Tag: PR

  • An interview with ET Brand Equity on PR

    First published in ET Brand Equity.

    PR is an essential component in building a cohesive brand narrative: Manu Prasad, Scripbox

    PR is a great means to develop and propagate a unique voice and point of view. Since we are focused on a specific target customer, PR, through its various channels, is a great way to talk about issues that matter to them, says Prasad…

    As we gear up for the India Communication Summit 2022, a special series has been introduced. ‘My Experiments with PR’ captures the opinions and experience of senior marketing leaders from diverse industries. It aims to bring out to our readers insights on how marketers see the PR industry and leverage communications to overcome challenges.

    In this edition, we present Manu Prasad, chief marketing officer, Scripbox. 

    1. What are the major PR challenges that your industry is facing now?

    Scripbox is a wealth manager, and because we are a digital native, we get classified as a fintech, and more recently, wealth tech. A domain that has been transformative from an economic perspective, and one that has received a lot of attention, some good and some bad. One of the biggest challenges therefore, has been to create our signal amidst the noise, from a brand and messaging perspective.

    Related to that is the second challenge – much of the messaging in the domain has been around specific products and the returns they provide – from IPOs to crypto. In contrast, our focus has been on helping our customers develop the mindset and behaviour that helps in long-term wealth creation. 

    The signal of right advice amidst the hype noise is a challenge in an era of constant FOMO, for us as well as our customers. In addition, our target customer is a mature investor who has seen a range of products and market cycles, so it is important that even when discussing the complexity of investing, we don’t get tagged as being overly simplistic, or too condescending. 

    Lastly, our entire business is built on trust. Building this trust organically, without resorting to seemingly quick fixes like sponsored media appearances, awards etc is not an easy path.

    However, the challenges also present us with an opportunity to innovate and push our creative boundaries. Keeping unpredictable trends in mind, our PR objective is to cut through the clutter, while also staying relevant and communicating our messaging in the media. 

    2. How do you as a CMO plan to leverage PR as a weapon to fight those challenges?

    PR is a great means to develop and propagate a unique voice and point of view. Since we are focused on a specific target customer, PR, through its various channels, is a great way to talk about issues that matter to them.

    Money is not a topic that is discussed enough in the public sphere, though all of us have hopes, fears and aspirations that are almost always intrinsically connected to money.

    By adding this to the discourse, doing our bit to increase awareness around financial planning and wealth management, and providing perspectives that our customer might not have considered, our aim is to build a relationship of trust with them. One based on our expertise and always having the customer’s interests in mind.

    From a channel perspective too, both print and television relatively speaking have their audience’s trust. In a complementary way, digital helps us target very specifically, both in terms of message and audience. 

    3. Is PR only there for crisis management or can it be leveraged to achieve long term goals?

    That does make PR sound like the underappreciated hero who gets to shine only when a villain (crisis) makes an appearance. But that, in my view, is a very narrow way of looking at what a good PR strategy can add to the overall brand perception. 

    In the wake of an unexpected crisis, PR efforts surely come to the rescue of a brand, by taking actions required to minimise negatives and repercussions. But inherently, PR is a long game, and a worthy investment which is instrumental in building a brand’s reputation in the long run. Brand is all about building a perception and in a trust-based business, PR is an indispensable and integral part of brand strategy. 

    Very few brands run brand campaigns (different from acquisition campaigns) all year round. With the right efforts, PR builds consistent visibility for the brand among the target customers. With the help of PR, we are able to establish ourselves as thought leaders, influencing and impacting the space in a way that makes us synonymous to the domain. 

    4. Digital wealth is an up and coming concept and many might not be well aware of what it actually deals with. How has PR helped you in spreading awareness about your brand?

    Wealth management has been around for the longest while, and in recent years, accelerated by the pandemic, personal finance too has gone through a digital transformation. We have always believed in the unbiased power of algorithms, technology’s potential to elevate data to applicable insights, and digital’s capability to provide personalisation and intuitive interfaces. Now customers are increasingly believing that too. 

    But digital is a means. Our objective, as a digital wealth manager, is to relieve investors’ fears and doubts around money and financial planning. Our audience shouldn’t shy away from conversations around money matters, rather finance should be a topic of interest to them. With an attempt to simplify wealth management for our target audience, we strive to educate our consumers with genuine financial advice. Our PR efforts have allowed us to be creative and engage with our consumers on complex topics in a seamless manner. 

