Tag Archive for: presscore

Paying for brand ambassadors: worth it or not?

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In our last blog post we touched upon how your employees were your best brand ambassadors. However, many brands also pay high profile celebrities to endorse their products and/or services such as Brumby’s, who has recently announced its partnership with Matthew Hayden.

While many brands have successfully leveraged a celebrity relationship to their benefit, a large number have failed to engage their core consumer with the new ‘face’ of their business.

Why so?

Brand ambassadors must be picked carefully. Just because someone is famous doesn’t mean your target consumer will instantly warm to them. What’s key here is to ensure your brand ambassador is relevant to your products and services and, in turn, your customer.

The main aim of having a celebrity brand ambassador on board is to transfer the equity of said person to your business, resulting in enhanced preference and a heightened perceived credibility for your brand. They should be instantly recognisable and aligned with your proposition.

Target has recently demonstrated a great re-positioning campaign using the services of fashion guru, Gok Wan. This has worked brilliantly for them as Gok is well-known – and, importantly, liked – by consumers from all walks of life. He is neither too ‘fashion-forward’ nor hyper-critical, meaning the average Target customer feels assured that he – and therefore Target  –  really does have their best fashion interests at heart.

Linking with a public figure who is known for their brilliant charity or community work can also be an effective way to ‘piggy-back’ your messaging. Our client, Poolwerx, recently did exactly that, joining forces with Kids Alive founder, Laurie Lawrence, to promote swimming pool safety this summer. You can see more about that here.

Of course, it can go horribly wrong. Affiliating yourself fully with a celebrity means that if they fall from a great height, so do you. Think Kate Moss and the cocaine scandal – hugely embarrassing for the likes of Chanel and Burberry.

On the flipside, some great crisis PR can rescue your brand and even turn a disaster into a success. Rimmel stuck by Moss and some have argued that it actually boosted its profile and helped Moss obtain even greater international appeal. Her rock ‘n’ roll goddess status certainly didn’t take a hit – it just added to her ‘bad girl’ persona, which Rimmel evidently thrived upon.

But in truth, does anyone really want their brand to be associated with such negative connotations, regardless of the outcome?

In summary, there is certainly a place for celebrities in marketing and PR campaigns. Just be sure to choose someone who will reflect your company’s ethos and values, and who will bring more than just their name to your brand.

Media relations: what they don’t teach you at uni

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For the past three and a half years, I have been studying public relations at university. While I thought I knew everything I needed to know to start my career as a public relations practitioner, my time spent interning at Ignite PR has made me realise there is much more to PR than what we learn in the classroom.

‘Media relations’, for example, was a term chucked around in lectures but we were never taught what was really involved. At uni I was never taught as such the idea of ‘pitching’ a media release to a journalist and it was a completely foreign concept to me. Media relations isn’t even considered a unit of study yet most graduates from university will start out as juniors who need to know what media relations encompasses.

During my time studying at university, media relations was described at best as sending an email to a journalist and presuming that they would publish the attached media release. I was quick to learn that there was a whole lot more involved with media relations than met the eye and that it makes up a large component of the work we do as PR practitioners.

I was always under the impression that once you emailed a journalist with a media release that it would miraculously appear in the paper. I was soon to find out that this was not the case at all. Media relations is a skill in its own right. It isn’t a case of just picking up a phone and asking for coverage – you must ‘sell’ a story to a journalist, convincing them to cover it.

The idea of talking to a journalist was indeed a daunting task at first and I wished I had learnt how to do this at university. However, I came to the realisation that it would be very difficult for universities to assess students on the art of’ pitching’ and ‘following up’ – it is something that is best learnt in a working environment with real clients and real journalists to pitch to.

This is where the value of a work experience opportunity comes into play, as here you can apply what you have learned in your studies into practice.

I’m surprised Australian universities can’t include a media relations subject as a unit of study, considering it is such an essential part of PR. Saying this, it is something that is learnt over time and you do eventually become more confident and better at it with practice.

University students wanting to get a career in public relations should seriously consider taking up as much internship experience as possible before they graduate. It is not only a good GPA that lands students into getting full time paid position jobs, there are some things that can only be learnt in a work experience environment, one of them being media relations.