PR Basics. Lesson 2: Target Audience, Stakeholders and Publics

Hello to you all!

It`s Tuesday - a perfect time for some Teaching/Learning. As I promised, today I will share with you a new blogpost on PR Basics. If you are new to my blog, let me offer you this first piece I wrote under the series of 'PR Basics'.

Having shared some clear, easy-to-understand and hopefully useful thoughts on everything PR people have to know about strategies, I decided to continue this topic with the following question: Who is who in PR campaign?

Obviously, such a slightly retoric question requires a comprehensive and not-so-straightforward answer which I am providing below for you, my favourite audience.

PR Basics. Lesson 2: Target Audience, Stakeholders and Publics

Overall, it can be said that apart from the PR person (somebody who is delivering a campaign, it can be a team as you know) there always at least three levels of people involved in the process. To specify, I will not talk about people behind the curtains (PR team) and not even those giving a performance (PR clients), but the audience - the most important judge, who decides whether you work is successful and usually is a key to success. 

As we established last time - there are three types of PR aims:

- Awareness

- Attitude

- Behaviour 

We also said that awareness is when you are trying to inform somebody that there is this thing you would want them to have). So here is how it works in a real example: you are telling your friend (Friend A) about this amazing new bag you saw on NET-A-PORTER.com in order to make them buy it for another friend (Friend B). First of all, you will make them 'Aware' the bag exists.

'Attitude' means trying to convince your friend that the bag is worth buying for another friend and make them see all the good about the bag, its price, colour, brand etc.  

'Behaviour' stands for the actual act of buying the bag.

As there are three aims/steps in the filling in the perception gap process, it should not come as a surprise that also three types of actors are involved in these steps, representing different types of publics:

1. Primary audience - these are the people whose awareness we would like to raise (In the above mentioned example the primary audience is Friend A) 

2. Secondary audience - are the people who may also gain some benefits from PR, therefore, they are willing to help approaching our primary audience. (Such as Friend B who will get a bag if Friend A is convinced to buy it).

3. Additional audience (such as thought leaders, scientists, celebrities etc) - those who can help us influence our primary and secondary audience. (Such as Kim Kardashian holding that bag at fashion week, don't know if that is helpful, though). 

Hm...now my example look confusing even to me, so I guess it is necessary to provide some more serious and illustrative cases. I guess because it is a big day for Apple today with them revealing their new products (and we can`t be more excited, so it takes me ages to finish this post as I am switching between the Tabs to watch the event and blog), let`s go with the iPad example.

1. Primary audience (stakeholders) - this is you. I mean if you are not an Android person :). These are the potential customers who desire the new iPad Mini Retina display or whatever it is we will see in a couple of minutes. Primary audience is the one who is going to use our product/service and who will bring us profit.

2. Secondary audience (stakeholders) - these, I believe in a very global context, are developers and all other tech people who makes this world more impressive, faster and unbelievable. Clearly, that with every improvement Apple (Samsung, HTC etc) makes digital industry benefits - competition always drives the industry forward. So in a way, they should always keep in mind their collegues. Another example of the secondary audience, is of course, mass media as they are the one benefiting from the new products releases in a way that it gives them food for thought (food for writing) and real food in the end. :) Many other examples of the secondary audience can be given -  retail, mobile network operators, Apple employees etc. 

Overall, it is important to remember they are the ones interested in you selling your iPad Mini.

3. Finally, the third category is tricky. Those are the people we can involve in our PR campaign, because they can help us convience our first two groups of publics that iPad Mini is the tablet to buy. The choices are only limited to your imagination; however, it seems like in the modern PR world it is slightly limited to either celebs/Twitter influencers and now scientists. Scientists are big to involve in a PR campaign, because apprently they are the most trusted people of all. This is why, if you don't know how to make your press release better, just say 'research shows....' :). On the other hand, people don't really seem to trust celebrities and politicians, but somehow we are still mentioning them in our strategies.

By the way, if you are not sure whom to trust :) or if you want to know more about who are the most trusted publics - you need to check out this website - Edelman Trust Barometr.

Another idea worth sharing is that publics are not just individuals as organisations, groups of people and comunities can also represent our target audiences. Imagine a university that decides to buy new tablets for all the students to make lectures more digitally engaging. Or...say, politician who choses iPad mini as something to feature in his campaign because it makes him or her looks cooler and closer to young geeks. Or even a government who want to make iPad mini avaliable for every high school student - just imagine that :) 

Publics (stakeholders) can also be internal/external if you look at their place towards your company. And yes, intenal stakeholders are vital for successful PR process, just imagine Tim Cook presenting new iPhone when his HTC One started ringing...I know! 

