines.
People decided certain kinds of sweets (baked goods for one) were bad and stopped buying them. While new brands were emerging with low fat technologies to cut calories. Sara Lee was left flat-footed in this time of “no thank you” to dessert options and so-called “full calorie” products.
So, with a portfolio of new reduced fat products in the wings, plus an agreement to bring the real Sara Lee out of obscurity to become the face of the brand (named after her by her father when she was nine years old), and a strategy to revitalize and re-stage Sara Lee as a relevant and contemporary brand — we set in motion a major media experience…
Vienna, Austria: land of dessert, palaces and Mozart
Our event concept was predicated on capturing the hearts and minds of top food media from the US and Canada. To do this, we needed to give them content that was unique and compelling in a setting that would engage their imagination. We were determined to “own” them for at least three days time, away from their offices and schedules in an environment we controlled.
Vienna is the dessert capitol of the world. Dessert as we know it (cakes, pastries) was invented here. To be an acclaimed pastry chef in Vienna is to achieve our equivalent of culinary superstardom. We brought the idea to the Viennese tourism board, the Austrian economic chamber, Imperial hotels and Austrian Airlines. All bought in to the opportunity to host a large contingent of US food media, knowing the coverage opportunities this could offer. In return we got access to palaces at no charge, free ground transportation, cheap airline tickets and hotel rooms.
We worked literally around the clock to do all of this within six months of our being hired. We constructed a three-day schedule of seminars, events and hands-on experiences we knew would supply editorial angles appropriate to an array of food media from Good Housekeeping to Associated Press. Also ladled in was entertainment for the editors on a scale that we knew would trump anything they had seen previously. This included an exclusive concert with the Vienna Symphony just for them in the very palace where Mozart performed his first concert when he was six years old.
In total 56 editors and writers went to Vienna. All of this would be carried off by our team of six people, plus the master pastry chef from Sara Lee. Adding to the pressure was the CEO of Sara Lee Steve McMillan, the head of marketing and the founding Lubin family all in attendance.
You just push yourself…
We recruited the top seven pastry chefs in Vienna to create new recipe ideas for home cooks using Sara Lee products as a base. We secured a dessert psychologist from the University of Vienna who did a remarkable presentation on the psychology of eating dessert. She spoke poetically about the guilt issues Americans experience that is absent in the European mentality about sweets consumption. The Viennese by the way are not fat even though the pastry shops outnumber McDonald’s.
We brought a US food historian to chart the evolution of baking and sweets in our nation, including the birth of Birthday celebrations and our cake traditions. A special seminar on chocolate was held in the oldest operating bakery in the world, opened originally in 1535. We introduced the editors to the real Sara Lee (they were awestruck), launched a new line of desserts at a dramatic “dessert fantasy” reception inside one of the most important palaces in Vienna.
We designed the Symposia to cover every aspect of dessert, why it matters in the American diet and to rekindle our love affair with the sweet tooth with a nod towards balance and moderation.
We positioned Sara Lee as the expert brand on the evolution of dessert in America….
To do all this required total commitment — mind, body and spirit. Nights, weekends leading up to the event were spent creating materials, securing editor attendance and handling the logistics of moving a large group of people from venue to venue flawlessly. Hotel rooms had to be meticulously selected based on editor preferences and personal needs.
The editorial concept development work was a monster, creating angles appropriate to each title and editorial slant, while developing supportive materials and sources for each one. Once in Vienna we had 56 editor “stars” to watch over and then our top client executives to boot. I did not sleep at all for four days. We worked around the clock making sure every detail was handled without mishap.
I distinctly remember sitting on the bus next to the Food Editor of Bon Appetit as we took them to the airport for their departure back to the states, literally zoning in and out of consciousness as we talked about her experience and story plans. It was a monumental undertaking and a huge homerun in the making. The media coverage coming from this event was unlike anything the brand had ever seen in its history. The turnaround was launched.
It was an experience I will never forget. There were moments along the way when you would hit the wall and declare, “I’m just done.” But you go on, knowing what’s at stake and push yourself a little further. I would not recommend this as a way to live your life on an ongoing basis, but a few of these experiences along life’s trail can elevate your game a bit — for a lifetime. Yes, its scary and yes you may tell yourself there’s just no way to do something of this scope in six months time with a small staff – and then you muster up the courage and press on.
We helped restore luster to an iconic American brand, and that was worth every minute. The only way to know what you’re really capable of is to test the limits and then go past them.
There’s not a moment to lose. Your brand, your budget and outcomes are at stake. The world of communications has changed, and your PR strategy and tactics must evolve with it. Or be prepared for little to no bottom line benefits from your spend.
Why does this matter? Being in the presence of a message (PR driven or otherwise) does not mean any useful interaction has actually taken place. Your goal is to impact consumer behavior. But there’s a vast difference between communications that is built correctly to accomplish that vs. messages “out there” in media that perpetually circle the engagement airport — never quite landing.
Here are the key questions you should be asking yourself right now…
1. How does the PR strategy connect and align our brand in a relevant and meaningful way with the lifestyle interests and passions of our core customers?
Relevance is key to securing engagement — so consumer insight and understanding is a precursor to building effective communications. There must be clear and specific linkage between PR programs and the consumer’s self interests that position the brand as an enabler, supporter, educator and facilitator of your consumer’s lifestyle passions. Otherwise she’s not going to pay any attention to what you put out there.
2. What proportion of your budget is dedicated to Web-based communication vs. mainstream media?
We have ample evidence that word of mouth drives business results. And now we know that Internet based communication is increasingly the genesis of influence, conversation and discussion about businesses and brands. Yet old habits (always hard to break) push spending and programming frequently down the well-worn path of conventional print and broadcast media. It’s not that these channels don’t matter, they do. But the poor red headed stepchild in many cases is the very media channel that can activate conversation and buzz. So is it time to re-configure the proportional spending to place more assets in web-based media channels? Yes.
3. Social media may no longer be a tertiary place to participate, but are you creating scale underneath your social media strategy?
Unlike any other media property that has come before it, the unique characteristic of social platforms is quite simple: they ALL begin with an audience of zero. It is your content strategy that can help aggregate an audience over time. How well you do this will impact the overall value and benefit of social media investments. Achieving scale is a combination of building and distributing useful, entertaining and valuable multi-media content (read video) along with special offers and benefits – and then integrating social media through every consumer touch point in your marketing communications toolbox.
4. To what extent are you now investing in creating media that fuels the budding relationship with your core users and brand fans?
“Owned Media” is now the third “core” leg of the media communications stool alongside earned and paid. Brands are now publishers and content producers themselves. The Internet has enabled cost-effective distribution. However PR campaigns have historically been built around enticing and convincing third-party editors and gatekeepers to do a story (earned media). And coverage certainly comes imbued with the associative value and credibility from implied third-party endorsement. Equally important however, brands can now talk directly to consumers through custom editorial content thus assuring the message remains unaltered or diluted. Have you launched your video channel yet?
5. Look before you leap. To what extent have you refined your listening tools to be sure you understand what consumer’s are saying to each other about your business?
Pushing messages at people doesn’t work any longer. Relevance is king. And part of the equation is honing your listening investments to be sure you fully understand the conversation that’s taking place around you. There are online-based tools both quantitative and qualitative that serve this purpose. A full suite of listening platforms should be “always on” with analysis following closely behind to assure you’re aware of what’s being said, by whom and where. You can’t effectively engage without this knowledge.
These five areas are vital to effective PR strategy and tactics, tied to your ability to impact behavior. They act synergistically to make communication effective. In the absence of these tools and approaches, you’re resting outcomes more on hope — and hope is never a strategy.
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