First, we must address
the six-million-dollar question:
What Is Public Relations?
The answer is quite simple:
PR is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.
Publics:
These are the specific groups, individuals and anyone your business comes into contact with. They include potential clients/potential employees, current clients/current employees, suppliers of services and materials, competitors, political leaders and opinion makers. Essentially, an organisation’s publics mean everyone who could be interested in it and its products or services.
Strategy:
A successful PR strategy involves making your publics as diverse as possible; when people hear about a product or service from various sources and perspectives, it enhances credibility, and they remember it better.
Press Release:
This is a crucial PR tool; it must be newsworthy, preferably have an appropriate photograph to generate interest, leading to articles and photographs in newspapers, trade and consumer magazines and internal journals, sparking press conferences, radio interviews and TV appearances.
The press release must also have attention-grabbing, appropriate soundbites, which are easy to remember and create a credible, consistent image of what the company is, what it is about and its distinct brand.
It can also explain the company’s backstory: who founded it, when, where, how and why.
People love a terrific story and appreciate a business more when they know the history of its brand and feel that they can trust it.
Good Ethics makes for Good Economics.
A business is more likely to succeed if it is trusted.
Case Study:
“We need a bottle – a distinctive package that will help us fight substitution. We need a bottle a person will recognise even when they feel it in the dark.
The Coca-Cola bottle should be so shaped that even if broken, a person can tell what it is.”
Extract from a design brief for Coca-Cola, 1910.
Content Creation:
Public Relations also provides the text and tone for websites, brochures, leaflets and literature for exhibitions, conferences and seminars.
Finally, when the worst happens, it is PR that deals with the fallout and the potential damage to a company’s reputation. This is called crisis management.
Marketing’s role is to inform or remind to persuade and sell.
Advertising promotes a company’s products or services.
But PR is the guardian of the business’s reputation.
Get in Touch
Castle Public Relations was established in 1997. We have clients in every sector providing credible, concise communications and making headlines happen.
If it is PR you are after, give us a call or email us