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Everything has a price

Everything has a price

We understood that the value of our image and our reputation IS PRICELESS. Excellent. Think that "P.R." deal exactly with your own image and reputation.  

Curious, isn’t it? :-) 

Therefore I ask myself: why companies, when it comes to cut the budget, the first thing they take away is precisely the service offered by PR agencies? Gosh...

Think about the fact that there are companies who decide to do everything internally inventing (or proclaiming to be) big experts in PR, never working before in this industry, or putting their image strategy in the hands of newly graduated people, with a very little experience... or to “marketing” experts that, you know very well, is  a branch of economy and not of communication…  

I am stating this because often it happened to me to interact (and offer myself as press office) with startups that had planned in details the creation of a video game, but when it arrived to its completion they had not one euro to "promote” it. So they chose a member of the internal team to let him manage PR... And how could he plan a strategy of communication? Going on the Internet looking for sites dealing with video games or contacting journalists/friends of reference sites met during tradeshows or press events, letting them try the game or inviting them to fairs for an interview, obtaining maybe a nice article (and often it wasn’t), and then going on Social networks to "buy" 10,000, 100,000 likes, just to have a fanpage full with a lot of people... "likes" that, by the way, are often made of people that for the 90% are NOT interested in those products, but are only useful in order to increase numbers... Or they decided to trade their products on platforms like Steam, Origin, Apple Store, without creating a marketing and PR campaign in parallel. How did product sales go? In many cases they were not like expected, and money and time have been spent in vain, when maybe (maybe...) everything would have been successful only entrusting experienced people, spending a little more at first, but with a greater return on investment in the medium term.  

I'm not generalizing. There are cases in which the product was so ingenious that the only "word of mouth" launched it in the market reporting an unexpected success. But, in the majority of cases, I can say this is exactly what happens.  

I can bring to your attention dozens of cases where companies that decided to cut their PR budget have miserably failed. This is normal, it is an inevitable consequence, and who does not think so, will soon fall into oblivion. Once your presence is missed in the market, together with your credibility and reputation, inevitably your image and your business decay. Marketing alone cannot help replacing what PR can do for you, exactly like PR alone cannot do what marketing is able to offer.  

But... but... the evolution of traditional PR is changing quickly and is moving to the increasingly thin border of marketing. And marketing is no longer the same marketing of a long time ago... Everything is changing because users, readers and the audience have changed. This thanks to the evolution of the Internet and of the world of Social networks, due to a change of language and to the interaction among people that, if once was limited to a few thousands, now can count millions of immediate contacts.  

If, once, PR were measured for their efficiency on the quantity/quality of clipping (press clippings) products nowadays are based on "how many clients your PR actions can bring me?" The famous formula "clipping = customer", by now, no longer works. We have to give more, and do more.  

But let’s proceed step by step…
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