In earlier articles we've reviewed Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout and later The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al and Laura Ries. Since our current theme is building your brand through good relations with the press, it seemed an opportune time to feature a book that stresses the importance of public relations: The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR by Al and Laura Ries
Please note: this book isn't a step-by-step instruction manual. Rather, it is a series of mini case-studies built around this theme: use PR to build your brand, and then once the brand is established employ advertising to keep the brand in front of the customer.
As the authors state in the introduction: "You can't launch a new brand with advertising because advertising has no credibility. It's the self-serving voice of a company anxious to make a sale."
It is wrong to say that this is an "anti-advertising" book. Rather, Ries and Ries stress that the PR campaign and the Advertising campaign need to work in conjunction--but that one needs to put the ad campaign in its proper place. The advertising is best used once the brand has been built, once there's not as much news that's truly new about the brand anymore. Chapter 21 "Maintaining the Brand" illustrates this and offers some tips for you if you have a mature brand.
For the small business marketer looking for new ideas, this is a book filled with "what not to do" stories. It's a worthwhile education in marketing just to read through all the unseen multi-million dollar minefields that big corporations have blundered into with their ad campaigns.
Also instructive for the chief marketer, is the story of how Ries and Trout were able to build the Positioning brand (pp. 109, 138). Although much of the book concentrates on what big companies have done wrong in advertising, here is an example of how a small company did it right. If you read closely, there is valuable instruction from a small business brand that has created and maintained a place in the marketing and business lexicon for thirty plus years--all the while maintaining a steady stream of titles on bookseller's shelves.
The story of how they built the positioning brand is really the best case study of a successful brand in the book. Like many of the best marketing books, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR introduces us to ideas--ideas that we can then take and incorporate into our own small business.
Remember: Brand (who you are) + Package (your Face to the Customer) + People (customers and employees) = Marketing Success.
© 2006 Marketing Hawks
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