What is Consumer PR?

Classically, the definition of consumer PR was to drive change in behaviour via persuasion and third party endorsement, but in today’s modern communications landscape, this definition is far too narrow.

Today, what we must seek to practise is Brand PR.

This means that communities of stakeholders, distinct audiences, and multiple communications channels must be leveraged and understood to build and protect the key asset of businesses today – the brand.

A brand is the promise a business makes to its customers, and its reputation reflects the delivery of that promise – be it positive or negative.

The importance of brand will continue to rise as, according to Martin Raymond, Founder, the Future Laboratory ‘We are in the middle of a decade of extreme turbulence and the biggest change of all is the fundamental shift in the relationship between brands and consumers’ (Raymond 2014). Businesses no longer control their brands as their reputations are played out in the court of public opinion.

This is a scary fact, particularly as what brand stands for generates $118 billion of the combined market of the world’s ten most valuable brands (according to the 2015 Forbes Most Valuable Brands List). In short, 20.5 per cent of the business value of those top ten most valuable brands is linked to intangible, reputationally sensitive words, colours and pictures (Badenhausen 2015).

Therefore, today, firms must not look to create a PR strategy, but rather they must ensure PR is within their strategy from the start. If and when PR truly lives up to its potential, it will cease to have a label at all. PR is not just something to amplify an existing strategy; it is the art of storytelling, mapped to reputational health, stakeholder audiences, brand and business needs over time.

The separation between ‘consumer’, ‘corporate’, ‘business to business’ and ‘financial’ PR is best understood as a difference between brand and business goals, and distribution channels rather than the basic principles of PR.

As a discipline, consumer PR has suffered from being seen as the least strategic, business-rooted part of the industry, yet it has always needed to be the more dynamic, transactional and creative form.

However, with the ever-increasing importance of brands and their reputations, this inferiority complex is evaporating and the true value of Brand (formerly known as consumer) PR is now being appreciated in the boardroom.

Where Did Brand PR Come From?

From the dawn of mass media, enabled by wider literacy and cheap printing in the early nineteenth century, marketing disciplines began to artificially separate and develop.

In the background were the few people that advised on and acted as intermediaries with the exploding forms of mass media – now including radio and television. These people did not have a name, or much attention and respect until Edward Lois James Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, opened his office in 1919 (Heath 2013: 66–69).

Bernays pioneered many of the basic concepts of persuasion and third party endorsement that are still relevant today. In ground-breaking essays such as ‘A Public Relations Counsel States His Views’ (1927), Bernays detailed the difference between his emerging profession and the ‘ad men’ who relied solely on paid media to get messages across in a crude, one-way fashion.

In contrast, Bernays sought to create ‘events’ and mechanisms that demonstrated new concepts via actively involving opinion formers and media of all kinds. Press, live activation, word of mouth and the assets now called ‘content’ all played a part in a dynamic, agile combination, designed to get messages out to and shape the perceptions of diverse groups of real people.

Two instructive and still relevant case studies from the 1920s demonstrate Bernays’ thinking in action.

One channels complex social changes and consumer aspirations into a fully rounded campaign. The other deftly deployed the power of third-party endorsement on its own. Although these case studies are from the 1920s, their clarity of insight, thinking and activation still make them very relevant and in many ways far superior to most off-the-shelf campaigns of any marketing discipline today.

Understanding the Consumer

The foundation of all Brand PR, and indeed marketing itself, is an understanding of the target consumer.

This foundation comes from diligent research. Countless tools and methods exist for getting these foundations together, ranging from search intent and social platform sharing metrics, to qualitative market research, shopper data and more. All have important, but limited roles to play and work best when used together.

In 2005, the UK’s Guardian newspaper employed image recognition technology to see how many brand messages an average Londoner saw every day. The study demonstrated that a consumer sees at least 3,500, and is unable to recall 99 per cent of them (Gibson 2005). Since then, debate has raged on how much higher this number could be, internationally, in an increasingly online world. In 2011, Chris Malone of Relational Capital Group suggested in Forbes that in many cases this could range as high as 30,000 potential messages (Malone 2011). While some have disputed this figure, in the 1970s, Al Ries and Jack Trout found that consumers were exposed to around 500 on average (Ries and Trout 2001: 1–19).

This means that whatever the market sector or campaign goal, we must ask, and keep asking, why care? Why share?

Bill Bernbach was an American advertising creative director. He was one of the three founders in 1949 of the international advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). Bernbach said it well: ‘You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. Because if they don’t feel it, nothing will happen’ (Steel 2006: 62).

