Crafting a Public Relations Message For Your Enterprise

Generally speaking, public relations messages serve one of two purposes. They can either present products to customers, or companies to communities.

Public relations messages are very terse communications that pair a product or a company with a strong positive emotion or feeling. They can be expressed in very few words, but they communicate a great deal.

To build a brand for your products and business, you send the same message, in a variety of media and format. This fixes the relationship between your products and services and the emotions or sensations you want them to elicit firmly in the minds of the target market or community.

• Alka Seltzer delivers immediate relief for upset stomach.
• Hertz. We’re number two so we try harder.
• NatWest provides helpful retail banking.

In every instance, note that the product name is paired with a specific benefit and a strong positive emotion. Take a moment to think of how many ads you have seen with this message.  Now think of how many ways you have seen related ideas appearing in news articles, films, television shows, etc.  For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, OJ Simpson worked with Hertz to create a series of commercials about a man running through an airport to get a rental car. Variations of that scene, aired in many commercials, became a part of many films and and television shows and though few mentioned Hertz . . . they all reminded people of the original Hertz ads and the message that they made it easier to rent a car.

For example, to create an effective public relations message you can deliver through mass and social media, do the following:

• Identify the name of the product.
• Determine the benefit your product delivers to the customer.
• Determine the emotion or sensation that benefit elicits.
• Create a sentence or phrase that captures that information.

For example.

• Tirelle cleans and scents clothes so they smell like a sunny spring morning.

Collapse that word into a phrase that captures the same meaning.

• Tirelle, spring into every morning.

From that simple message, you can derive radio, TV and viral video ads.

You also derive the non-advertising content you will work to have mass media and social media carry to your target market and community.  For example, you can draft tips that explain how to pack clean spring and summer clothes in the winter so they smell spring fresh when it is time to begin wearing them. You can write articles that discuss why hypo-allergenic scents used in your product provide spring freshness without inciting allergic reactions.

To be effective, your public relations campaigns must be based on a very, very limited number of well crafted evocative messages you can broadcast across media.

Sometimes the ideas will be in a two thousand word article that appears in the London Times. Sometimes they will be incorporated into viral video tips posted on your site.  But the idea you are working to communicate must be reinforced in all your public relations communications.  Failure to follow this advice results in unclear messaging which results in products and businesses people have little or no memory of and no emotional tie to.