To sum up, one should always remember that PR is not about selling stuff to the consumers, it is about 'building relationships with PUBLICS' (it is always so embarrassing to misspell this word) and publics are not just the consumers. And no, they are not just the journalists you are spaming with you press releases. Publics are everyone envolved in the process as well as everyone you can make involved, if you know how. 

Thanks for reading me! And I will write to you again on Thursday! =*

P.S. Have you seen the new Mac computer? It`s awesome and $2999. 

Back to Apple event - they are showing the new iPad just now!!! It`s iPad...Air!

New iPhone and new marketing lessons

Hi guys! Thanks for reading my recent post, I really appreciate that!

As promised, today's story will feature the new iPhone (iPhones) and the marketing side of the product launch in particular. First of all, I have seen them both already, touched and used the new fingerprint scanner. Moreover, my flatmate has already got a brand new iPhone 5S in granite colour. (Happy Birthday Song!) Yes, actually black&white Apple phones are in the past (unless we are talking about 5C), they are now silver, granite and champaign (at least from my colour perception standpoint).

Another thing I was happy to know is that Glasgow is one of those places where you can get a new Apple product at the date of actual release, which was September 20th (and pre-order from September 13th). By the way, according to some 'street statistics' (the number of people I saw queuing in from of the Apple Store) at least in Glasgow new iPhones where successful. My friend told me that the store opened at 8.00 and at 8.30 everything was already sold out! In case you would need some more authoritative figures - 9 million copies were sold on the opening weekend. More info here.

With all the negative stuff, like bugs, fingerprint scanner hack and so on, my verdict is the following - I would still want to get a new iPhone, because it is cool, even the 5C (for me C actually stands for cool), but like I would not spend my last penny on it (which I did with my iPhone 4s). It is like the excitment is over.... Wait, iPhone advocates, before hating me, let me just explain my point in more details. I would not talk about the technology and 64-smth processor, because I don't really care, but Apple`s marketing strategy - this is what caught my attention. And yes, new iPhone is successful, but there was this thin line Apple people have almost crossed.

1. The art of keeping secrets. Me, and I believe all the Apple fans, where quite dissapointed when long before the date of official release, it was possible to find everything (95% of information, to be precise) on the new phone model - colours, design, innovative features etc. Yes, I get that every other year data licks happened, that`s ok - this makes the excitement stronger and adds to the intrigue (is it true? did you know the new iPhone will be crystal? similar rumors). The thing is that we never knew the whole truth before Jobs or Cook revealed the big mystery. Therefore, what I don`t get is why was it so hard to have the secret kept this year. You might disagree, but the stock market defends my opinion - the very same day after iPhones 5S and 5C were released, company`s stock went down by 5%! And experts say due to the lack of new information: we did not heard anything new - everything has been seen in advance.

2. The power of brand. In the new university course I have just started doing online, brand was defined as a relatonship between the manufacturer (creator) and the customer. It kind of like a promise, supported with additional value company gives to their customers. People are irrational about their consumer behaviour, therefore, what they want from brand is not so much the substance, but emotion. It is all about iPhone making you feel happy/excited/on top of the world/chosen/rich/whatever. I believe iPhone equals luxury. At least few years ago, back at home one could rarely find young people using the expensive Apple masterpiece.

They used to buy it to make a statement - every celebrity, fashion, art people prefer (prefered?) iPhones, because they were so deifferent and so much better than other smartphones. Nowadays, HTC and Samsung are not far behind (I`d say it`s rather arguable which smartphone has it all and which does not). Subsequently, Apple must stick with the basics - be luxurious. However, they decided to conquer the new markets and make the cheap, sorry, colourful version. Here I would like to quote this witty review on Wired by +Katie Collins:

'When Apple finally confirmed that it would be releasing a cheaper plastic iPhone, almost no one was surprised -- rumours and leaks have been rife for many months. What was more of a surprise was that the cheap, plastic iPhone wasn't quite so cheap and plasticky after all.'

To illustrate the point, according to the report by We Are Social, 81% of social media buzz around the iPhone 5C launch was negative, with almost a half of mentionings being critical about device`s design and more than a third dissappointed with the price.

On the one hand, the cheaper model was inevitable, because of the modern market enironment. Moreover, the same strategy seemed to work pretty well with the iPod and iPad mini. On the other hand, iPhone 5C is not that cheap to compete with the competitors and 'damages' (?) the luxury brand attribute. 

3. As the result, we can see the changing face of Apple brand. As I mentioned above, I guess 'C' now stands for 'cool'. This idea is proven by the recent research (12th annual CoolBrands survey) on brand perception, where Apple tops the list of the coolest brands, and not so much the list of luxury ones. I don`t know where the new marketing strategy is good or bad, we will see in a couple of years. Anyway, that`s a great topic for discussion - how big brands should adapt to the changing environments and how adaptable can the marketing strategy be. 

Let me know what you think!

Best regards,

M