Why You Should Bother With PR

For various reasons lately, I have been in discussions about the use of Public Relations within a company.

PR is an interesting area. It's dogged by a relatively poor reputation outside of its own industry: if marketing is "The Poster-Making Department", then PR is the "IT Girls and Champagne Thursday Slackers". Even if PR is seen as effective, then the broad stereotype is one of a 'charm and smarm' offensive via networking with the 'old boys' out of reach of mere mortals.

One of the biggest issues I've found is that PR Agencies are a little like Italian restaurants: it's it's rare to get a bad one, very easy to get a mediocre one, but quite tough to get an outstanding one, and unfortunately, until you've had a good experience, you don't know what you're missing. Which means that many companies have employed PR agencies due to not having the expertise in house and have been disillusioned by uninteresting results, tainting their view on the whole exercise.

According to Wikipedia, Public Relations is all about managing the flow of information between a company or an individual to the public. This is a pretty broad and consequently not that useful.  Personally, I think that The Chartered Institute of Public Relations' definition is more punchy. Paraphrased, PR is all about reputation: the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. The goal is earning understanding and support, and influencing opinion and [buying] behaviour.

But surely that's just marketing?

Well, yes, communication does come under the remit of marketing, and PR is part of the marketing tool kit. And every marketing campaign should have a communications plan.  But beyond that, PR has a very different scope and skill set to a more traditional marketing campaign.

Marketing is by it's nature is targeted to specific, limited segments. Audiences are categorised by multiple parameters, with the intent of creating messages that will appeal.  One of the first rules of marketing is that you can't be all things to all people.  Every day, marketeers have to make calls on 'Opportunity Cost' of their limited budgets - a term economists use for the next best thing you sacrifice.  In the same way that if you buy a new phone the opportunity cost might be a television upgrade, every marketing campaign you run to one audience is another one you can't create for someone else.  This is where ROI (Return on Investment) calculations often come into their own.  Brutally put, will my company get more money if I do option 1 or option 2?

Communication/PR works in the other direction.  It is much wider and aims to talk to as many of your business stakeholders as possible; often ones which have less of an immediate ROI but still have a say or influence.  It's using as many channels as possible to get the widest range of messages out there.  Whilst marketing funnels messages down the key people, PR is there to widen the net and aid your potential growth in the longer term.

PR has other advantages too: due to getting the right information to the right contacts, mentions of products, people or services are often seen as more credible coming from a third party.  It builds trust, and allows stakeholders to feel more engaged with you and the various audiences.  It speaks very much to a brand's image if the language and messages are consistent that fixes it without needing advertising.  It's also usually cheaper: whilst there is a people/time resource cost, press releases, phone calls, contacts and social media management are often free or low cost.

So if it's so great, why isn't everyone doing it?

Well, the main downside of PR is hard to measure.  Ultimately it is there to help communicate messages, and unless you do mass market surveys, you can't always tell if your attempts have been successful.  Looking at increases in sales over a PR campaign duration will always be hit by confounding factors, and even the actual measurables on something like social media (clicks, likes, shares, views and so on) only goes so far, and falls short of a convincing argument in a boardroom.  It can be difficult to get someone good to do the PR, and assigning it to the marketing assistant or the cheapest local agency without thought as 'it's just press releases' is a sure-fire way for it to fail.  All of this means that it can be hard to justify a spend on an agency or on an in-house PR person when you cannot see an immediate result or have gotten bad results in the past.

Plus, sometimes you do just need the money elsewhere.  PR is always one of the first cuts in any budget rationalisation.

In the end, it all comes down to personal judgement on questions like:

• Where are your audience and do they already buy from you?  
• Do you need to start developing different segments in the market and seeding ideas before going into a marketing push? 
• How clear are your messages in the market place? 
• What is your brand awareness? 
• Are there key audiences you simply don't have the time to engage with? 
• Can I measure at least some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for success?
• Can you defend the choice to use PR to the senior management?
• And most important: what is the opportunity cost of PR for the company?

It's not an easy choice, despite my pro-PR stance here, because it will always be hard to defend even with analysis and ROI calculations, and can leave you personally exposed.  At the same time, sometimes you just have to put your money where your mouth is.  Wish me luck!

On Coffee, Spills and Service: Customer Focus the Starbucks Way

A couple of weeks ago I was in Dallas, and had a minor coffee-based incident.  Someone bumped into me in Starbucks, and the almost-full drink I had in my hand did a spectacular impression of a waterfall down my (luckily water-resistant) coat, over my bag, and finished by cascading onto the floor. 

