So we have arrived at the 4th and last part of this series. It all started with what seemed to be a trademark battle between T-Mobile and the tech blog EngadgetMobile, and in the past three episodes of the Magenta Lessons, we’ve covered some very interesting topics. Part one was about the role of colors in design and branding, which was followed by the role of brands in marketing. Last week, I wrote about trademarks and copyright in the graphic design field, be it industrial design, web design or advertising. And today, we’re going to take a look at the subject of Public Relations - and see what we can find out about why knowing a bit about it can be the best thing that ever happened to us.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Public Relations

The term Public Relations (PR) is used to describe the management of information between one party and another. Every company that is large enough to have a public face will employ PR in one way or the other. In fact, it is mandatory to make use of PR when managing brands. To explain Public Relations better, think about how you want your target audience to perceive a brand.
As a marketing manager, you will want to connect a certain image to a brand; one which the target audience can identify with. We covered this in Part 2 of this series. So, next to the other promotional elements of marketing (advertising, personal selling, direct marketing, sales promotion), we have publicity, which, in Public Relations, is the arm of action.

What’s the Difference between PR and Publicity?

While Publicity goes out and creates a story around a given subject, with the objective to leverage certain aspects of it while making it easy to overlook others, Public Relations aims to oversee and control the flow of information on a much larger scale, e.g. with the goal to not even let bad news become public.

Example:

Let’s say that T-Mobile wanted to raise their text message rate in the U.S. from currently 15 cents to 20 for every message that exceeds the monthly budget. If we were to make the assumption that they needed more money and the 15 cents (which, right now, is 5 cents below industry standard) is really busting their butts, we could see a task for T-Mobile’s Marketing Manager coming up: “Make this bad story a good one for our customers”. To do that, he could employ a variety of techniques: from simply letting it slip under the carpet to spinning it into the brand’s premium positioning as a differentiator.

This example is based on the assumption that T-Mobile wants to make more money from the text messages their customers send. Can we make that assumption? Let’s look at this post from June 30 on EngadgetMobile.com. Click on the screenshot to enlarge.

Read the post on Engadget Mobile

Now the picture has become more transparent. What I would make of this is that T-Mobile doesn’t have any need to earn more off of the text messages. Instead, they want to convert their prepaid customers and those on a budget plan to long-term customers with a flatrate contract (where the text message price doesn’t matter, because it’s unlimited), which of course brings more money in, especially money T-Mobile can count on and plan with, as opposed to the prepaid fluff. Duh.

What we can see here is two things:

1. The decision to increase the pricing for text messages was the flatrate marketer’s idea, and
2. The article on EngadgetMobile is surprisingly well written for that objective.

The latter is publicity.

How to Influence the Consumer’s Mind

The media has a huge impact on what we do, and how we do it, with editorial content being a very trusted source for information. Just think of blogs. Many of us have a handful of favorite blogs we read regularly. They are in one of the fields we are interested in professionally, or for fun. Either way, the blog(ger)s we read and trust have an impact on our opinion. And there is a responsibility that goes hand in hand with this kind of authority: honesty.

As soon as a blogger receives money from a company to write about their product, they are trading their honesty for cash. You may have heard about sites like PayPerPost or ReviewMe - they are marketplaces where companies are offering a couple of bucks to bloggers who are willing to write a post about their products or services - in a positive tone. The blogger is also required to include at least one do-follow link in their post in order to receive the money.

As despicable as that may seem, it’s a way quite a few bloggers are making money online - but it still isn’t as fantastic as what is happening in the offline world on a much larger scale, and what has happened ever since the first ‘newspaper’ has been invented in ancient Rome.

The Acta Diurna were the daily Roman official notices; they were carved in stone and presented to the public in message boards. Julius Caesar used this method of publication to announce the outcome of trials, and such ‘news’ that were intended to communicate the strength and superiority of the state. Also in ancient China, the government produced news sheets to get their publicity across.

Today, our governments don’t carve their propaganda in stone anymore. They employ Public Relations agencies instead.

Painting the Canvas Of A Free Mind

The skill in publicity is to paint a picture around a topic, thus applying direction - with the course being approached absolutely controlled by the publicist. Utter control is indeed the main objective here; controlling the target audience, controlling consumers, controlling the public. The profession relies and prospers on the intelligence that facts, on their own, embody no emotion at all, but the human being is the definition of an emotional hothouse.

By applying an emotional element to an arid fact of any kind, the publicist can steer the direction of thought of the target audience to some extent. What, you don’t believe me? Just read the paragraph above this one again, then answer the following question:

Considering its dangerous potential to massively influence our society, do you think that the power of publicity is likely to be abused by the authorities?

No.

