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What are the keys to success in using public relations to build a brand?
1. You need an idea to start with. You need a unique position that you can use to try to get into a prospect's mind. You might, for example, pick out a segment of the market that you are the leader in and then position yourself as the leader in that category.
2. If you are not the leader in any category, you can try to establish yourself as the "alternative," or the No. 2 brand in the category. As Pepsi-Cola is to Coca-Cola. How do you do that? You ask yourself "what is the leader's position?" and then you become the opposite. Coca-Cola is "the real thing." It's the original cola, as a result of its introduction more than a hundred years ago. So Pepsi became the opposite with its strategy to go after teenagers. "The Pepsi Generation."
3. You need a spokesperson. The best spokesperson is almost always the chief executive. We recommend that the chief executive of any major corporation spend at least half of more of his or her time on outside public relations activities.
If you could give my company one piece of marketing advice, what would it be?
Focus. Whatever you are doing today, your business would be stronger and more profitable in the long run, if you concentrated your activities on one industry, one region, one function, or one problem. When you try to be all things to all people, you end up being nothing.
What's a Chevrolet? It's a large, small, cheap, expensive, car or truck. It's also a brand that used to be the leader, but has lost its leadership to Ford.
How could you explain the success of brands such as Coca-Cola, Ford and GM, which built and positioned their brands with investments in advertising and remain leaders?
Coca-Cola, Ford and GM brands (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac) were built in the distant past by public relations, not advertising.
Take Ford, for example. When Henry Ford built the first production line and manufactured and sold an automobile (the Model T) for an incredibly low price, it created an enormous amount of publicity. Then he paid his workers the astounding sum, for the time, of $5.00 a day. As a result, Henry Ford and the Ford Model T were probably as famous in their day as Bill Gates and Microsoft are today.
Today, of course, all of these brands need advertising to maintain the brands. But the brands themselves were built by PR, not advertising. What Ford did in his time, Bill Gates has done today. The Microsoft brand was built by PR, in our opinion, not advertising. As a matter of fact, Microsoft received more publicity last year than any company in the world.
How can a public relations company promote itself and the discipline of PR to potential clients?
Public relations agencies have the same problem as advertising itself. Advertising has little credibility with consumers because it's widely believed to be "self-serving." Why should a consumer believe what you say about yourself?
Why should a client believe what a public relations agency says about itself or the public relations functions? In essence, they are failing into the advertising trap. They lack credibility when they talk about the power of PR.
The public relations industry needs public relations. They need others to say good things about PR, primarily the media like The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune, Advertising Age, etc.
Actually that's why many public relations agencies have asked us to speak to their clients and prospects. We are perceived as marketing strategists, not salespeople for the PR function. We have some credibility that public relations agencies do not.
Why does it have to be PR first and then advertising?
Many advertising agencies believe that since most products are similar, it's the advertising that needs to be different. That's why they want to launch new brands with advertising and then use PR to make the advertising famous.
In our opinion, products might be similar, but their perceptions are not. Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola might taste pretty much the same, but the brands occupy different positions in the prospect's mind. The best advertising works against ideas and concepts that already exist in the mind. (This is the core of our positioning concept.)
Since advertising lacks credibility, a company needs PR first to establish the brand's credibility and then advertising second to reinforce and reaffirm that credibility.
Do you observe any changes in brand building methods which could be called "a revolution"? What are they?
The biggest revolution is the switch from advertising to PR or public relations. All the recent brand successes have been primarily PR successes, not advertising successes. Starbucks, Zara, Red Bull, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Linux, Harry Potter and many others.
Starbucks, for example, spent less than $10 million in advertising (total) the first 10 years the company was in business. That's less than $1 million a year which is a very small advertising expenditure for a country of 300 million people. And yet today Starbucks has some 95 percent brand recognition.
Zara runs almost no advertising except for two sale ads a year.
PR is especially important in the high-tech field. All of the big global high-tech brands Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Oracle, Cisco, SAP and Sun Microsystems were first created in the pages of the business press. By PR or publicity, not by advertising.
There's a paradox here. It isn't PR that builds brands; it's word of mouth that builds brands. One person telling another about some great new product or service. But that first mouth needs to be motivated to spread the message. And PR has the credibility to do that.
Advertising has little credibility. Most people don't believe what they read in an advertisement or see in a television commercial. That's why they are unlikely to spread an advertising message by word of mouth.
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