By Alexandra Reid
I see, time and time again, in professional articles and blog posts and hear in every day conversations the misuse of the terms marketing and public relations, and it annoys me.
But I admit I am not entirely innocent either. It’s really easy to mix up these two terms because they are complementary fields that share so many similarities. They are both public facing, require many of the same skill sets and share some methods of media and public engagement. However, it is important to understand that their goals and processes for reaching these goals are distinct.
Boiled down to its bare bones, the answer is quite simple. The goal of marketing is to determine the customers that a company should sell to and to devise a strategy on how to reach them. PR involves creating a purpose-driven, active dialogue with a target audience, whether it’s potential customers, employees or stakeholders, with the goal of developing visibility and a positive corporate image and reputation by relating it to its interest groups.
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This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
In my first posting, I promised that this blog would investigate how human evolution has impacted the way we do business, why we are the way we are, and why we act and feel the way we do in our personal and business lives. When it comes to evolution, two areas of investigation are of interest: first, the evolution of the human brain as it relates to how we make decisions, and second, how and why we like to live and operate in tribes.
A few weeks ago a Globe and Mail column by Margaret Wente, The Amygdala Election, provided an eloquent discussion of both phenomena visibly on display in the current Canadian federal election.
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By Linda Forrest
One thing you can rely on in the media game is change. The media industry, as ever, has been aflutter this past week as trade publications both in North America and Europe either swallowed whole their counterparts in a high-profile merging of brands, or print editions of long-standing B2B trade publications announced their intentions of moving strictly online. In reaction, many proclaimed, once again, the death of the trade magazine.
There are various perspectives on why these shifts in the magazine world are taking place, including this detailed piece, written in a funerary tone, from Adweek’s editorial director and longtime prominent media figure, Michael Wolff. Meanwhile, as quoted in a Guardian piece that questions whether trade magazines have a shelf life,
David Levin, United Business Media chief executive, draws a comparison between the situation the trade press finds itself in today and 1912, “when there were a lot of blacksmiths about and we were about to get the motor car.”
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By Linda Forrest
Happy Playbook release day, everyone! Today is the fateful day when Canada’s own Research in Motion begins selling its long awaited Playbook tablet. You might have heard that this was coming, as the media has been very hungry for news on tablets set to compete with iPad; it’s a topic we’ve covered here as well. You might also have heard that RIM has had a series of PR, well, disasters leading up to this release: from on-camera CEO breakdowns, to a cavalcade of bad reviews that suggest the product is not yet ready for market. What should have been an exciting and positive time has instead become a challenging time poised to test the mettle of the company and affect its long-term reputation in a highly competitive marketplace.
The recent PR missteps have been documented extensively elsewhere so rather than repeat them here in-depth, let’s look at the Playbook story as a whole and see what lessons can be learned for other companies bringing technology to market.
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By Linda Forrest
Francis has always been a stickler about not filling client releases with meaningless buzzwords, and rightly so. There are some words and phrases used to market technology that are overused and virtually meaningless. Chief on this list? “Solution.” His dislike for this word is well documented – even on this blog, in this earlier post.
Every time the word “solution” is suggested — and it is suggested almost every time — I implore the workshop participants to imagine the word doesn’t exist. “Now,” I ask them,” What is it that you actually do?” The answers immediately get much sharper and focused and far more meaningful.
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