Perspectives

At some stage in one's life something happens that leaves an impression on you forever. Be it a billboard you see while driving by, a speech made by someone, a book you have read or anything for that matter, it tends to impact and alter your way of thinking thereafter.

During these holidays I had gone to my college just to meet my old teachers and see if anything had changed during the time I had been away when a book on one of my teachers tables caught my eye. This book considerably influenced on my thoughts that I have expressed out here.

Advertising is something I have worked in and Public Relations is something that has taken the world by storm. It is everywhere and also what I am currently studying hence researching on the shift from Advertising to Public Relations has been an extremely enjoyable journey for me.

It is the first time I am ever writing a blog, that also on a worldwide forum and I had no idea how it would turn out but once I started the thoughts just flowed. Please feel free to post your comments and I hope you enjoyed reading my views.

Lets Talk PR

Today everywhere we look, we see a dramatic change from advertising-oriented marketing to public relations-oriented marketing. Major brands these days are born with publicity, not advertising. A closer look at the history of the majority of successful modern brands shows proves exactly this. In fact, an astounding amount of brands, including Google, PlayStation, Palm, Harry Potter, Zara and Red Bull have been built with practically no advertising.

When Red Bull was launched in India, very few people were aware of the

brand or its benefits. Since the company did not believe in any kind of paid advertisement, the only way in which they promoted their brand was through visibility and word of mouth. People from the Red Bull sampling team would set up sampling stations at Fuel stations, Health Clubs and would sample them a can of Red Bull and explain its benefits and usage patterns as per the consumers lifestyle. Even today one will hardly see any advertising for the brand.

People today see advertising is the self-serving voice of an organization eager to make a sale, thus it has no trustworthiness and hence no longer can a brand be launched via advertising.

Instead it is publicity or public relations, which are required to launch new brands as they permit an organization to tell their story indirectly through third-party channels, predominantly the media. Public relations provide the productive perceptions that an advertising campaign, if appropriately directed, can exploit.

In today’s times when clients are counseled they are advised that any new marketing program ought to begin with publicity and then shift to advertising only after the public relations objectives have been accomplished. For managers indoctrinated in an advertising culture, this is a revolutionary idea, while for others it’s a natural evolution in marketing thinking.

Advertising is Dead. Long Live Public Relations

But if there is so much advertising how can it be dead? After all we do see advertisements everywhere we look. Advertising is like a painting; a painting is also dead yet today it is more popular then it ever was.

A painting’s ‘death’ does not stand for the death of the painting itself on the contrary it is the death of its purpose as a portrayal of reality following the invention of photography. In a similar way, advertising has lost its purpose as a brand-building instrument and lives on as an art.

If one goes to measure the value of a candle, can we measure it by the value of the light output, in view of the fact that a candle has lost its function as a method of illumination for a room, yet in spite of that, nightly world over millions of candles are burning. No romantic meal is complete without candles on the table; in fact every so often individual candles sell for more then a light bulb even.

However like a painting and the candle, advertising has also lost its purpose and has turned into an art as well. This does not imply that advertising has no value. The value of art lies in the eye of the beholder and as soon as a functional discipline becomes an art, it loses its purpose and consequently its ability to be objectively measured.

Advertising advocates will expressively stand up for their vocation on the foundation of enhancing the equity of a brand or building brand value or creating an emotional bond with customers or motivating the sales force. All of the above is accurate to a particular degree, but it cannot be objectively measured, as adverting has lost its communications function and has become an art.

Creating a brand and defending a brand are two core essentials of any marketing program. Where public relations create the brand, advertising defends it. Advertising no longer has the power to place a new brand name into the psyche, nor does it have any credibility left with the customers, as they have become highly cynical of advertising claims and are prone to discard its messages whenever possible.

Nevertheless it is evident that several products and services have reached their target audiences minds, resulting in becoming successful brands. How have they achieved it? The answer is simple, via public relations and publicity. All current marketing successes have not been advertising successes, but in fact, public relations successes, such as Microsoft, BlackBerry, Intel, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart to name a few.

Starbucks barely spent anything on advertising until recently. Being a brand that makes over a billion is sales they spent hardly a few million on advertising over their first decade in America.

They Body Shop is all about its natural ingredients and when Anita Roderick traveled the word in search of those ingredients, the pursuit resulted in endless publicity, thereby built the Body Shop into a worldwide brand, and all this was possible with virtually no advertising.

Wal-Mart one of the world’s largest retailers, Vioxx, Prozac and Viagra in the pharmaceutical field, Tickle Me Elmo, Beanie Babies and Pokemon in the toy field, and Oracle, Cisco and SAP in the high-technology department, all have grow to be multibillion-dollar brands, and in turn multibillion-dollar organizations with practically no advertising.

The Era of Public Relations

Would you or I or anyone for that matter, ever give a second or pay any attention to an advertisement of a brand we've never heard of? Would we ever believe such a message? Is there any believability in such an advertising message?

Would you ever entertain someone whom you didn’t know, who called you up and told you that they would like to make an appointment to show you and in turn try to sell you a product you’d never heard about nor ever heard the company name, or would you simply hang up on the person?

On the other hand, if the caller on the line was some one working for Gucci and was inviting you to a pre-collection launch cocktail party as you are a preferred customer, wouldn’t you be tempted to go, after all Gucci is a name everyone knows and has a credible name and reputation in your head.

Public relations and in turn publicity of a product or service provides the credentials that lead to the creation of credibility required for advertising. Only once an unknown or new brand acquires some credentials will you bother to even notice the advertising.

Gone are the days when advertising builds the brands. This is the era of public relations. Advertising can not longer start the fire; only fan it once public relations have gotten the fire going. Only third-party endorsements can accomplish the validity required in order to get something going from nothing.

Public relations today has become too much of an integral part of most organizations for it to take a backseat to advertising any longer. The time to be bashful is over. Now is not the time to be the reluctant bride but a unique opportunity for Public relations professional to seize the marketing reins of their clients, and grow to be the primary source of external counsel and the dynamic force behind building a brand.

One can draw a similarity between war and marketing. There is no difference between military generals who fight today’s war with yesterday’s weapons and marketing advocates who use yesterday’s tools of advertising to fight today’s marketing war, instead of today’s tool of public relations. Yesterday the time called for amours, today is the time for electronic warefare. Likewise yesterday’s marketing success was advertising and today it is from public relations.

As public relations comes to the forefront of a good number of new-product launches, clients no longer have the same blind faith used to in their advertising agencies. In the future, we can anticipate a volatile growth in the public relations industry, leading to new respect for the public relations profession, both within and outside the organization.

The cries of distress from the advertising industry can be foreseen. It is not just business, money that they will be losing, but the advertising industry will be suffering an even greater loss, the loss of the traditional role as marketing partners, after all in during the golden age of advertising, marketing meant advertising.

And the future is now. The era of advertising domination has come to an end and marketing has entered into a new era, the era of public relations.