Okay, maybe it’s not stunning but it may be a revelation to you. Some marketers have told me that the following few paragraphs are the most insightful they have ever read about why their PR efforts have failed …
You’d think given the promotional power of the media that it would be a fully developed promotional channel. Instead, for all practical purposes it is untapped. Surprisingly, it is the PR industry that has kept PR from blossoming into the money-making promotional force it should be.
Thanks largely to Edward Bernays, who is considered the father of PR, people in the industry are conditioned to seeing themselves as counselors and practitioners, and certainly NOT salespeople. A quick look at the Public Relations Society of America’s website will give you a sense of the industry’s highbrow attitude. Many come into the field of public relations with journalism backgrounds, and they tend to be liberals who question the fairness of capitalism and the free market.
Marketers are often frustrated with PR firms. In truth they shouldn’t be. The reason they are frustrated is they want PR firms to be something they are not. As counselors and practitioners, public relations professionals do their best work soothing over issues between a company and their many “publics”.
Most public relations work is done in the areas of investor relations, community relations, crisis management, event planning, employee relations, etc. They do a great job in these areas but when they are asked to use publicity to promote products, the PR industry falls flat on its rear. And for good reason.
I think it’s safe to say that most PR professionals would be insulted if you called them a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. Putting a traditional public relations firm in charge of selling is like putting a rifle in the hands of a medic. It’s a mismatch of ideals that is destined to produce a really bad outcome. Traditional PR firms are not organizations meant to drive sales and they never will be.
The PR industry’s billing model of hourly charges and monthly retainers is another sticking point between marketers and PR firms. For a marketer who is under pressure to produce sales, paying a PR firm and not knowing what, if anything, they will get for their money is unsettling. Marketers are used to buying ads where they pay for an ad, and get an ad.
So even though PR firms seem like the gateway to the most powerful promotional channel on the planet, these firms don’t sell many stories that promote products. For most PR professionals, using PR to sell products just simply isn’t in their nature.
If you want to exploit PR as a promotional channel and mobilize reporters into a national sales force, you’ll need to find another way to do it. That could mean arranging your own product in-house or it could mean hiring a company like ours. This might seem a little odd but I think the reason we arrange more product publicity before noon than most PR firms arrange in a month is that I’ve never thought of our company as a PR firm. I’ve always tried to explain that we are an ad agency. One that has taken control of a marketing channel that has historically been underdeveloped.
We took a lot of heat when we started selling PR by the story 25 years ago. We simply focused on using PR to sell products and pricing it like ads. Traditional firms were outraged at the way they felt we cheapened the image of their industry.
The business community felt differently. They flocked to us in droves. Since that time we have arranged tens of thousands of news stories that explain products to the public. If you don’t have media stories appearing frequently about your products, you should call us. Over the last 25 years we’ve gotten pretty smart about persuading reporters and producers to cover products.