    Intending to target a specific consumer base, we have leveraged selective PR to communicate our distinct positioning and desired messaging. We’ve preferred to channel our resources in an effective organic PR strategy, rather than taking the paid route, to increase credibility for the brand among viewers and readers. Slowly but steadily, PR has continuously helped us build trust with our consumers and investors. 

    5. How has been your experience with PR in your professional journey? 

    In the past, I have worked as a brand manager in print publications, I have also been a columnist, and PR has been a part of my recent roles. These varied experiences have given me a relatively more rounded view of the domain. 

    I have found PR to be both a good lead on some brand-driven campaigns (e.g. the annual surveys we do around financial freedom, World Savings Day and Women’s Day) as well as an excellent complementary aspect in general marketing campaigns. There have also been occasions when the PR coverage around a campaign has provided the brand more visibility than the actual campaign – for example, when the brand has used influencers. 

    The challenge of showing the benefits of PR has been an interesting one to continuously solve. From anecdotal feedback to showing spikes in brand keyword traffic, it has been quite a journey. 

    Overall, I think PR is an absolutely essential component in building a cohesive brand narrative over the long term. Media has gone beyond traditional mainstream into many streams and that makes the role of PR an ever-expanding and interesting one. 

  • What makes a full stack marketer?

    On Twitter, GG asked a question that I felt compelled to answer because I have used this on LinkedIn for a while.

    I did borrow the phrase from tech, but sounding cool didn’t quite cover it. 🙂

    To begin with, why do I use it? First, the people I want to connect with on LinkedIn are from the consumer tech, digital marketing and brand domains. This usage would be familiar to them, and would help frame my experience and expertise. The experience straddles the offline and digital space, and has media, FMCG, e-commerce and fintech brands. The second part is to do with the skill sets that I think qualifies one for that description. This is my attempt to elaborate on the latter. The “frontend” and “backend” of marketing. It covers demand generation, lead generation, and conversion but I have refrained from classifying it because it is context-dependent.

    Disclaimer: These are my perspectives of things I have worked on. I do this with the understanding that “as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance” (more…)

  • Brand, Journalism, Marketing

    A few months ago, in The Future Of Owned Media and Can media become social enough?, I’d written about a marketplace model that would connect journalists and ‘buyers’. More recently, I saw an article about Contently raising a round of funding to work on its stated objective – connect freelance journalists and writers with nontraditional publishers, such as brands, agencies, nonprofits, and new media companies. These organizations use Contently’s technology to commission projects, such as sponsored articles, infographics, and blog posts.

    Like I’ve tweeted before, journalism is definitely in need of a business model. Media (with advertising) is arguably not the best bet now, because of various reasons. Digital has allowed brands to create their own media platforms (blogs, websites) and social has enabled them to (at least) broadcast it themselves, without a dependency on traditional media. Frank Strong, in a post titled ‘Why Content Marketing is the new Branding‘, rightly states that content is currency. It not only builds perception, but enables us to transact with consumers, keep a conversation going, and at some point, achieve a certain business outcome.

    However, except for campaigns, marketing collateral etc, brands have never really required/produced ‘content’ on a regular basis, and thus they are not wired for it. But content marketing obviously requires sustainable quality content, and that’s where brand journalism can play a part. I’d come across the term ‘brand journalism’ first on this post in early 2013 – ‘The Role of Brand Journalism in Content Marketing‘ – where it is defined as “research, storytelling and reporting for a non-media company, in that company’s line of business, with the goal of thought leadership.” (Erica Swallow) There’s a media vs non-media debate in the post, but my little tiff with the definition is that ‘thought leadership’ is rather limiting. There might be other business objectives/outcomes. Unless we’re talking of a leadership among the consumer’s thoughts. (share of mind)

    Meanwhile, in addition to a structured way like Contently, I can see brands already doing other forms of brand journalism. (used loosely) I’d classify blogger outreach, guest Twitterers, all under this, because the brand is using a content creator’s contextual reputation to enhance its own standing. The latest example I saw was quite fantastic – teen retailer Wet Seal ‘handing over’ its Snapchat account to MissMeghanMakeup (aged 16) who has quite a social following on various platforms. (via) To note that this is not Miss Meghan’s only client!

