Posts Tagged ‘Wall Street Journal’

It’s Your Brand. It’s Your Image. It’s You.

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

By Tyra Haag
@tyratuckerhaag

Simply put, your brand is your identity. It’s your essence. It’s how customers, pundits or even the general public view and know you. Whether you’re representing a small business, large company or yourself, your brand defines and shapes everything about you and your company.

Personal and/or company-focused advocacy programs can help mold a brand, offering consumers and the general public a glimpse at what really matters to you and your organization.

Let’s look at a few examples, beginning with Hardee’s.

What does Hardee’s value, and in turn want their customers to value? In a recent interview, the company’s chief executive Andrew Puzder describes how he rescued the company from a “freefall” in the early 2000s.

According to Puzder, Hardee’s had become a “jack of all trades, master of none,” so over the next several years, he implemented “Operation Quality Service Cleanliness,” which is now referred to as “the revolution.”

Employees were scripted to be friendly and cheerful; he narrowed the menu selection dramatically and began focusing the Hardee’s brand to target “young, hungry men.” A new focus on what the customer wanted from Hardee’s and bringing the company back to “its burger roots” saved and re-established the Hardee’s brand.

Advocating within one’s brand doesn’t apply solely for large corporations. On April 14, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about a small business looking to expand its brand by aligning itself with a potentially polarizing public figure – NFL quarterback Michael Vick – who was involved in a highly publicized dog-fighting scandal in 2007 that nearly ruined his professional and personal life. In this unique case, the small sporting equipment company, Unequal Technologies, was looking to spread its brand to the masses, while the individual, Michael Vick, was looking to begin restoring his brand and reputation after years of negative publicity. As the article states:

Even with Mr. Vick’s brand tarnished from the highly publicized dog-fighting scandal — which landed him in jail for a year and a half and prompted companies, including Nike and Coca-Cola to drop him — Unequal Chief Executive Rob Vito sensed an opportunity. If the sporting world could be made aware that Unequal’s football pads had helped Mr. Vick’s spectacular comeback from a rib injury, it could help Unequal attract orders from NFL teams and football moms alike.

Unequal was advocating that its brand made superior sporting equipment, with an emphasis on high-performance and safety. Vick said the endorsement allows him to address the issue of concussions in the sport of football as he also tries to rebuild his blemished public image. The article continues:

News that Mr. Vick had signed his first endorsement deal since leaving prison caused a media explosion. “Within 24 hours, we had about 10 million hits on the website, and I was on CNN, Bloomberg, Fox, ABC and CBS,” Mr. Vito recalled. “We had so many hits, it crashed our site.”

The exposure gave Mr. Vito a chance to talk about Unequal’s insoles, golf grips, sneakers and body padding, which are currently available only on the company’s website. “The sales went up 1,000% when Mike came on board,” Mr. Vito said.

To bring this topic home, I invite you to take a moment to watch Starbucks  CEO Howard Schultz’ online video explaining the rationale behind the company’s latest logo redesign in honor of the company’s 40th anniversary. Schultz uses words like, “embrace,” “essence,” “heritage” and “respect” – words carefully chosen in order to communicate to consumers how the new design is in step with the Starbucks mantra of being “True to Our Heritage.”

Without such clear communication as to why a company is or isn’t doing something, it’s not possible to create and maintain true brand advocacy and loyalty.

After all, isn’t building a brand with public and media advocacy really just trying to increase meaningful consumer interaction and experience in the long run? For better or for worse, your brand is you. What better brand advocate than yourself?

I encourage our blog readers to think about companies, like Starbucks, Unequal Technologies and Hardee’s, whose brands and images clearly display advocacy for what the companies truly believe in and how they share these messages with us, as consumers.

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Earth to TSA: Unions for “Employee Engagement” Aren’t the Answer

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

By Mary Beth West, APR

With our blog focus this month on PR and the power of the relationship (it having been Valentine’s and all), we couldn’t help but notice in recent weeks the headline about Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) airport screeners’ successful efforts to unionize.  While we recognize and respect unions’ right to advocate for the interests of their memberships, a primary rationale for the start-up of this particular one, as put forth by TSA chief John Pistole, leaves us bewildered about the means to the end.

