I’m not in business to please other PR firms. I’m in business to help other businesses sell more of their products.
PR firms don’t have the best reputation. I’ve never met a CEO who thinks much of them. I remember one telling me, “I don’t know what our PR firm does for us. I guess they have some plans to help us if we screw something up. When I see their $15,000 line item each month I just hold my nose and initial it.”
In my opinion the PR industry should be much larger than it is. Businesses bring money to PR firms in a shoebox and to ad agencies in a dump truck. That’s because ads increase sales and PR is seen as defensive posturing. What a shame considering PR firms hold the trump card of sales.
Surprisingly it’s the PR industry that has kept PR from blossoming into the powerful sales channel it could be.
Thanks largely to Edward Bernays, who is considered the father of PR, people in the industry are conditioned to see themselves as counselors and practitioners, 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 with journalism backgrounds, and they tend to be people who have an ideological distaste for capitalism and the free market. If you are wondering why CEOs don’t like them, there’s a hint.
Marketers are often frustrated with PR firms too. In truth neither should be. The reason they don’t see eye to eye 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 its many “publics”. Most public relations work is done in the areas of investor relations, community relations, crisis management, event planning, employee relations, etc.
I think it’s safe to say that most PR professionals would be insulted to be thought of as a bunch of capitalists. Putting traditional public relations firms in the role of sales and marketing is like putting rifles in the hands of a medics. It’s a mismatch of ideals that is destined to produce a 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 doesn’t sit well with CEOs and marketers either. For people under pressure to produce sales, paying a PR firm and not knowing what, if anything, they will get for their money irks them. When it comes to promoting products, they are used to the advertising model of pay for an ad, get an ad.
So even though PR firms seem like the gateway to product publicity, they probably aren’t. They didn’t get their PR degrees hoping they could one day hawk your products.
If you want to develop PR as a promotional channel and mobilize reporters into a national sales force, you’ll need to find another avenue. One great avenue is us. We arrange a ton of publicity but we don’t consider ourselves a PR firm. We are a marketing firm that thinks and operates like an ad agency.
We took a lot of heat when we tried to distance ourselves from the PR industry 25 years ago. The thing that set us apart the most was our nationally trademarked Pay Per Interview Publicity® billing model. We simply focused on using PR to sell products and priced it more like ads. I didn’t understand what the big stink was but traditional firms were outraged at the way we did business. They felt our “pay per interview” way of billing cheapened the image of the PR industry.
Fortunately, business owners and marketers 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. The selling power these media stories have had is unmatched in marketing.
If you don’t have media stories appearing frequently about your products, you should call our Vice President of Media Production Heather Champine immediately at 952-697-5269. Over the last 25 years we’ve gotten pretty smart about persuading reporters and producers to do stories about our clients’ products. And the PR industry has softened its position on us a little too. At least publicly.
