Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category
Paid advertising and public relations are not one and the same. Advertising is space that you pay for in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast. The benefit of advertising is that you control what goes into the space by providing a camera-ready ad or a script. Public relations (PR) becomes part of the editorial content of the publication. When a reporter writes a story about you, and you do not pay for the space in which the story runs, that is public relations.
While PR costs significantly less than paid advertising, it involves more risk because you are not in control of what goes in that story. The reporter, editors and broadcasters ultimately decide what to cover. More times than not, however, PR is worth the risk because the public tends to value editorial coverage more highly than paid advertising.
The other benefit of PR is article reprints. Sending article reprints as you would newsletters gets your name in front of people who have already worked with you, and lends you tremendous credibility. But before you get a reprint, you’ve got to get an article.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
Advertising, Marketing, Pittsburgh, Public Relations No Comments
You open the newspaper and there on the first page of the home and garden section is a feature story about your competition. The story quotes your competition, discusses the great service they provide, and maybe even includes a case study or two. You ask yourself, “Why did they pick that firm instead of mine? My staff is much more qualified than the other guy’s!”
There are basically only two reasons. The first is luck. If your competition happened to grow up next door to the editor of the Daily Post, chances are excellent that the editor will think of his childhood friend first when he needs information. There’s nothing wrong with that: when reporters are looking for a reliable source, they go with someone they know. That brings us to the second - and much more significant - reason why some companies get press and others do not: effort. Getting publicity means building relationships with the media. If you understand what reporters want and need from their sources, and spend a little time and effort meeting those needs, you could find yourself the subject of the next feature story.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Advertising, Marketing, Pittsburgh, Public Relations No Comments
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Monday, May 4th, 2009
Advertising, Marketing, Pittsburgh, Sales, Uncategorized No Comments
The products that change lives are actually brands. Dan illustrates the strong association we have with brands and how to develop that same bond with your customers. Click here to watch the video.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Advertising, Branding, Marketing, Pittsburgh No Comments
To break the cycle we need to embrace ’small’ failures, get closer to customers and users, create physical models or simulations to test alternatives.
Fail Small
When our children were in preschool, each day began with play-time. Children sat cross legged, either individually or in small groups, building towers, putting dolls to bed, or arranging furniture make-believe rooms. There was no ’sunk cost.’ They were just pretending. In child’s play, there is no “equity.”
But when dollars are attached to those minutes, the pressure is on. The concept of ‘investment’ becomes real. The more “concrete” an idea becomes, the greater the equity invested. In developing new ideas, products and services, the central problem is dealing with the costs of failure when the invested equity is high. If throwing out an idea is expensive, people and companies won’t want to do it.
Get Closer to Customers and Users
One of the inherent difficulties of developing new solutions on behalf of a future customer is the knowledge gap between those who develop new products and those who ultimately have to use them. People who develop products are experts. Customers and users, on the other hand, represent a broad range of experience and expertise, and in general, are substantially naive to advances within a field. The challenge for developers is to be able to apply the leading edge knowledge to a sufficient level of transparency that naive users can experience the benefit without the expertise. Whether it’s the design of a website, a product or a retail environment, the people who are developing them have a hard time imagining what real customers and users might experience when they’re approaching the product for the first time.
Just as it is hard to remember how difficult it was to learn to walk as a child, it is virtually impossible for experts to become surrogates for a naive user. The problem is compounded by the fact that the factors that influence a satisfying experience for a user are almost never obvious to the user or customer prior to extended use. Had you asked someone in 1975 what form of headphone would be appropriate for an ipod, they simply wouldn’t have known. Before the ipod had been popularized, most consumers weren’t aware that they were going to jogging every morning. The concept of wearing headphones while they were jogging would have seemed like a ridiculous proposition.
Experts trying to imagine how a naive consumer might experience a product run the risk of misjudging just how different users are from engineers. Although we are all practicing ad hoc sociology when we observe users and try to understand the meaning of their grunts and moans, the process of translating engineering and marketing knowledge to a satisfying user experience requires a new approach, integrating many more formalized sociological and behavioral research methods than are now used in common practice.
Getting Physical (Fast)
Although product development teams need not become sociological or psychological researchers, the success of their efforts will be inextricably tied to the ability of innovators to preview and evaluate possible experiences customers and users have with products before specifications are defined. Essentially we need to be able to successively “try” a product, recognize its failings and make the changes early in the process to know that what we are specifying is really going to be better. Development teams need to create an environment that allows for a series of “failures” before product specification to increase the probability of success for the product that is ultimately engineered and manufactured.
The underlying assumption for creating such an environment is that experiencing a product or service takes place in time and space; it is a “physical” activity. The physicality of experiencing products makes it paramount that product developers have ways to “get physical” with products, services and experiences early enough in the process so that the essential characteristics of the experience can be identified and understood before resources are devoted to engineering and production. Only by getting “physical” early in the process can we hope to successively approximate enough experiences to know the characteristics of those that are better than others.
Dan Droz is Chairman and CEO of Droz & Associates: Marketing, Branding, Design, Public Relations, Advertising, Web Design, Interactive Marketing for Pittsburgh and surrounding regions.
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
Advertising, Branding, Design, Marketing, Pittsburgh, Public Relations, Sales, Web Design No Comments