Some of world’s best brands have been built with PR.

With rising media costs and lack of deep pockets to spend, many brands are seriously considering using PR in a big way to promote their brand in the most cost efficient manner. Recently I was chatting with few of my friends who are working on various brands starting from FMCG to Consumer Durables to lifestyle. During our intense conversation, most of these people felt that new and innovative options need to be discovered to promote brands as returns on spending huge money on mass media is not delivering the desired results.

Now why are these people questioning the ROI? The answer to this is very simple. Today with the increase in the number of channels and audience fragmentation; marketers are not able to catch their audience that easily. They need to increase their promotional budgets to reach a larger audience but the results are not satisfactory. Even the print and the outdoor medium have become equally expensive. One cannot get a great impact by taking a few hoardings in any city. Even if you take a good number of sites the sustenance factor steps in. How long I can continue the campaign? Marketers are looking answers for these. Do we have an answer? The answer is yes. Marketers need to start innovating to fight this rise in media prices, media fragmentation and high clutter levels by just revisiting their communication and media strategy.

Powerful Public relations strategy is one way to look at:

Some of the world’s best brands have been built though PR. Our own software company Infosys is both a leading Indian and global brand which has grown in manifolds by brilliantly planned PR strategy. We must also remember that the company has delivered value and has consistently performed. Apart from some advertisements during the IPO, this brand has been build brick by brick purely using public relations in the most effective manner. The brand has become almost a familiar brand amongst software engineers and aspiring engineers. We have more such examples of brands that have build their corporate brands through PR.

Google is another brand which is in everybody‘s mind starting from today’s teenager to the senior citizen. This brand has never advertised in India but the brand has grown in leaps and bounds to have the largest email service in India, Gmail. The brand Google has become so familiar and friendly that people use the phrase ‘Google’ it to get any information on the net.

TCS is also another brand that has taken its brand to new global heights through PR. While TCS has the support of the TATA name but to become a global brand on software space PR has played a pivotal role for TCS. The secret of success for all these brands has been their focused vision and commitment which PR has leveraged at every stage of the growth of the company. Also with PR this brand has managed to build credibility and faith with their stakeholder which has in the end resulted in raising the equity of the brand both domestically and globally.

It’s misnomer to think PR is just press release:

About two decades back PR was just about disseminating news via press release or through press conference. But over the last few years that has radically changed. More and brands are placing their faith on PR to build credibility which is difficult to achieve through the conventional advertising and publicity. While some of the reputed brands spend a lot of money on advertising but they still use PR to restore faith and confidence among its audience.

Two great launches or event in the recent period that has implemented PR effectively has been the announcement of TATA’S NANO. There was great PR build up before the official announcement and showcasing of the product at the AUTO EXPO. This was possible because there was a great story to talk about in terms of a ONE LAC car which was a great dream and aspiration for many Indian consumers to own a car. It was a good strategy on the part of TATAs to use PR as it is PR that built confidence and credibility among the prospective consumers to reassure yes we are giving you a car for ONE LAKH. Public relations in t his case could play a very important role as there was a great story to tell. In fact I hardly could see any advertisement on the day of the launch. The PR really overpowered the print campaign. And the reason for the same is that consumers need to know more about the product and PR was the best tool to sell this revolutionary concept in car. If you have a great story to tell then brands must strongly move towards using PR as a weapon. In case of TATA NANO if we count on the coverage they got through PR and convert it to advertisement rates it would be quite substantial may be even match the budget they spend on advertising.

Even the success for IPL must be attributed to a large extent to PR. While individual teams and brands did some advertisement what really caught cricket fans is this new concept which had great news and story to talk about. Today post the first IPL league many teams are seriously considering to revamp their image through PR before the champion’s league. All of us know cricket is a religion in our country and the hype generated through the press will create more excitement and interest than patriotic HINGLISH jingles and use of celebrities by various teams in their campaign. IPL really drew more viewer ship on channels more crowds to the stadium but more than this there was great buzz around in the social network media where different community groups were formed to track the matches with their own views and criticism. This is where social media network as a medium is being used to drive PR.

Use of new age media and innovative media opportunity in PR:

The advent of new media like blogs and social network has made PR more innovative and interactive. Facebook, My space and Orkut are some of the few social network media which are being used by many brands to touch the younger audience. Various movie reviews and play reviews are available if you are part of any community in the social media network. The audience you converse through this social network are becoming strong testimonials to tell you or give you more information of a movie or purchasing a music gadget. This of course is supplemented by the news that appears in the dailies and other media which helps in getting brands closer and into the consideration set.

