Hands up who has seen new brands launched by advertising? Yep, hundreds of times over, right? But advertising is not, and never has been, the best way to launch new brands.
Public relations has, and still remains, the best way to launch new brands.
Why? Because the basic underlying factor you need when launching a new brand is credibility and you cannot achieve it by telling everyone how good you are.
You might be Honest John but nobody expects you to say your products are crap.
So you need to leave it up to others to talk about you – such as influential social media commentators and mainstream media, like newspapers.
So a few days ago, I commented on the decline of advertising spend in broadcast media.
(The same decline is not being felt online, but it will happen eventually. The trust consumers have in online advertising is dwindling.)
Don’t be surprised. For a long time advertising has ceased to work, it’s just taking the marketing world a bit of time to catch up to where its consumers are at. Your customer is bored with you telling them how good you think you are. They’re not listening anymore. Come time to set your marketing budgets, you’d better be rethinking where you spend your cash.
Now everyone’s talking about viral marketing. Don’t you love a new buzzword? Viral marketing is simply word-of-mouth advertising, often delivered visually, with content that people are motivated to share around their friends. Good viral marketing is a way of getting people to think positively about your brand which is, drum roll please, the objective of public relations.
We are moving into an era of almost accidental celebrity – Susan Boyle, Dave Carroll, even the Will it Blend videos that took YouTube by storm. It’s how the little guy fights back against the multi-million dollar ad budgets – and they are extremely effective. (Of course, anyone can be a celebrity with a decent publicist, a sliver of talent and the right instructions.)
Viral campaigns deliver no guarantees of success which frustrates marketers that are trying to decide how to pursue a viral strategy. But there is only one guarantee with advertising – and that is failure for the same-old stuff being peddled out. So you’re still better off to have an attempt at being off-the-wall and perhaps heading viral than you are to pursue your corporate-approved status quo.
Getting your consumers to talk positively about your brand is more than launching a viral marketing campaign. We’re also talking reputations on the line. So anybody with an internet connection can have a view about your brand and publish it to the globe. There is very little that you can do to stop it. (In fact, the best way to handle it is to engage in the conversation.)
Yet again, we are in a public relations fortress. The people that have the experience and skills to help manage this process will not be located in your advertising agency, they will be in a public relations consultancy. And there is no amount of advertising that can repair brand damage incurred because you forget to factor in public relations into your marketing budget.
Even blind Freddie can tell advertising isn’t working. Tipping your budget into it is like flogging a dead horse. Go get yourself a decent public relations specialist and start with the basics. Get everybody talking positively about your brand and then you can sit back while the sales take care of themselves.
Check out other Public Relations posts.
