New Opportunities for Marketing and Public Relations
By Mark Weiner, President of Delahaye
The following article is an excerpt from Mark Weiner’s new book, Unleashing the Power of PR: A Contrarian’s Guide to Marketing and Communications. Mark’s book offers a model for creating and implementing public relations programs that generate desired results and improve an organization’s ROI. Using dozens of case studies he explores the benefits of speaking to senior management in ways that improve communication and ultimately help strengthen PR performance.
In recent years, more companies in industries ranging from auto manufacturing to financial services and from consumer package goods to entertainment have reached the same unexpected conclusion: PR works. And at times, PR works better than other forms of marketing and at a small fraction of the cost.
Professional communicators have been using PR to deliver value for decades. What’s new is that a handful of leading professionals are now scientifically proving how they are generating measurable results from their public relations activities. The progress that this change represents is significant: Rather than relying on subjective perceptions of what represents value, they are applying the concept of “return on investment” (ROI—a term that has long been used by financial professionals) and objectively measuring the economic benefits of public relations activity against its associated costs. When someone asks about the ROI of an investment, they are really asking, “How much money did I make (or lose) in relation to what I spent?” And the answer to this question is conveyed in the language of business, not that of perceptions or buzz.
One element of PR-ROI is to scientifically show a contribution to sales. The first documented case of this form of PR-ROI analysis came during the course of an extensive and sophisticated statistical analysis of marketing performance in 1999, when telecommunications giant AT&T discovered an amazing fact: public relations, in the form of media relations, generated just as many new long-distance customers as advertising, even though the company invested substantially more resources in advertising than in PR. What’s more, the analysis showed that public relations regularly provided a boost to other forms of marketing: when news about AT&T was positive, prominent, and highly visible, advertising was more successful, outbound telemarketing was more productive and their inbound telemarketing was more effective. The discovery changed the way AT&T marketers worked with PR professionals to plan for and evaluate overall marketing effectiveness.
In more recent years and prior to the company’s acquisition by and absorption into SBC to become “the new AT&T,” AT&T’s position as one of the world’s dominant companies was in decline. The example of AT&T offers two important lessons: the first is that public relations is a greatly undervalued resource that not only performs well in its own right but also adds value to other forms of marketing communication. The second is that while public relations opens the doors to a great many forms of opportunity, no amount of positive PR can overcome the harmful effects of deregulation, flawed business strategy, and intense—and even unscrupulous—competition. Nevertheless, like so many “firsts” uncovered throughout its history, AT&T was the first company to accurately measure the interaction and effect of public relations within the marketing mix. As a result of AT&T’s work, it could never again be said that PR is “soft” when it comes to making a measurable contribution toward an organization’s achievement of meaningful business outcomes.
As explored in greater detail in later chapters, research proving the surprising power of public relations is being replicated at other companies and is creating new opportunities for PR in corporate communication and brand marketing. Public relations is unique within the marketing and communications mix, and it is my aim to show how PR can take a more central role in the way companies and brands evoke meaningful business outcomes through marketing and communication.
In this chapter, I outline seven elements of change that have altered the landscape of corporate and marketing communication. These elements set the stage for public relations to achieve a special degree of primacy:
- Transformations in the media business
- Declining impact of traditional mass marketing
- Changing media consumption habits
- Access, abundance, and speed of information
- Decreasing brand loyalty
- Increasing distrust of large corporations
- Increasing levels of accountability
These factors create new opportunities for public relations that are now being found in the quickly shifting landscape in which marketers and communicators must operate.
Unleashing the Power of PR: A Contrarian’s Guide To Marketing and Communications is available at traditional booksellers such as Barnes and Noble, Border's Bookstores and Amazon.