I am told most of the electronic products such as the laptops the final decision in buying is made by the consumer only using the mediums like the internet by reading their product reviews etc. This also holds true with automobiles where the prospects reads reviews about the brand and product from various auto journals before they decide to arrive on the brand to buy or test drive it.

The other innovative ideas to get your brand promoted are product placement opportunity in various media which is relevant to the brand. For e.g. TV show featuring on real estate one can promote a microwave by displaying the product in such shows which is part of the accessories customers look at buying for their kitchen. Brands could also tie up with construction houses to get write up about their product in their brochures and website.

The use of PR needs to be tactically applied and one must have a good story to pitch for the media to talk about. In the coming years Public relation will move faster and more brands will seriously consider to use this communication tool to build the credibility of the brand as costs on the media front is just going up and up. With increase of more GEC in the electronic medium and TRPs fluctuating as channels are bringing freshness in the programming marketers are need take lot of risks to place their brand in these channels without knowing the right ROI from these programs.

Public relations will play a great role in providing marketers to infuse good strategy which will get them stories and credibility. One also needs to think beyond just coverage and come out with out of box thinking to get qualitative message through PR.

My team and I develop PR pitches for our prospective clients. This is one of my KRAs. Planning requires, besides understanding the client’s business and requirements, a lot of research on the industry, the competition, and the current image that the client has in the market. This involves primary researches like speaking to journalists and domain experts. But before that we need to conduct a host of initial secondary research that involves scanning through a lot of print and online media. I am sure this is the same with every team in any PR agency.  So what are the various sites we visit on the internet to gather our initial understanding of a subject or vertical? The requirements and solutions depend from client to client but on an average, these are some of the top sites that you can start off with.

1. Search engines - Google is the obvious answer, and there’s no contesting that.  Additionally, we have Google News Search, if you want to scan through news reports; and Google Blog Search, if you want to scan through blog posts. These are pretty useful search engines that you can use in case you don’t find much headway on a normal Google web search. I also use an addon like Customise Google on my Firefox in times of absolute desperate situations when I need to run a query on other search engines like Yahoo or Live, as sometimes they throw up different results.

Sometime, when these search engines are not sufficient, there are specialized search engines like Truveo and Blinkx for video and audio search, Pipl for people search, and Twing for search within Internet forums.

You can compare Google and Yahoo search engines with SearchBoth. See screenshot below:

2. Wikipedia - We all know Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia contributed by everyone. Now the credibility of Wikipedia has been debated by many before, but I still think that it can be a good resource for reading up on a new technology, place, person, or a subject e.g. public relations. I understood more clearly about PR from Wikipedia than any text book I read in school.  You can also use Wikipedia to get media profiles.

3. IBEF -The Indian Brand Equity Foundation site is a credible site to get information on various industries in India. Take a look at the links on the left side of the page. You can read up the summary and latest news reports of various verticals including automobiles, auto components, aviation, banking, biotechnology, cement, financial services, food industry, gems and jewelery, healthcare, information, technology, insurance, IT enabled services, media & entertainment, oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, real estate, retail, semiconductors, steel, textiles, telecommunications, and tourism & hospitality.

4. India in Business - This is an Indian government site created to help foreign investors in India but you can take advantage of it as well. There are essays on the Indian economy, different industries in India, and alot on foreign investment regulations.  There are sections on the Union Budget and Economic Survey of India.

5. Indobase - This is a good site to get the names of major events in India categorized according to industry and cities.

6.  Industry association sites - Industry association site like CII, FICCI, NASSCOM, and ASSOCHAM are good places as they keep on publishing free reports that you can quickly download and read. There are good content on the sites themselves. Besides these four, we can go to sector specific association sites. For example, for anything on online and internet data in India, we can go to IAMAI. There are associations for each sector.

Do you  know of any good research resource? Share it in the comment.

Business blogging in India is evolving, but yet far behind the tech and bloggers of other subjects. So when Gaurav came up with the idea of running a collaborated weekly digest of the best of business blog posts, it sounded good.

So here we are, India PR Blog is part of this initiative, doing its bit to help promote business blogging in India. The initiative is simple. Here is the brief explanation:

We will form a network of 5 to 10 influential business bloggers — Veerchand Bothra, Rajesh Lalwani, Ranjan Varma, Kiruba, Gaurav Mishra, Gautam Ghosh, and your own India PR Blog to begin with — who will publish a weekly roundup of Indian business blogs on their respective blogs.

The roundup will consist of about 5 high-quality posts written by (new and established) Indian business bloggers. We’ll typically share the link with a small excerpt and our own comment on the post. The posts to be linked to will be decided among the network.

The posts can include all business topics including marketing, advertising, public relations, human resource management, finance, and entrepreneurship.

