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The Less-is-more Approach: Extending Campaigns’ Lives

By John Guiniven, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Corporate Communications, James Madison University

In marketing and advertising, all the talk is about niche market, segmented consumers, and how to reach them.

The trend is spreading in every profession, not just advertising and marketing. Disney is exploring niche resorts instead of “worlds” and “lands,” and churches are adopting several smaller ministries rather than one large undertaking to tap into the interests of diverse congregations. In public relations – whether on behalf of products, political candidates or issues – the less-is-more, small-is-big approach is increasingly utilized by practitioners. It can be the same for marketing in the insurance industry, especially if a company is small.

“In this age of personalized media, audiences self-select communications channels and the messages they want to hear,” says Noam Gelfond, senior vice president with Ketchum, a public relations and marketing agency in Washington, D.C., which specializes in corporate and product positioning.

Gelfond suggests that practitioners create vehicles that are produced on a small-scale platform but can be more effective for certain audiences than traditional vehicles.

Chris Anderson’s book, “The Long Tail,” which looks primarily at the entertainment industry, finds: “The combined value of modest sellers equals the sales of top hits.” Thus, moviemakers are advised to produce a handful of $20 million films instead of shooting for a $100 million blockbuster because “consumers are scattered as markets fragment into countless niches.”

“The one big growth area,” Anderson writes, “is the Web, but it is an uncategorized sea of a million destinations, defying the conventional logic of media and marketing. The cultural landscape is a seamless continuum, with commercial and amateur content competing equally for attention.”

Social influence – such as online word-of-mouth – can give extended life to products. The demand curve shows growth, peak, and decline, but the downward slope never reaches zero, which Anderson labels “the long tail.” A scan of Internet social sites shows that the same long tail exists for non-product PR campaigns. And if an issue never disappears, it can be quickly reignited rather than laboriously resurrected.

While the big PR event for mass-scale consumption will never completely go away, smart practitioners are able to adapt to smaller scale communication platforms, Gelfond says. Blogs, word-of-mouth, and podcasts provide flexibility.

Ed Emerman, president of Eagle Public Relations in Princeton, N.J., agrees. He advised a client to move from an annual survey that aimed for “a big splash of publicity” in a few national outlets to a series of smaller surveys throughout the year directed at a broader range of outlets. That proved more effective in reaching their publics who had moved from predictable media homes to spots throughout the media landscape.

Some things practitioners should consider include:

  • Build the ability to change rapidly in PR plans. Generally, that means devoting more resources to feedback and real-time measurement, such as monitoring online sites to address public attitudes and opinions as they arise.
  • Become engaged in social content and networking sites. These are going to have greater impacts on the life span of an issue than traditional media. Practitioners who lack the ability to tag these sites will fall behind the current communications process.
  • Recognize that the attention market no longer exists exclusively, or even largely, in a handful of locations. Use multiple channels and increase frequency and repetition to break through the clutter.

“Producing volumes of information for fewer people might seem wasteful,” says John Mims, director of public relations at Altyris, a High Point, N.C.-based agency, “but you’re reaching people generally more interested in your message – and more likely to spread your views to their social networks.

(Reprinted with permission from John Guiniven. This article appeared in an issue of “Tactics,” a Public Relations Society of America publication.)

Posted: Friday, June 20, 2008 12:00:00 AM. Modified: Friday, June 20, 2008 4:18:33 PM.

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