Before I’d even had a chance to react, the Starbucks staff swung into action.  One Barista immediately escorted the clumsy bumper away.  Another came straight to me with cloths (and genuine concern) to check me for damage, get me to wipe off my iPhone which had been in my other hand, and help me clean myself up.  Whilst I was doing that she moved my bag to a table near a fan (“for your coat”) and then mopped the coffee on the floor.  A third Barista nipped out and put a ‘wet floor’ sign near us, and then made a replacement coffee to my exact prior order.  By the time I’d wiped the coffee of my coat, my phone was dry and working, I had a comfy chair waiting for me near a fan with my bag and a replacement drink, and no-one slipped in the pool of coffee.  It was seamless, accomplished without discussion and skilfully done.  Within a few minutes they had a grateful if slightly soggy customer, and everyone else feeling secure in the vicinity that “a good job had been done”, thus validating their choice of café.

And the whole thing was a beautiful example of a working brand and corporate culture.   

Starbucks is an interesting company.  They are a chain selling what is a fairly basic product which has created a high value offering through customer service over and above the actual product itself.  Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks: “We’re not in the coffee business, serving people.  We’re in the people business serving coffee.”

Starbucks is aware that their coffee isn't the best on the market (although it is very protective of it), but that’s not their unique selling point.  Everything about Starbucks is about the experience; from the ambience, to the furniture, to their additional services like the free wifi (one of the first businesses to offer this to their customers).  It’s supposed to make people want to go there and spend time, and the coffee is in many ways incidental.  Despite the mixed reactions in the UK, it’s why they ask your name for your coffee: to personalise your experience and acknowledge you as an individual rather than just the 12^th customer ordering “a small skinny latte”.  It’s the extended 7 Ps to the nth degree.

One of the areas where Starbucks puts a huge amount of investment is in their staff.  There is a basic understanding that many people who work at café chains are likely to be school leavers, and so will not necessarily have the skills to deal with angry customers day in, day out with the required ‘Starbucks attitude”.     

Most customer-facing organisations will give training on how to deal with irate customers usually with an interaction model such as ‘Laugh’ (Listen and Empathise/Acknowledge/Understand/Give Solutions/Hit home with Follow-ups).   They also try to employ people-focused staff who genuinely care about the customer experience.  Overall. this means customers will get sympathy and an attempt to solve the problem with tact and care.

Starbucks does the above, but goes beyond this.  A key foundation in their training is scenario planning: not something that many customer-focused organisations will do and certainly not at a basic level.  Scenario planning is the idea of creating the story of a series of possible or plausible events for businesses at a strategic level, allowing possible responses to be crafted with an understanding of potential options.  Starbucks has rolled this out to an operational, staff level.

Practice and scenario planning make it much easier to react in a crisis without feeling under pressure, personally under threat or lost.  It also makes the whole reaction faster and more effective because the thinking has already been done for you, and when you are dealing with employees with less experience, that can be critical.  Getting a customer to wipe off their phone before their coat isn't something that would be immediately obvious to do, but a broken phone will have more of a long term effect on their perception: clothes can be washed but phones can’t.  By examining what could go wrong in advance, many of the standard pitfalls can be avoided.

In my case, there probably was already a scenario plan with the key elements of: “potential injury” (burns) “potential property loss” (phone), “upset customer” (soggy with no coffee), “potential disturbance” (had I decided to be terribly non-British and cause a scene for being bumped), and “potential safety hazard” (slippery floor).  The issues were dealt with in order of priority, with each Barista taking a key role.  It was noticeable that the floor was dealt with last, once the safety aspect was covered.  By covering potential scenarios in advance, there was no confusion as to what needed doing and in what order, and the low key delivery ensured the least disturbance for anyone else there.  

However, there can be drawbacks to this approach.  The most obvious is the inevitable resource drain.  Compiling a lot of potential situations takes time and personnel.  Since the world is an infinite place, the task can expand to take as much time as allotted and still need more.  Scenario planning can easily become a full time job in any organisation, and drawing a line where diminishing returns on staff time become clear can be tough.  With regards to the Starbucks example as this goes down to a grass roots level, training all of your staff – repeatedly – at all levels is taking them away from their core roles and means you will need more staff to cover that time. 

There’s another more insidious drawback as well: by training them to react by rote, there is a removal of some of the basic processes of problem solving.  You know that saying, give a man a fish and feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and feed him for his life?  What happens if your beautifully drilled staff comes across a situation not covered in the scenario training?  It’s a toss-up: is it worth having near perfect service 95% of the time, with a potential 5% possibility for complete confusion, or to have mostly good service with problem solving ability 99.9% of the time?

It's a strategic choice, and no matter how you slice (or pour) it, it's a choice on how you want your business and employees to function.  So far, Starbucks has worked amazingly: it's worth billions and is one of the most recognised brands in the world.  At the same time, I am less convinced of how it would work in something like a consultancy, research or any kind of more in-depth creative role.  If you need to foster people's own free thinking skills, programming them for reactions does seem limiting.

And me?  Well, my day went on as planned, and if I had a vague eau de cafe, everyone I met was polite enough not to mention it.