Time for Public Relations?

Working in an agency, I've witnessed clients squash fantastic ideas because of lacking budgets and/or faith. Public relations seems to experience a high number of those concept denials.

Why is that? It's probably because many marketing professionals view public relations as the french fries to their advertising hamburgers. A side order. Something they could do without but is a nice cherry on the top of a campaign. (I must be hungry...) When it comes down to it public relations is not intrinsic to the functioning of a business. Neither is advertising or marketing. So they are partially right. When budgets have to be cut and it comes down to making the product or trying to sell it, well, you have to make the product before you can sell it. Unless your Bill Gates... of course with Vista it seems he was better off selling products that didn't exist yet. But I digress.

Examine this idea a little more. Let's take current circumstances into consideration. To say the economy is in the toilet is kind. If companies haven't already started cutting budgets, they will. First gone will be public relations. But think about it. If the economy is really what's affecting your profits, chances are good that your competition is feeling the pain equally. Now your competition will either continue with their PR campaigns or they'll pull out. Either way, can you justify not finding a way to keep up your public relations efforts? If your competitor is in the news and you're not, you're done. If your competitor pulls out, the news becomes silent on your line of business. A silence you could much more easily fill without Company B in the forum making noise. Face it. No matter how bad the economy is news will never stop. You have to be there to succeed.

Ultimately, when times are tough, you have to keep customers coming. People have to believe they can depend on you. They have to know your company is there for them. Once they think that, you have to remind them constantly. If the news picks up your company's story, that many more people will hear about your company and remember it. Keeping you afloat.

In other news...
I saw that Detroit White Castles plan to give away as many 40,000 Slyders during the next three days. Slyders are a little more than 50-cents a piece... that's around $20,000 worth of White Castle product. (Google search "Detroit White Castle") That's my dream. To have my client come to me and say, we want to give away thousands of dollars of product. Just get us in the news. Done and done.

Dunkin' Donuts v. Starbucks

So I must say that I've taken note of Dunkin' Donuts this year. Watch out any company who sells coffee. They're after you. Just ask Starbucks. In fact, you don't have to ask them. Go online, turn on the t.v. or listen to the radio.

Dunkin' Donuts is shouting from the rooftops that they beat Starbucks in a taste test. Yes, taste tests make it on list of advertising things I don't like ...or I believe "loathe" is how I referred to my feelings on advertising in my first blog entry. A thirdy party research company proclaimed this... a company DD obviously commissioned to do the taste test in a way that the results would come out in their favor.

(Side note: Doing a taste test implies that people can't figure out for themselves that your product is better than a competitor's. Now why might that be....?)

The thing is I've tried DD's coffee. Twice. I thought with all of the advertising and publicity play there must be some substance there. So I tried it. I am definitely not a conneisure of coffee, but I could even tell it was bad coffee. The first cup I purchased was burned. The second time it tasted like coffee flavored water. Don't get me wrong. I'm not that big a fan of Starbucks. Coffee Bean is the coffee shop with my heart but wow. Really? I think Starbucks would be embarrassed if they had sold cups of coffee as bad as the ones I had from DD.

But outside of the bad coffee, is the advertising and public relations efforts that stick with me. I first took notice when I read a CNN.com article addressing Starbucks massive layoffs that happened this summer. DD pulled an entire paragraph in that story. The ridiculously discounted promotions caught my eye and when they were topped off with extensive advertising, DD became hard to ignore.

Just today I read an article by BusinessWeek proclaiming DD's newest campaign "Dunkin' beat Starbucks." Now we can all visit the extraordinarly unique URL DunkinBeatStarbucks.com to find out how.

All in all, a fantastic integrated campaign. But a lesson I've already learned in my limited ad years, DD, no amount of ad dollars will make your product taste good. Your ad dollars can put cups of coffee in customers' hands, but it's your job once they put it in their mouths.

Um Welcome...

Let me start with this... I don't like public relations. I don't care for marketing. And I loathe advertising. Let me follow-up with letting you know that I work in an agency where I do all three.

We've all been inundated with crap slogans, commercials, news stories and telemarketers' phone calls. That's what I hate.

But when I come across a campaign so beautifully executed that it becomes a poem in tangible form, I really can't contain myself.

I've been in this business for about two years (unless you count college internships that bring up those years to just under four). Unfortunately, I've lived in an ad-saturated society for 24 years. An expert by experience - it's obvious what's bad, cheap, false and AMAZING.

That's where I begin.