Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

It’s the new year so expect a slew of advertisements for anti-smoking products and gym memberships. One organisation that has really impressed me and stands to actually connect with their audience is Boots. They’ve launched their Change One Thing campaign which is a refreshing alternative in terms of a communications strategy.

Despite our best intentions, it’s impossible to drastically change our lifestyles, hence most of our New Years resolutions fall by the wayside. However by making some small simple changes, we can ultimately reach our desired goals - whether it’s giving up smoking, losing weight, etc. Communications has always been about being relevant to your audience.

As Pamela N. Danizger points out in her book ‘Let Them Eat Cake‘:

Just because most advertising doesn’t work to generate sales doesn’t mean that luxury companies should necessarily stop advertising. Rather, they need to create ads that resonate and are relevant to the passions, desires, and fantasies of the consumer. The brand’s ads must tell a story that will be so involving that the consumer becomes part of the brand story…The key word is relevance…delivering meaning to the consumer’s life today and having an expansive vision in order to continue to deliver meaning to the consumer in the future as the consumer’s life changes.

(Jo Tyler, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and Penn State and also founder of Humanizing Business.) The brands are the story. When they talk about their brands, it is always in a larger context with lots of detail, be it a backdrop or situation…So when the director of marketing for women’s athletic shoes at Nike talks about the brand, it isn’t Nike hanging out there in isolation. It’s always against the backdrop of the story of the consumer who wears these shoes and what happens to her when she wears the brand. The story is how the brand affects who the customer is, how she defines herself, how other people think about her. The story may be about athleticism or about performance or about style…By adding deeper and deeper layers of content, or more story threads, the Nike brand is transformed into an expansive brand with more relevance to more people now and in the future by continually telling new stories in new ways.

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