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Value-Added Public Relations

Written by: Andy Marken

Article Overview: Book Review -- The Secret Weapon of Integrated Marketing – By Thomas L. Harris, Phillip Kolter; McGraw-Hill, NY, NY, June 1997, 336 Pages

Value-Added Public Relations

If you think its easier and less painful to learn from others rather than make your own mistakes, Messieurs Harris and Kolter have done a superb job of amassing a solid set of public relations and integrated marketing communications (IMC) programs to help you break through your creative block.

The two do a very good job of examining how a wide range of well known companies and products have used public relations to get more bang for their marketing bucks. They do a fair job of examining the efforts and activities from 30,000 feet but don’t give a lot of insight into the thought-processes and implementation activities that produced the results.

The book tends to be more of an academic work that supports two concepts that fade in and out of favor in the trade – marketing public relations (MPR) and IMC. Unlike Clarke Caywood’s book, The Handbook of Strategic Public Relations and Integrated Communications, the authors do a very good job of explaining more than 50 public relations tactics that can be used and how they support and enhance other communications tools to deliver better corporate and product branding and marketing.

Harris and Kolter give corporate marketing and communications people a very useful set of guidelines for carrying out the full range of IMC activities including situation analysis, setting objectives, developing strategies, devising tactics and measuring results. This is a worthwhile book for PR people to read and then keep handy as a reference as they begin to explore and refine their techniques in the brave new world of one-to-one marketing and communications.

As B2B and B2C managers – brick and mortar, click and order and brick and click – have suddenly come to the realization that the consumer isn’t a faceless object that can be sold something. Instead, they are smart, sophisticated and perhaps even skeptical of most of the messages that bombard them every day. The authors show readers how focused PR programs and activities can more efficiently and effectively present drill-down levels of information to consumers so they can make informed buying decisions and more closely identify with your company and your products.

We’re presented with an almost unlimited avenues of tapping into customers today and selecting just the right mixture of efforts and activities is becoming increasingly difficult and at times dangerous. Both of the authors have enough “real world” experience to thoroughly analyze the case studies they present to give a practical set of lessons learned that PR and communications people can adapt to their situation.

Traditional marketing and branding activities are becoming increasingly ineffective in today’s global environment and it will be interesting to see how many of Harris and Kolter’s dozen plus examples stand the test of time. As Frederick Reichard, The Loyalty Effect, points out it is becoming increasingly difficult to build and maintain customer loyalty. We’re dealing with a lot of unknowns in the brave, new Internet-connected world and companies will kiss a lot of MPR and IMC frogs before they find a prince. But at least Value-Added Public Relations will be helpful in determining which frogs are really toads in disguise.

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