Understanding Media Channels

The understanding of the consumer required for any campaign must include a sense of what media they consume and share, and the behavioural triggers for doing so. Whatever the media or medium concerned, an audience focus is crucial. Bernbach described the distinction between writing and communicating:

Mediums, definitions and broadcast mechanisms have continued to change, but in contrast the basic categories of media, and the reasons for using them, have not.

The coming of digital and social media created new interest for PR practitioners in the roles of different types of media, but there is nothing new in these categories. Rented channels are not just the media partnerships cited today, but anywhere and everywhere a brand is a guest participant. Owned channels are not just online, they are customer magazines, official emails, events and immersive brand experiences. Shared media can be as simple as a private conversation or a caller to a talk radio station. Earned media is every kind of independent media coverage.

The advent of digital and social media introduced a new sense of permanence. While it used to be true that today’s news was in tomorrow’s rubbish, the Internet now means communications are not and cannot be forgotten. This presents both a risk and an opportunity for practitioners. Brand reputations can be damaged by old press coverage, or a video of an ill-conceived stunt that once would have been safely away from public eyes in the archives. Brand reputations can be enhanced in the same way by the legacy of strategically sound, creatively inspiring campaigns that also, until now, would have been just fading memories.

Understanding Influence

Marketers of all kinds cite ‘influence’ and ‘influencers’ as forces of nature that can be harnessed for their campaigns and PR is the key discipline to activate this. Celebrity endorsement, one of the most powerful tools of influence and very relevant in Brand PR, has been an abused form of borrowed attention for decades. David Ogilvy’s research in the 1950s demonstrated consumers recall the celebrity first and the brand second – and often do not recall the brand at all (Ogilvy 1988).

The perennial appeal of celebrity stories to mass media and consumers has meant that this often expensive, rarely strategic tactic keeps on going. In an interview with a celebrity about the release of a new film, show, or album, a reference to an endorsed brand is usually at the end, if it has not been cut altogether. When ‘new media’ emerged – this same idea of getting noticed via borrowed attention evolved. The publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in 2000 was seminal in provoking new thinking around ‘Influencers’.

Gladwell packaged Influencers into ‘The Law of the Few’, stating ‘the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts’ (Gladwell 2000: 19). In his book, these people were divided into subcategories of ‘Connectors’, ‘Mavens’ and ‘Salesmen’. The idea that marketers needed to reach a very small number of the right people to create massive changes in consumer behaviour proved intoxicating. At the core of much of Gladwell’s concept of influence was an experiment conducted in 1967 by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram’s experiment is the basis of the ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ idea: 160 students were given a letter and instructions that it be sent to a stockbroker in Boston, whom they did not know, via the novel mechanism of passing the letter on to anyone they suspected of being socially closer to the ultimate target. On average, it appeared to take just six links to get the letter to the stockbroker. However, Gladwell saw great significance in the fact that just three friends of the stockbroker acted as the last link for half the letters he received. These three people appeared to be very influential indeed.

The academic world swiftly challenged Gladwell’s reworking of celebrity endorsement. Duncan Watts, an acclaimed network theory physicist then at Columbia University, repeated the Milgram study in a way that debunked the idea of Influencers:

The perspective offered by Watts is very instructive for Brand PR. The challenge of creating, building and maintaining brand reputation means we cannot rely on a handful of expensive endorsements from seemingly special people. We must understand, respect and serve many audiences wherever they are in order to increase the chances of enabling networks of influences between individuals. How, where and why influence works is and will always be mysterious and not reliably predictable but it undeniably exists.

Giving ourselves the best chance of making an impact is simple. We either rely on casting a small number of overly expensive dice in hopes of a good result, or else throw a larger number of careful darts and optimise our approach as we go. All the tools we have access to can assist with the latter – we can see what consumers want from brands, and therefore what to say about them. We then need to define how and where we say it as our route to success.

Measurement and Evaluation

Historically, PR practitioners relied on what was called ‘Advertising Value Equivalent’ or AVE. AVEs are calculated by multiplying column centimetres of editorial print media coverage and seconds of broadcast publicity by the respective media advertising rates. In most applications, the total amount of editorial coverage is ‘valued’ as if it was advertising, irrespective of its content and tone. This obsolete metric relied on the assumption, often attributed to David Ogilvy, that people pay three times more attention to messages in independent editorial compared to branded content. The value of PR (though not the actual budget to fulfil a brief) was calculated on this basis. Just one brand mention in an article as the result of a short telephone interview, the chance delivery of a press release – or even no direct interaction with the agency at all could be ‘valued’ at six figures. The audience figures used to price the media were, and often are, based on assumptions. The total circulation of a publication, audience size of a broadcaster, or unique visitors to a website are rough, often inflated estimates. It is impossible to defend the notion that a brand mention on page 27 of a publication with three million readers was seen by anything like that number, much less that it was changed.