    I can paint a rather utopian win-win-win picture with this – brands with a purpose that has a social-societal perspective, journalists, who have created trust and a reputation of their own, who can identify with the brand’s purpose and who can write honestly (with disclosure) and consumers, who get to know more about the brands they align with through superb narratives created by these journalists. (among other storytellers) But I’d be surprised if it pans out this way anytime soon.

    It will have its challenges, but most of it is when we try to fit this method into the ‘containers of the past’. Its potential to succeed is because it offers much for all stakeholders. Journalists will have the option to be authentic in their writing, and give full disclosure because they’re not tied to the (traditional) media aspect. (newspapers/channels with their own business interests) Brands can be transparent about who has been commissioned to produce their content, and can use paid, owned media to promote it. Consumers get an interesting mix of narrators. It is a shift because the players (Brand, PR, journalists, media platforms) and/or their roles (production, distribution) will transform, but I do think brand journalism (a type of content) + marketing stands a chance.

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    until next time, to better brand stories

  • PR – Public Relationship

    The control a brand has, or rather the lack of it, was evident in two examples I saw recently. Both became viral, one at a very small level, and the other, a huge global one. You must’ve guessed the second one easily enough. Meanwhile, the first was ‘Bros Icing Bros‘ and linked to the Smirnoff brand, unofficially. You can read the details here. The way the game worked – “a person presents a friend (err, “bro”) with a Smirnoff Ice which they must then and there – regardless of time, location or context – take on bended knee and chug the entire bottle. The exception is if that friend himself (or herself) is carrying a Smirnoff Ice – in that case, the original presenter must chug both “Ices””  A case of user generated brand buzz, which perhaps did good for the product and was relatively non-detrimental to the brand.

    And there’s the first example, which is easily becoming THE example now, for bad PR. BP – if the spill wasn’t bad enough, there was the spillage – the fake PR account – advice on what/why BP should or should not do with it, the tweet billboards, an old (fake) ad, the ironic sign, the ghastly, ghastly images, the user created logos, a coffee parody, and the post from the man who created BPGlobalPR. BP’s losses as a brand (intangible?) is much more than the real $costs that have been speculated. Meanwhile, it has finally reached out to the @BPGlobalPR account. (While on the topic, do check out Rob Cottingham’s excellent take on the subject)

    The only commonality I’m looking at is the user generated content (or discontent). I don’t think this is an area which can be gamed easily. Sure, you can try to manipulate events and people, and search engines, try some good old PR, but there are no guarantees that it won’t boomerang. And I think it holds true across the spectrum – the two cases are polar opposites in terms of magnitude of the event, what the crowd did to it, and what the brand tried to do.

    Deviating a bit. I read “Arundhati Roy on ‘War of People‘”, where she took the scope of the Naxal issue into corporate boardrooms, and was immediately reminded of Umair Haque’s latest post titled “Ethical Capital is Capitalism’s new cornerstone“. He defines Ethical capital as “the stock of techniques, tools, and practices not just for creating value, but for defining and refining values, that an economy possesses”, and CSR, social investment, social entrepreneurship etc as the baby steps towards building it. But the corporate world still doesn’t understand the rewiring, as he himself notes. And here’s where we loop back, I don’t think this building of ethical capital can be gamed either.

    I can spot an increasing number of efforts – Pepsi’s Refresh Project, their efforts for production sustainability, Nokia’s eco profile for new products, their bicycle charger kit, to name a few. While the cynic in me sometimes disses official CSR, I realise its perhaps a level that has to be crossed before we reach out for bigger things. I also see efforts from the consumer side  –  CarrotMob (via Surekha)

    I see all of this as a trend where users are linking the brands they use, and their consumption, to the larger context of their lives and the even larger context of the world they inhabit, and the culture they consume and create. The ‘badges’ have changed, they’d like to associate themselves with brands that accommodate or at least work towards these badges.  In the foreseeable future, I think that brands which understand this will not only align more people on their side, but also have inherent features and processes which would allow them to be transparent, reduce these costly mistakes, and admit to their mistakes without the PR approaches that are drawing flak now.

    until next time, PR pressure?

