Creating and maintaining a polished big company presence for you in the marketplace is the most valuable aspect of public relations. Polish is the result of quality and consistency—high quality communications and a consistent message. Public relations showcases, maximizes, and builds on the products, services, and customer-facing practices you already have in place through smart strategy and a truly impressive array of tools—that extend far beyond media releases. Customers and prospects---like yours---who are in the market for complex products & services want to know 2 things before they buy. 1. Is this the most cost-effective solution? They already know what they need to get done; they ju
Before you start planning a slew of projects for the year, revisit last year’s duds. A project that appears to be dead may be a prime candidate for revival. Make a list of projects that either you or someone else started, but never finished, last year and ask yourself these questions: Why did we drop the project? How far did it get? What’s changed since we dropped that project – company objectives, the competitive environment, project personnel, technology, etc.? What new information do we have now? Is the project still relevant? Is it still viable? In terms of time, budget, effort, and professional rewards, completing a project that everyone assumed was dead can be an extremely appealing ve
Albert Einstein said that if he had one hour to solve a problem he would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. In fact, zeroing in on the right problem is so important that you could say a perfectly defined problem is not even a problem anymore. Consider this: A large municipal library had signs posted in its parking lot that said the lot was for library patrons only. Often, downtown shoppers ignored the signs – especially on weekends and in the summertime – and parked there anyway. The result was that library patrons often couldn’t find a place to park. The library board considered a number of options and finally decided to pay someone to police
Following are a few more nuggets from Dan Ariely’s excellent book on buying behavior, “Predictably Irrational”: The first price that people hear for a product or service is likely to become an anchor – they will strongly associate the value of the product or service with that price – no matter how the price fluctuates in the future. Everything becomes relative to that first price. We assume something is good or bad based on the behavior of others. Is “everyone” buying something? Of course, this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is why it’s so important to surround a great product or service with buzz. Companies can create artificial buzz by giving the initial impression that everyone
