Jeremy had a long-time client who opened every meeting with the following phrase: “Be brief. Be brilliant. Be gone.” All meetings were restricted to 30 minutes. If you couldn’t state your case in a half hour, it probably wasn’t worthwhile in the first place. He demanded from PR a smart idea, a straightforward message, and an approach for telling his brand’s story that made immediate sense and had a better than fair chance of delivering the results he was looking for. Simple, right?

Keeping it simple in public relations strategy, planning and execution has real, unassailable value. Does a new PR campaign always require a phone-book size slide deck? Is a handful of well-researched, solid facts insufficient evidence to validate a new approach? Is it always best to deliver all brand messages in every press release?

We say nay.

Simplicity should not be confused with being bare-bones or uncreative. On the contrary. The most effective campaigns are often those with the simplest messages. They are easiest to remember, seem so obvious, and the audience –from the client pitch to the end-user—gets it with little to no explanation.

Sometimes keeping it simple requires paring the core brand attributes or the key messages to just the one that speaks most powerfully and persuasively, and then linking it to what we often refer to as a “higher cause.” One example we love of this strategy at work is Tide Detergent. The higher cause: pride. The functional attribute: whiter whites. How much simpler can it get?

It can be difficult for marketers who are very close to their brands to choose one attribute or a single message. It’s like asking them to pick a favorite among their children. There is also the “scaleability” argument. In the pharma world, it can go like this: since we only have x years left on the patent, we need to tell the whole story and provide fair balance in every tactic and have the outreach be as wide as possible, as casting a wide net is the most efficient use of our limited marketing budget, and the best way to make an impact fast.

To this, we say OK. Have other elements in the marketing mix be the spaghetti and PR the meatball. We then work to land on the single functional brand attribute (efficacy? safety? mechanism of action? rapid onset? unique nature of the core ingredient?) or message (disease education? symptom awareness for self-identification) we want people (target consumers and the media) to remember most, and identify the higher cause that will not only garner media attention, but also trigger an emotional connection to spur the most likely portion of our audience (at-risk population? women as healthcare gatekeepers? key markets only?) to take the desired action (e.g. get tested, visit a website, talk to their health care provider, download and use a coupon, enroll in a program). Once at this point, the rest is simple – from the tactical plan to the integration, from execution to results measurement.

And if more convincing were necessary, imagine this…a world where all meetings were brilliant and over in 30 minutes.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 9:23 am and is filed under Public Relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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