Wish to kiss success? Go lip to lip!
It will be good if you can find some time to pick a book titled The Fall of Advertising & The Rise of PR. It would be great if you could read it too!
The title is a misnomer. The authors, Al Ries and Laura Ries, are not proposing that advertising is dead. Rather, they claim advertising isn’t as powerful as it used to be and should be used more as a support to a well-orchestrated Public Relations plan.
Their theory is simple: Build brands with PR and once it is established maintain it with advertising. They give enough and more case studies of brands that have taken this route: Microsoft, Starbucks, Body Shop, Linux, PlayStation and a whole lot more.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer used smart PR, more than advertising to launch its blockbuster brand Viagra. Not just the customers, even the drug experienced growth, thanks to PR!
Nicely written and neatly presented with apt examples, the book itself became a best-seller thanks to powerful word of mouth!
As irony would have it, the next book I picked up to read, or rather reread, was an old classic (never mind if all classics are old) All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. It’s a book that became popular not by advertising but by brilliant PR and word of mouth.
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As a Unitarian minister, Fulghum wrote a simple credo and shared his statement of belief with his congregation and then read it at a primary school celebration. As fate would have it, a Washington senator was in the audience. Impressed, he requested a copy of the speech and took it to Washington where it was read into the Congressional Records.
From there it made its way to the Kansas City Times. Portions of it were printed in Dear Abby and Reader’s Digest. Talk show hosts read it on their radio shows. A telephone company sold thousands of copies as a poster to its customers.?
The content was photocopied, sent to loved ones and posted on bulletin boards at schools throughout the country.
It was then made into a book. The damn book went on to sell more than a million copies around the world.
All this and more accomplished without a single shred of advertising!