AVEs were widely denounced following the Barcelona Principles being agreed upon by PR practitioners from 33 countries who met in Barcelona, Spain in 2010 for a summit convened by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC). The Barcelona Principles identify the need for outcome-, instead of output-, based measurement of PR campaigns, call for the exclusion of AVEs, and recognise the communications value of social media. Coverage volume, opportunities to see, clippings, fans, followers, likes, comments, shares, views and retweets all have their place, but they are not key business indicators. It is best to use them as optimisation metrics to help understand what parts of a campaign are working, and figure out how to make it better.

The challenge for Brand PR is to focus on what matters for a business, and build a communications strategy to drive business results. In the absence of a globally recognised PR measurement, the key is to set the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and measurement tools at the outset of a campaign, so all expectations are aligned and hopefully can be met or exceeded. To demonstrate effective Brand PR, two case studies follow. They are very different from each other. The first demonstrates how strategic creativity and robust media relations can change a global narrative. The second demonstrates how Brand PR can directly deliver business goals.

C@se Study

The Burger that will Change the World

Maastricht University Cultured Beef and Ogilvy PR

How do you make laboratory-grown meat appetising to investors while neutralising the ‘yuck’ factor and make Cultured Beef into the most talked-about new food in the world? By turning it into a beef burger.

Cultured Beef was developed at Maastricht University as a solution to the looming world food crisis. But the pioneering work of Professor Mark Post risked being wasted if his funding dried up. To counter that, Ogilvy PR London needed to persuade and engage a global influencer audience, winning the approval of the world’s consumers, and ensuring dissenters who found the science controversial or unpalatable didn’t discredit the work.

Objectives

• Drive investment so Professor Post’s work at Maastricht University could continue for another 2 years.
• Ignite informed discussion using key messages to educate the public about the coming food crisis.
• Convince investors Cultured Beef would be a viable option that would offer a return on their investment.
• Deliver against set performance indicators of 60 top-tier international news reports (print or online) and 40 broadcast pieces.

Strategic approach

The key to establishing Cultured Beef as a viable, profitable solution to the predicted food crisis was to normalise it in the eyes of the world. To do that, a strategy was devised to consumerise and humanise the issue by:

• explaining the future potential food crisis using credible third-party data (from the UN and academic literature) shaped into consumer-friendly messaging;
• igniting discussion of laboratory-grown meat as a solution to this crisis through a mixture of credible scientific and inspiring consumer-focused engagement;
• unveiling Maastricht University’s Cultured Beef in the form of a burger – an iconic and globally loved food item – revealing this world-first during a carefully managed live TV event;
• using independent third-party volunteers during activities to accentuate the credibility of Cultured Beef and the science behind it;
• pre-briefing influential stakeholders and potential detractors (farmers’ unions, PETA, science activists, etc.) to ensure messaging was not muddied by the reaction of others.

Execution

London was selected, with its convenient time zone and position as a global media hub suitable to unveil Cultured Beef to the world.

• More than 200 international journalists were invited to a live tasting event – each vetted for the most impact and reach.
• The event was optimised for broadcast media with a recognisable TV cooking show format – something very familiar to consumers all over the world.
• Impartial tasters, a chef and TV presenter, added to the credibility of the event.
• The live feed was available for free to the world’s broadcasters as well as live-streamed so that everyone had access to the best shots from the event, including close-ups of the burger and the tasters’ reactions.
• A select top tier of journalists were given embargoed advance access to act as influencers and key message drivers for consumers and other media.
• With the help of the hashtag #CulturedBeef, the online conversation was shaped and monitored social media chatter in order to fend off crises and engage with commenters.

