By Alex Martinez (Based on "The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR")
Marketing is key to a company’s success. You can have mediocre advertising and still be successful if you get the marketing right. Positioning of you brand is essential.
Research shows that in almost every category, the leading brand remained the leading brand over decades regardless of the volume and content of competitive advertising. The leader owns the position in the mind. Almost none of the Internet companies that tried to build brands with advertising succeeded.
The ones that did succeed usually did so with massive PR, not advertising. Amazon.com and eBay are two classic examples. What makes PR or a news story is controversy. When you launch a new brand your first question is, “Who’s the enemy?” Then you try to generate news stories. Publications are most likely to run these articles if there is controversy. Our strategic approach to this is that you need to use PR, blogs and word-of-mouth first because the brand doesn’t have credibility to be believable. Likewise, the single most important idea in marketing today is focus. And guess what: Most companies aren’t focused.
By Al Ries, author of Marketing Warfare, The 22 Immutable Rules of Marketing, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, and Positioning: The Battle for your Mind.
