Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Paul Dervan recently pondered whether advertising is enough to build a brand anymore. It’s an interesting question and one I love to answer from a PR perspective. Unlike some of my peers I believe that advertising has an important role in brand building. Simply relying on public relations cannot communicate your brand values. Such a viewpoint lacks a basic understanding of the benefits of advertising. Advertising allows an organisation to communicate its scale, repeat its key messages on an uninterrupted basis and specifically target its audience though certain media outlets.

Having said that over the past twenty years, consumers have grown wary of advertising because the majority of it lacks authenticity. As I have previously commented, the old way of doing things was selling to customers on a promise. The problem for advertisers is that consumers have bought into the promise and we’ve had enough with being disappointed with reality. Now companies are being charged with actually delivering on their promise.

Core to this is the overall experience that a consumer undergoes through a brand’s various touchpoints. As Francois Gossieaux points out:

Your brand gets defined by the UI (User Interface) of your company, the interface through which your customers and prospects interact with your company. That interface gets determined by pre-sale activities - i.e., advertising, retail layout, retail personnel attitude, telemarketing, sales people’s knowledge of the industry, etc -, as well as immediate post-sale activities - i.e., packaging, ease of use to set up the products, available help options, etc. -, and the long term post sale activities - i.e., telephone support, return policies, warranty policies, on-site support, etc. That makes up a lot of links in the chain that determines your brand in the mind of the consumers which your company controls.

Tom Himpe has an interesting presentation (which Paul has also since spotted in a followup post) highlighting the ‘evolution within marketing from message-centric (trying to flog average products & services through flashy and entertaining messages) to product-centric (trying to actually improve products & services, and make them more remarkable, interesting, beautiful or valuable)’ (Hattip to Helge Tennø.)

Quoting from Himpe’s presentation, there are a lot of lessons for brands to learn:

1. The world doesn’t need more products, it needs better products
2. There is a blur and overlap between the product and the experience, where the messaging ends and the products begins is very grey
3. Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the marketplace
4. Marketing should be more than entertainment, but add actual value to the core offering, and as a result, to people’s lives
5. Digital technology is not…about making traditional advertising clickable. Instead, digital technology is changing how we access and use products & services.

From a PR perspective, there has to be a fundamental realisation that in our current role there is only so much we can do. Even with the addition to new channels to our arsenal, unless we are also able to get involved in the product/service experience then there will always be a limit to our influence. For example, like customer service we also are on the frontline for receiving feedback about how an organisation, product or service is perceived. Whether that will happen or not is another matter, what is a reality though is that PR agencies now have to work with other disciplines to deliver integrated campaigns that truly connect with an organisation’s target audience.

Within this marketing mix, advertising has an important role to play. Its influence has waned somewhat as the various brand touchpoints ultimately dictate the consumer’s perception of the brand, but in terms of brand building it can communicate values well and based on the amount of money being spent give the illusion that consumers are dealing with a large corporate organisation. Importantly, as Paul points out, in a world where there is little differentiation between competitors’ products or services in some markets, advertising can help you stand out from the crowdd.