So there it is. Simple. And so here are this week’s roundup:

1) Kamla Bhatt interviews ItwoFS’s Karthik Srinivasan on plagiarism in Indian film music

Ever wanted to know the status of plagiarism in Indian film music. itwofs.com is a chronicle of plagiarism in Indian film music. Read about the initiative from Karthik Srinivasan from this interview by Kamla. Soon we might hear about Karthik being sued by Bollywwod music composers, or the latter being sued by the original copyright holders thanks to this site.

2) Maninder on what’s wrong with Idea Rocks India’s MSN microsite

A good insight and a piece of advice to all those companies jumping into the online gold rush today. I actually have more to say that what Maninder had to say. Create a (micro) site, add some flash designs (but that takes 5 minutes to load …yawn), throw in some games and contests, tie up with a few restaurants and movie halls, and pray that everyone from your target customer group will log in. It takes a lot more than that to create the next Orkut or YouTube, or a closer Gang of Girls. There is no originality in the online campaigns going on today. Maybe we need another itwofs for such campaigns.

3) A three part series on startup financing in India: 1, 2, 3

A good writeup by Kartik Must read for all entrepreneurs. And something I will refer to when I am ready for my startup

4) Guest Post by Mayank Bidawatka, Head of Marketing at RedBus.in. on Pluggd In this post, Mayank demystifies SEO and SEM concepts

If you are eager to know about search engine optimisation and search engine marketing, read this post. While it won’t make you know how to search engine optimised your site, at least you will the basics.

5) Sudipto Majumdar on the rise of gaming cafes in India and Sashi Reddi on the Indian gaming business

Gaming is fast taking on the Indian landscape. I had a colleague who told me that in her previous office, most of the executives will go to gaming sites between breaks. Gaming breaks instead of cigarette breaks huh. These are some good reads on the emerging vertical.

“One Black Coffee”“

I spent 20 years in PR agencies before moving to corporate communication” claimed a fragile looking lady with a proud voice as she tried to sink her body in black leather sofa.

“I completely understand what is possible and what is not possible in PR and I never pressurise my agency” another claim slipped from her lips as she sipped coffee from a large green cup.

“I respect my agencies and professionals associated with it. After all, I know what value people like you bring to the table, especially when we are all immersed in myopic views of corporate world filled with inside views” the overdoes of claims continued as the server tried to unsuccessfully stop the overflow of coffee he was pouring in her cup.

“I am utterly disappointed with my existing agency” sigh!

“Last time when we organised a huge event for donating an ambulance van to a hospital in Chennai, only four journalists turned up!”

“When we issued a very important release of a key general manager level appointment made by our company, I haven’t got a single clip from Bombay and Delhi!”

“I am looking for a professional agency, which understands our requirement and do a justice to the news created by us”

“When I was in an agency, I got these huge bunches of clips for all my clients for each and every news they gave it to me. My media relations are excellent. Across the country I know almost every journalist. They are always after my life to give them stories”

It seemed as if the meeting was never going to end with continued monologues.

And presto! My cup of black coffee just got over.

“Good. The Black coffee was really nice” my first and last words before paying the bill and saying good bye.

“A clueless Blonde”

“I’m stuck in a mental blizzard here. Am a newbie, and was recommended this site – I have questions – I don’t see a link where I can contact someone… I feel like a doofus and need help… SERIOUSLY!!!

I’ve been convinced and am convinced that this is the place for me, however when I tried to go through the content of the website- I did not know where to start. I am joining a PR company- it’s my first, they said they liked the fact that I have good interpersonal skills and that I can write well. I am writing a book, have written articles.

You see, I use simple words, which are easily understood by everyone. But after going through your site - I’ve completely lost all confidence. I don’t want to be the clueless blonde in the company. I need serious help.”

The mail landed sometime earlier this week in my inbox. I liked the honesty with which the lady in a mail acknowledges a situation many of us would have experienced at various stages of our lives. We all pass through similar situations. First day at school, first day at college, first job interview, first date, first movie with friends bunking the chemistry lecture, first marriage(oops!?) - having thousands of flying butterflies in a stomach is quite common.

You know what, Ms. Clueless? The problem is not with you but it’s with how you are looking at a situation.

Okay, let’s understand where the problem is?

Are they expecting you to know everything about PR from the day one? Are they expecting you to start talking to clients and pitching stories to media from the day one just because you have good interpersonal skills? Are they expecting you to start writing press releases and other material from the day one because you are a good writer? If the answer is YES, please steer clear of that agency. And if the answer is NO, so where’s the problem.

The learning is not a pack of Maggie Noodles (sorry Top Ramen and others. But you don’t have TOM recall yet!)

