CyberFootprint

Those who communicate sparingly don’t have to be stupid or lazy by default. Quite on the contrary. There is an insurance firm in the Czech Republic (disclosure: client) that has been pioneering the field of creditor insurance, individual protection and bill protection for the last 14 years. It offers brilliant products, however, no one knows either about the company or the brand. I bet you are tempted to think now:

What a failure on the agency part! You need to start a PR offensive and get the client into the media.

Wrong. Why?

The vicious circle

It is a bad idea to implicitly assume that when the company does not communicate in a prolific manner that it is ignorant of the obvious. Much of communication may be delegated to the internal comms. officers or even to the marketing or sales departments. However, that does not mean that the company is not doing good business and doing it well.

A lot of young PROs fall into this trap and a stereotype starts to develop. Later, as the people grow into senior positions, they perpetuate the same dogma on their subordinates and create a vicious circle. Closed-mindedness leads to lack of intellectual curiosity which leads to incompetence and obsoleteness.

Let’s examine this peculiar state of affairs in detail and see why the equation “does not communicate = sucks” is still embedded in our minds.

The tyranny of constrained budgets

The pressure to be effective and efficient is omnipresent in the PR business. The clients are pressing on the amount of press releases published, their quality and sales effects. Bottom line growth is the Holy Grail of all entrepreneurs and the communication agencies are the Knights of the Round Table who are supposed to seek it out and bring it to them. That leads to potentially disasterous situations for the brand.

Given that effeciency pressure, the PR agency comes to the client and in commoditizes his information in a matter of months.  The publicity consultants try to turn everything into newsworthy information, so they can bill more on activities they are executing.

On our way to hell

What comes next? The client’s newsworthy information gets exhausted in a few months and the consultants start substituting interesting information with hype, spin and sometimes even with fabricated news. Instead of being honest and telling the client to do something of a value, they choose to stage pseudo-events and build the brand on fluff. At that point you and the client will know what alienating the consumer feels like.

Those, who don’t communicate recklessly don’t have to fear this kind of situation. Information exhaustion, followed by long-term information poverty sets in when your agency starts churning out press releases for the sake of producing press releases. Telling the journalists about every single stupid development that occurs in the company and pressuring the agency to perform under these conditions is the shortest road to hell.

When you have nothing to say…

…communicate sparingly. Focus on developing the product and finding out how it creates value for the customers and the journalists. When the product is at its best, launch the offensive and sweep the target audience off their feet. The hard part is, of course, to justify this plan to the client. I recommend using sound arguments and offering anectodtal evidence. Persuading the client see the matter from a perspective of a journalist can accomplish wonders.

Coming back to the example given at the beginning of the post, the company in question has been developing the product for the past few years (doesn’t it make you think of long-term marketing planning?) and now is ready to gradually roll out the campaign. And yes, I will turn it into a case study.