According to his quote in the February 5-6 hard copy of The Wall Street Journal: “The safety of the traveling public is our top priority and we will not negotiate on security. But morale and employee engagement cannot be separated from achieving superior security.”

Note to Washington: There’s more than one way to skin a cat.  When it comes to developing employee morale and engagement, there are far more efficient ways to achieve those outcomes.

As if the TSA doesn’t have enough public scrutiny and criticism bearing down on it between the pat-down / scanner uproar of several months ago, the agency now seems to be inviting a whole new onslaught of public frustration about whether the TSA is all about nimble expedition of safety and security, or, more about job and wage/benefits protection for its government employees.

If employee morale and engagement is the end game, then we’d like to offer a far more streamlined solution: a substantive program of employee communications and internal team relationship-building.  Such a program can be implemented at a fraction of the cost and, if executed well, can produce the desired benefits with none of the negative down-side. 

It’s another example of how the public relations profession offers efficient business solutions through smart, relationship-driven programs . . . and case study upon case study proves that employee communications work in powerful ways to solidify a focused, productive workforce. 

The work of the TSA is critically important to the safety and well-being of our citizens.  Those employees certainly deserve respect and to have every advantage associated with a fair workplace. 

While the TSA seems to have charted its course on this issue, we hope other government agencies working at all levels within this country will make more effective use of public relations strategies and tools to achieve their goals, for internal and external audiences alike.

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Yikes. If you thought you were having a bad week at the office . . .

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

By Mary Beth West, APR

I’m counting my blessings this week that I’m not in the shoes of Nestle’s MarCom Department.  With that said, however, I’m in the public relations business.  And if you’re not an avid student of real-world case studies for guidance on how to handle your own next “really bad week” at the office, then you don’t belong in this profession.  So I’m paying attention here, because this one’s a doozy.

As you can read from The Wall Street Journal piece, Nestle is getting swarmed on the social media front by Greenpeace and Greenpeace wannabes over the candy company’s selection of palm oil vendors (of which the greens are no fans, quite apparently – read for yourself the details). 

With Nestle now counting 95,000 fans on its Facebook fan page – “now mostly protesters,” as the WSJ reports – the question has to be asked:  With “friends” like these, who needs enemies?

Note to self: add to client crisis management plans without fail a Plan B, C and D for when activist groups hijack your client’s fan page.

The WSJ article closes by saying “Marketing experts are split as to whether the company should simply shut down its Facebook page,” citing a few sources on either side of the argument, with one saying that doing so would “cut off all lines of communication” (to which I disagree, since Facebook is a great tool, but come on – it’s not the alpha and the omega of all public contact as we know it); another source saying “The damage has been so done, it might not be a bad idea to shut down the page and start over” (to which I ask the obvious follow-up question – what’s going to keep activists from simply doing the same thing all over again on the new fan page or wherever else?). 

So this is our world, and very few folks in even the highest levels of corporate marketing are used to it yet. 

In this world, the corporation has limited control of messages pertaining to their own entities in the good times and, seemingly, very little to no control in the bad times.  Social media platforms are a shared stage with the rest of the world, and everybody gets a backstage pass, regardless of whether they’re groupies or stalkers.  But you know what?  It ain’t going away. 

To Nestle’s credit, I truly think they are fighting the good fight here, trying to use some restraint and navigate this highly public, ugly situation with some class.  As their spokeswoman was quoted, the company wants to show “we are listening, which we obviously are, while not getting involved in a shouting match.”  Amen to that.  It’s a slippery slope between a level-headed, well-balanced response to criticism and suddenly realizing you’re in a place you don’t want to be – particularly when you’re operating from a supposition of corporate niceness and you’re dealing with a freewheeling, black-ops type of communications insurgency that delights in shock-value.

My final take-away from the temporary sanctuary of the sidelines is that these horror stories don’t give any of us a pass from deepening our engagement in social media – using the judgment of true professionals in how to take the high road, particularly in the face of fringe elements and tactical offensives.  After all, if there’s a battle being fought out there – and there always is – you can’t win it if you don’t show up.

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