  • Social Inside

    There’s quite a funny video that has got almost 50,000 views by now on YouTube. It is titled ‘The Social Media Guru’, and in case you haven’t seen it by now, you should take a look, though you might want to keep the audio levels down thanks to the language

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKCdexz5RQ8

    While the video does generalise and could cause some heartburn among some who work on social media and do good work, the reason I found it funny was because I see around me, a lot of what is shown in there – a preoccupation with the tools/platforms in vogue, and the lack of something as basic as an objective. As always, the tools are less important than the philosophy of sharing, collaborating, and 2 way communication that’s happening not just on social media sites, but across the web, though the former, because of their inherent nature, have taken it to a different level altogether. The combination of a client who has decided his brand needs to be on twitter, thanks to some article he read somewhere (or an even more vague reason) and the social media guru whose answer to any client is a templated Facebook page + twitter account + you tube, is quite lethal – to two sets of people – the agencies/individuals who are doing/interested in some genuinely useful work on the social media platforms and the brands who decide not to take the plunge basis the results of the poorly thought through/executed programs of other brands. It doesn’t help that the medium is still in its nascent stages and everyone is still learning.

    While social media practices and practitioners might be fewer in India, as compared to the US, the challenges faced show very little such skew. I read two posts recently on the subject. Karthik wrote about ‘selling social media engagement in India‘, where, with the experience of working in a PR firm and pitching social media, he looks at the changes he’s seen in the acceptance of social media among clients over the last couple of years, and the key attributes for making the sale. He mentions how an existing communications partner has a ‘door opener’ advantage as compared to say, an exclusive social media agency, which helps them get the right  people from the client side involved in the pitch, and the need for proper articulation and simple guides which could be used by the client team to sell to their bosses.

    In another extremely interesting post, Sanjay writes about “Advertising Agencies and Social Media: The Challenges“. He notes fundamental differences in the way an advertising agency looks at communication, and how communication actually happens in social media. The observations on ‘campaign’ focus, the obsession with perfection (copy), the mechanics of how communication is rolled out, are all spot on, and something that I too have experienced several times while dealing with creative agencies. He ends by mentioning that in the current scenario, agencies keep treating these platforms as broadcast media. That last thought is something I keep deploring regularly here, so I completely agree.

    Now the thing is, while these are all perfectly valid points, I was looking at it from a different perspective. I wonder if, in the entire spiel, social media’s proximity to marketing/communication/brand as a function completely overshadows the cultural transition required by the client organisation. Does it get discussed at all? Even in my post rant some time back, I had only emphasised the usage of social media in the PR, research, advertising disciplines and the different stages of the product life cycle – including sales, customer care etc, and barely mentioned the culture change.

    The subject of a shift in culture is something I have written about in several contexts – from basic thoughts on transparency in organisations and controlling employee communication internally and with the outside world, to the need for organisations to understand themselves and the value they provide before going overboard with listening and acting on consumer feedback, to whether the size and scale of the organisation dictates its culture and its internal and external communication processes,  and the necessity to tackle business problems and look at it as something that needs to be addressed at an enterprise level too and not just at a brand level. The Dachis Group presentation – ‘Social Business by Design‘ illustrates this extremely well.

    I examined it further in the framework of the Awesomeness manifesto, which i regard as an excellent set of fundamentals for organisations, if they want to operate profitably in the evolving business scenario, and in all four of its pillars, I could see the need for a more holistic approach to social media. Its obviously easier said than done. It involves a vision, the zeal and guts to translate that into internal and external business practices- from environment to employee friendliness, training of personnel, readjustment of business goals, hiring people who understand this new design – like say, P&G’s technopologist, who can operate across functions to evangelise it and help apply it in different contexts. And that’s just a few things. Look at an application of this across your organisation, and you’ll see how massive an endeavor it is. Maybe only a few organisations are thinking about it now, but I think it might become an imperative very soon, decided by external forces beyond the organisation’s control. Whether this is spearheaded by the organisations themselves or an external agency would be a decision based on several subjective parameters. Maybe then, organisations will be able to figure out the ‘gurus’ better. 🙂

    So while, it is good to see great social media efforts from brands, I wonder whether more needs to be done to integrate it more fundamentally within the organisation.

    until next time, social nirvana 🙂

    Bonus Reads:

    Customer Twervice by Social Media Explorer (10 examples of companies using social media for customer service)

    Social Media Policy Database (Via Six Pixels of Separation)

    Why its time to do away with the Brand Manager 🙂