Take your own time. Go step by step. Get into the agency. Understand the culture. See how they work. Read. Learn from seniors. Ask questions - however stupid it may sound. Understand the business. Make mistakes – never repeat them. Be open to ideas. Contribute and share your views openly. Enter into a healthy competition. Stay away from office politics. Eat. Work. Maintain professional approach with all your colleagues, clients and media. Play and maintain a work-life balance.

And, I am sure you will become one successful PR professional and who knows one fine day you would be answering a similar query on our blog!

However, if you are not satisfied with the suggested roadmap – please feel free to write and we will talk. All the best!

“Two Minutes Noodles”

“The concept I am talking about is amazing. It took the world by storm. Since the last 25 years this brand has been the most recognised brand in over 20 different countries. We are launching it in India. People are eagerly waiting for it here.”

“No…No…No…Our brand is big. We don’t need continuous PR. Just announce the launch through a Press Conference, that’s enough. My global CEO is visiting to announce the launch and it has to be a gala event.”

After a successful press conference and decent coverage across the country – a mail lands in my inbox.

“The PR has not been successful. Despite our news being there in many newspapers so many people I am talking to are telling me that they have never heard of this brand before. The brand building has to be done through PR, which has not happened. Please explain”

The person who wrote this mail has spent many years in advertising and branding. I am planning to send him a pack of ‘Two Minutes Noodles’

With a Taste Maker, of course!

ASSOCHAM yesterday released a report on the Indian PR industry, which came as a bit of a surprise. I though they aptly called it a ‘random’ survey. It came out of nowhere.

On one hand, this report is a positive development with industry associations now starting to conduct studies on the PR industry. PR researchers have been yearning for a PR industry report and this seemed like one that authenticated a lot of trends and issues that we in the industry are witnessing and discussing about.

And then before I completed my smile, a conspicuous figure in the report attracted my attention. ASSOCHAM has boldly put the size of the Indian PR industry at USD 3 bn currently. While I would have loved to believe this figure and bask in the glory of being part of a fast growing industry, I have my doubts. Are we really that big? A USD 3bn means around INR 12,000 crores. And that is a huge amount.

From the not-so-perfect finger-counting that we do usually, the PR consultancy business in India is supposed to be around INR 150-200 crores only. We have around half a dozen ‘big’ PR agencies that rope in the majority, read 70-80%, of the revenues for the industry. Each can have a revenue of around INR 12-15 crores with the highest going to around INR 20 crores from pure PR fee (not calculating the expenses). Even if you calculate the expenses, the total revenue of the biggest PR firm is supposed around INR 40 crores. The rest perhaps bring in a just as much as one or two combined of these ‘big’ agencies.

Let’s do some more guess work. What could be the total PR spend by the organised corporate say in the top 1000 companies in India through one or the other agency or directly? Can we quote a figure of around INR 500 crores. Add around INR 125 crores from the PR spends by the unorganised sector in mini cities. Would even all these combined reach that ASSOCHAM figure of USD 3 bn?

Or is there something else that I am not aware of in the industry, I would definitely love an explanation into that figure.

Other key findings from the report:

1. Growing opportunity cost in PR industry is one reason for constant job shuffles

2. Over 90% PR professionals come in at the entry level with enthusiasm and passion for their work but within a year shift to greener pastures

3. Brand building and image management are emerging as key areas where corporates seek services of PR firms to enhance visibility and promote services/ products/ top management

4. Majority of PR professionals confirmed that during the economic boom, huge competition emerged for brand building as a result of which PR agencies are in demand and quoting high market driven prices for services

5. PR sector registered growth of 22-25% in last few years which further went up to 32% in 2007 and by 2010, size of PR industry is expected to grow to more than $6 billion

6. Indian PR industry comprises 1200-1500 agencies with manpower strength of 30,000 to 40,000

7. In terms of vertical markets, healthcare is the fastest-growing sector; however, public sector, environment and corporate social responsibility are emerging as growth areas for PR

8. Overriding concern of industry is skills shortage; almost all agencies are hiring, a trend that is indicative of growth, and some are looking outside the PR industry to bring in new skills

9. Although there are thousands of small agencies and individual consultants serving very local markets, larger agencies are forging partnerships across the globe to meet demand from clients

10. Retainer fee on an average can be anywhere between Rs2.5 to Rs 5 lakh

11. Reasons for high attrition could be the temptation of moving to the higher pay master; leadership crisis within the industry; inability of PR outfits to meet evolving needs of companies/ clients and to understand the dynamics of the present-day market place

Read media reports on the study here: The Hindu, Mint, IndiaInfoline