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PR. It's not like a Sunday suit
 David Watkins chose PR as his specialist marketing discipline when developing his sales and marketing career. Working in both the public and private sector as well as running his own PR Company, he has many years experience in helping Organisations maximise the benefits of Public Relations.
He now runs Pink Elephant Training - a business skills coaching company and continues to extol the virtues of PR as a valuable marketing tool.
In this article, originally written for Business in Yorkshire magazine, David illustrates why he feels PR should be considered an integral part of the marketing mix and not just something to be used on an occasional basis.
Ask a group of business people their definition of PR and you will, no doubt, receive a pretty broad response. Some will see PR as a gloss to cover the cracks in their marketing strategy, others will see it as a damn good excuse to have a few drinks while others will see it as an essential and totally integrated part of their business ethos.
It really does depend on your viewpoint. The Institute of Public Relations defines PR as the "deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organisation and its public". The Ford Motor Company sees it as a compound of common sense, while many business people will consider it a straightforward extension of their sales effort.
The point is, of course, that it doesn't really matter how you define PR providing you recognise it. Most businesses don't. Even in the sophisticated media hyped 21st Century, many still regard PR in the same way as they would their favourite suit - something to wear on special occasions.
And yet it is those very same Businesses who recognise the value of public relations as a multi-faceted discipline that will be able to ride out the storm should something unseen or untoward affect their carefully structured image.
For example, Heinz, Farley, Perrier, BMI, British Rail and London Transport are still with us some, admittedly, in a different guise and others with a somewhat tarnished image. But all are still major players in their particular field,' and yet each has suffered a major blow to their once ‘wholesome’ persona.They successfully massaged their 'publics' with a structured and well-managed public relations strategy long before they needed to even consider implementing ‘crisis PR’ – despite in some cases a major loss of credibility.
One way of generating favourable publicity is to follow Henry J Heinz's philosophy of "doing a common thing uncommonly. Research* undertaken by Context Analysis has confirmed what PR practioners always knew and that is the effective use of PR can achieve on average a 3:1 higher response rate than advertising. People believe editorial more than they do advertising with the research finding that a quarter of a brand's value is now tied to the success of its PR initiatives.
The research also found that companies involved in new technology, for example Dell, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft were almost 75% reliant on PR to deliver real business value – and often at a fraction of the cost of advertising. Other categories where this is also true is the car industry, consumer electronics and financial services sector.
But of course delivering a maximum ROI is largely dependent on ‘doing it right’ While Oscar Wilde may have felt that "there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about", the argument that there is no such thing as bad publicity does occasionally have a hollow ring to it.
 Ask the Yorkshire manufacturer of the biggest bed in the world. Entered in the Guinness Book of Records, jumped on by 64 children on Blue Peter, launched at Ripley Castle by Henry the Eighth, exhibited at Harrods, and promoted in a way that you would expect couldn't fail to generate the expected response.
The Company went bust and a bed that had cost £15,000 to manufacture was sold at auction for a humiliating £3,300.
So how can such a venture fail?
In many cases it is simply a failure to understand the basic ground rules; that publicity planning should always go alongside product planning; all too often it does nothing of the sort.
Maurice Tither, who was PR head of former Sheffield agency, Stanley Dickson, used to say that the three phrases which would stop him in his tracks were: "Honest, I didn't know the gun was loaded", "Well, she looked sixteen" and "I'd like to do some PR"
It is certainly true to say that anyone can disseminate facts, what PR has to do is present the facts in such a way that people will take notice and then respond. In other words promoting reputation through timely and relevant information
 Martin Lacey knows this better than most. He is a key exponent in getting people to take notice. Former circus ringmaster and now director of the Great British Circus he has created more publicity than Mary Chipperfield and Gerry Cottle put together.
When he was a ‘consultant’ to the Mongolian State Circus he generated many columns of editorial based on the fact that the circus did not use animals and, years before, he did the same thing when his previous Circus located on to waste industrial land in Sheffield and he called out the Army to check that his elephants were unable to pick up and swallow any metal objects.
He is currently generating more publicity than he could ever imagine (not necessarily all ‘good’ publicity) with his new touring circus that uses animals for the first time in years. He has seen vociferous protests throughout the UK combined with record ticket sales 
PR is all about capturing people’s imagination and getting your message across in an imaginative way. A few years ago, the Yorkshire Post carried a large picture story of a West Yorkshire Police charity concert. It received such prominence not because of its subject matter (not another charity concert?) but because someone had the foresight to arrange for a local dance troupe to demonstrate their routines to a group of police rookies. The story and accompanying picture made almost a quarter of a (broadsheet) page.
These situations do not just happen, they have to be created.
Most new house builders will equip a show home and leave it at that. An enterprising southern based developer had a couple actually live in the house; the publicity and novelty value ensured the required sales. To say the idea could not be used again is probably quite true, but a Yorkshire builder adapted it recently when he used dressed mannequins standing in the driveway and peering through the curtains to add a lived-in feeling .when selling a plot of new homes.
Doing things differently is just one aspect of successful PR. With the current explosion in media opportunities, not simply traditional media such as Press and TV but new technology such as blogging, twittering and on-line messaging, there has never been a better time to grasp the value of PR.
 In fact, News Releases are fast becoming a major source of information for the Media. According to a recent estimate by the UK’s ‘Press Gazette’ the number of journalists now using news releases has risen from just 37 per cent in 1982 to over 68 per cent today and it is estimated that over 60% of all material featured in new technology programmes such as Channel Five’s Gadget Show originates from imaginative News Releases. It therefore, follows that selective targeting and creative presentation should be a major consideration when distributing information.
The first thing to decide is your objectives: what are you wishing to achieve? If you are wishing to influence change then think the whole scenario through. The resulting publicity may in fact create quite the opposite effect. It cost McDonald’s many thousands of pounds to combat the 25th anniversary ‘shortfall’ It cost Cadbury’s £12m of further investment when they originally launched ‘Wispa’ with a massive marketing campaign in the North East only to find they could not fulfil demand and therefore had to temporarily withdraw from the market. This allowed rivals Nestle to step in with their Aero countline and mop up the publicity originally generated by Cadbury. And who can forget Gerald Ratner’s PR faux pas when he compared his watches to ‘cheaper than a prawn sandwich but probably won’t last that long'.
No organisation can succeed unless it creates support through understanding. The more a Prospect or customer knows about the company the more receptive they will be to its high visible messages. Companies do not make a choice whether to have PR or not. There is no such choice. It's not a Sunday suit. The only choice is whether to harness the planned, disciplined and managed potential of professional PR or whether it should be haphazard, accidental and totally reactive.
© David Watkins. Please feel free to reproduce segments of the article – an acknowledgement would be appreciated. This is an update of an original article that appeared in ‘Business in Yorkshire’
*The Media Prominence Study, conducted by Text 100 research arm Context Analytics. Results published March 2009.
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