Results

• Unsupported by paid media, the campaign appeared on 26 of the most influential newspaper front pages around the world, with over 1,000 broadcasters airing the owned content an average of five times each. Cultured Beef trended globally on social media, sparking debate in more than 150 countries, and changed the global conversation about the future of food.
• It drove investment: more than 15 investors approached the Maastricht University team as a result of favourable coverage of Professor Post’s work. Not only was funding guaranteed for two years as targeted, but the work will be supported until Cultured Beef is ready to go to market.
• It ignited informed discussion: careful stakeholder engagement averted dissension. Instead, the event generated more than 2,000 pieces of coverage (509 pieces in the UK alone) – exceeding both print and broadcast KPIs by more than 1,500 per cent and reaching over 500 million people. The 26 national newspaper front pages included The Guardian, The Washington Post and Spain’s El Pais. The messaging was carried by the BBC, Al Jazeera and China’s CCTV, with 1,000 broadcasters airing the clips an average of five times each. Speciallynegotiated previews with NBC’s Today Show and Time Magazine ensured an important consumer base of middle America and global corporate opinion-formers were reached.
• It started the normalisation of Cultured Beef: the story firmly entered the world’s public consciousness being mentioned on Jay Leno’s and David Letterman’s talk show in the US and on Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Cultured Beef was spoken of as an alternative to traditionally produced meat. The clearest signal of success against target came from The Sun newspaper which carried the headline: ‘Brave Moo World: 5oz of beef that could solve the food crisis.’

Figure 16.1 Cultured Beef burger

Source: Used by permission of Ogilvy Public Relations

Evaluation

Cellular science and issues of food security are not normally topics that capture the imagination of the mainstream media or mainstream consumers around the world. To do that, a creative approach was essential for Ogilvy PR London to make the world aware of the importance of the story.

First step was to settle on the idea of a burger. The limits of the science meant Professor Mark Post was only able to produce mince-like beef. In order to avoid unfavourable comparisons with processed meat such as ‘pink slime’, which was a buzz phrase in US media at the time, Cultured Beef was presented in the well-known and much-loved form of a burger. Then the story had to be told in an accessible way. To handle the science, an animation was created explaining the lab process in an easy-to-understand way. The animation was used at the live event and picked up by media who reported on it. The story of the coming food crisis was brought to life in an engaging mini-documentary that opened the live event and was also made available for media to use. As well as using the familiar cookery show format for the live event, it was decided to inject an element of jeopardy by tasting the burger for the first time in front of live TV cameras.

With thanks to Ogilvy Public Relations and Maastricht University

C@se Study

The Measure of Pleasure

Beyond Dark chocolate and Ogilvy PR/OgilvyOne

How do you reach more than 140 million views, inspiring UK consumers and doubling existing sales overnight? By using science to prove emotional brand claims for the first time and differentiating a chocolatier through PR activities so credible that they drove brand identity and advertising.

Beyond Dark wanted to differentiate itself and take a bigger bite of the UK’s dark chocolate market. The brand faced the challenge of getting its little drops of chocolate noticed in a highly competitive sector, dominated by established names with distinct brand propositions. Green & Blacks is ‘Organic’, Divine is ‘Fairtrade’, and Lindt appeals through ‘Craftsmanship’.

Without the luxury of its established competitors’ big budgets Beyond Dark sought to stand out, challenging Ogilvy to build a distinct and credible brand proposition that resonated with consumers. A reason needed to be created for chocolate lovers across the UK to seek out and try Beyond Dark.

Objectives

1. Drive sales to new and existing customers, enhancing Beyond Dark’s visibility and preference within the dark chocolate market and increasing sales by 15–20 per cent.
2. Raise awareness of the brand among retailers, increasing distribution by 20–25 per cent.
3. Generate conversations nationwide centring on the consumption of chocolate, increasing consumer familiarity and engagement with Beyond Dark through new channels.
4. Substantively differentiate Beyond Dark from its competitive set.

Strategic approach

There were four requirements that framed the strategic approach to ensure the objectives were met and hopefully exceeded:

1. Keep Beyond Dark’s unique ‘drop’ format at the core of the campaign to ensure maximum differentiation from competitors.
2. Transform the way Beyond Dark reaches buyers and target influencers by creating content and encouraging a debate that would play out across all media channels from TV to Facebook walls.
3. Go beyond traditional media to amplify flagship coverage, encouraging content sharing and direct interaction with the chocolatier.
4. Inspire and excite the general public encouraging them to seek-out and sample Beyond Dark.

Ogilvy conducted in-depth research into key influencers and the chocolate-consuming public, delving into some common confectionery folklore and scientific theories. Brand and consumer insights quickly established that Beyond Dark’s market visibility hinged on the development of engaging, sharable content, harnessing a core brand belief: that Beyond Dark’s unique refinement process renders it the most pleasurable dark chocolate.

Adopting this belief would make the brand’s chocolate drops famous for ‘pleasure’ – the very reason most chocolate is consumed. Market and competitor research showed no other brand had taken this territory, although many try to ‘own’ emotions; appealing to the 85 per cent of women aged 35–55 who purchase the majority of chocolate.