Yes.

Did you answer yes? I just used a couple of rhetorics in an attempt to steer your thoughts into a certain direction. These techniques are:

• I used a colorful word to evoke an emotion. “Control” connotes something unfavorable (who likes to be controlled by someone else?), and I loaded it even more by adding “utter”.
• I stressed the impact of the emotion by making use of repetition and an inverted climax: “controlling the target audience, controlling consumers, controlling the public” repeats the same word three times to stimulate its impressiveness, and the sequence of decrescent specifics broadens the scope to include the reader (”target audience” < “consumers” < “the public”).
• I used “intelligence” instead of “knowledge”, which is a colored word and connects the reader’s thoughts to the mystery and respect of intelligence agencies.
• Finally, in the question itself, I added a call to consideration, which on its own raises awareness; I loaded the terms “potential” and “influence” with the words “dangerous” and “massively”, and I used an alliteration (”power of publicity”) to emphasize its importance and make it more memorable.

In marketing and psychology, the art of inquiry is actually a discipline by itself (as well as alliteration in advertising). I could have asked “Do you think our government uses publicity to control what becomes public on a regular basis?”, and the answers might not be as weighted. I could also have given you more than two options as an answer, but I only offered yes or no, black or white, with the answer I wanted you to pick placed after the other.

I didn’t do this to tread on your toes but to prove my point. By using a few simple techniques, I successfully steered you in the direction I had in mind and you (hopefully) answered my question the way I wanted you to. If I can do this, don’t you think our governments can do it too?

Well, this post is not about politics, but marketing, so let me just throw this idea at you: T-Mobile and the Engadget Mobile blog have joined forces to collaborate on a Public Relations level. To what extent is not clear, but the wonderfully inflated news story about the tech blog using magenta in their identity does raise a few eyebrows. Especially since almost every post Engadget publishes on T-Mobile (which is a lot) seems to be in favor of the telecommunications company, no matter how bad the news really are. Welcome to the wonderful world of product placement.

That’s quite Interesting, but where’s the Proof?

As I am not affiliated with either party, I can only offer my train of thought here. Thus I ask you to not take this article as proof or given facts, only as the conclusions of a logical mind based on what is out there for everybody to be seen. I’m simply asking myself what I would be doing in their place - and I take it that you do notice my nice little disclaimer at this point. So we can carry on.

There is the recent collaboration between T-Mobile and AOL. In February, T-Mobile announced to launch Instant Messaging Services on their mobile phones, including AIM. Now that is nothing special by itself, just the fact that Weblogs, Inc., who run the successful Engadget blogs, are owned by Netscape, which is owned by AOL Time Warner. Now, what I would do if I had the marketing post at T-Mobile, is knock on the door of AOL and say, hey people, we’re promoting AIM for you, so tell us what you’re going to do to promote your promoters. Ha.

Any Press is Good Press. Why?

Here’s a thought: in today’s world, news runs at an incredibly fast pace. The average life span of a news thread is extremely short, as there is only so much time in the daily news show, and only so much real estate in a newspaper format. What was top news yesterday is already forgotten by tomorrow - the question is, what remains in the people’s minds?

A very simple answer is constant factors. Let’s say we have 10 news threads evolving around a brand over the course of three months. While the content differs for every one of the ten stories, what remains the same throughout the thread is the brand name. So you might read about Steve Jobs announcing a new phone that “will change phones forever”, then about the iPhone hitting stores at $399, then the iPhone only functioning with one network, then the iPhone getting a software upgrade, then Apple dropping prices for the iPhone dramatically, then people who bought the iPhone at a higher price feeling as if there were taken on a ride, then people lining up in front of Apple stores to purchase the iPhone. And. So. On.

The primary constant here is “iPhone”, the second one is “Apple”, a third one would be “Steve Jobs”. Remember the repetition I used above to highlight a word? Well, create multiple threads around one constant (brand) and the constant turns out to be your natural repeting factor, which, in effect, will remain in the people’s minds long after they have forgotten the story itself. Why they forgot the story? Because that’s yesterday’s news. It has already been replaced by newer news.

That, in essence, is why any press is good press.

Conclusion

Manage to get your brand out there, and you already have an advantage over your competition. If people talk about your product or service, you have achieved something that is highly valuable in today’s world - that’s the holy grail of marketing, and called Word of Mouth. That’s because with the overflow of information every consumer is exposed to day after day, you want to be in their minds. And with the proven trend that consumers are more and more aware of advertising - and nowadays, demand to decide for themselves which ads they consume, and when they consume them (which is infavorable to advertisers, as it is a loss of control over the target) - Public Relations become more and more important, and with it, its arm of action which runs by the name of Publicity.

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