The unfolding mission was defined: to create the world’s first ever scale for measuring pleasure. Beyond Dark’s ‘Measure of Pleasure’ would harness compelling science and emotive content, tangibly defining the brand’s benefits to inspire a change in consumer purchase habits. A partnership was struck with leading names in science to help engage the general public in a mass-participation experiment to develop the Beyond Dark ‘Measure of Pleasure’. This successfully created engaging content, an historic scientific development and most importantly news centred on Beyond Dark with a credible product claim that ensured substantive competitor differentiation.

Execution

A partnership was confirmed with Myndplay, an ‘EEG’ (electroencephalogram) technology provider, along with scientists from Birkbeck University to assist in developing the pleasure scale. This provided professional endorsement as well as the support and equipment necessary to read the brainwaves and pleasure reactions of experiment participants. One hundred volunteers (including bloggers and journalists) were assembled at a pop-up lab in London and fitted with the latest ‘EEG’ headsets, calibrated to measure brainwaves against a specially commissioned pleasure algorithm. Participants took tests, from blowing bubbles to stroking kittens – all measured on a scale against a single drop of Beyond Dark, as well as the pleasure received from rival brands in order to prove the brands’ pleasurable credentials.

With this experiential and scientific foundation a media and influencer engagement programme was initiated. Creative, engaging and credible content was developed to support the ‘Measure of Pleasure’ and directly engaged journalists, influencers, consumers, volunteers and fans. This included:

• a website to sit alongside Beyond Dark’s existing pages and to host experiment results;
• supporting social media channels such as Beyond Dark’s Twitter feed;
• providing participants from the experiment with tools to share their experiences including video, photography and personal experiment results.

Through this activity the brand’s pleasure-giving and pleasure-seeking personality emerged. Then on January’s ‘Blue Monday’, officially the most depressing day of the year, the pleasure giving news was released. The results of the experiment were released in a documentary film and through traditional and social media news releases. Targeting national, trade, broadcast and online influencers, Beyond Dark scientifically proved ‘emotional brand’ claims – for the first time. Following the launch of the initial results, a media roadshow was conducted targeting key broadcast, print and online publications, visiting studios and publishing houses to conduct tailored pleasure experiments appealing to Beyond Dark’s core demographic of women aged 35–55.

Results

Overnight, Beyond Dark and its pleasure experiment became a national sensation. Consumers, foodies, scientists, marketeers and the media were inspired to share and participate in the ground-breaking campaign. Inspiring widespread conversation, it credibly proved an emotional brand claim and developed the first ever scientifically ratified scale for measuring pleasure.

• Beyond Dark’s sales more than tripled: on launch day sales shot up 100 per cent, increasing to 327 per cent in the following months as word continued to spread about Beyond Dark’s pleasure credentials.
• Distribution increased 309 per cent – retailers including WH Smith, Sainsbury’s, Harrods, Holland & Barrett, and 850 independent stores began to stock Beyond Dark.
• For the first time Beyond Dark drew the attention of national newspapers, TV, Radio, magazines, academics, marketeers and the general public. Coverage reached 142,000,000+ views prompting widespread conversation and information sharing across social channels. Beyond Dark organically developed 7,000 Twitter followers overnight and doubled the volume of posts online surrounding ‘pleasure’ and ‘chocolate’. Activities, conversation, and over 2,000 new weblinks propelled Beyond Dark to the top of UK search rankings for ‘dark chocolate’.
• The Brand PR activities were so effective and credible that the experiment results drove the brand advertising and packagingcomplying with the strict rules of advertising authorities.

Figure 16.2 Beyond Dark’s Measure of Pleasure research: blowing bubbles

Source: Used by permission of Ogilvy Public Relations

Evaluation

Beyond Dark became the first chocolatier to prove that pleasure comes from eating its chocolate. The creative combination of scientific research and consumer purchasing behaviours saw Beyond Dark’s ‘Measure of Pleasure’ tangibly demonstrate an emotional brand claim for the first time. PR activities produced results so credible that they could then be adopted in advertising and on packs – complying with the Advertising Standards Authority’s and Trading Standards’ strict rules. Industry insiders have heralded Beyond Dark’s ‘Measure of Pleasure’ as the future of marketing and scientists have added Beyond Dark’s pleasure scale to academic papers. On a limited budget, this engaging and targeted campaign took the brand from specialist outlets into the mainstream. Millions learned about Beyond Dark and shared its content, tens of thousands made purchases, and hundreds of new retailers clambered to stock the world’s most pleasurable dark chocolate.

With thanks to Ogilvy Public Relations and Beyond Dark