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Monday, September 10, 2012
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Thursday, December 27, 2007
2007 Year in Review
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Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Friday, June 8, 2007
Announcing: The Theory N Practice Domain!
Yep, we've secured our own domain name...You can now find further "meaning making out of nothing" at the new site:
www.theorynpractice.com
www.theorynpractice.com
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Crazed Manager or PR Genius
We've all enjoyed the common baseball manager rants against umpire gaffes. Miffed at a call, baseball managers will go to great lengths to show their dissatisfaction, even humiliating themselves in the process, as they kick dirt on the mound, stand toe-to-toe with umpires, and throw fits reminiscent of a two year old. Recently, however, a minor league AA baseball manager took it to a new art form...and earned himself Internet fame in the process.
As seen in this clip, Phillip Wegman, the miffed manager of the Mississippi Braves took a tour of the baseball diamond, wreaking havoc on everything in his path, even the pitcher's Rosin Bag. After covering home plate with dirt, he made an artful recreation of the base the dirt. He then trotted to third base and second base, relocating them into the outfield. His finest moment came when he mimicked a military crawl to the pitcher's mound, grabbed the Rosin Bag, and tossed it like a hand grenade towards homeplate. He finished his rant by throwing the ump out, and bowing to the crowd.
On the surface, it would be easy to call this a manager tirade gone awry, but here at TnP, the surface isn't good enough for us. Whether he planned it or not (and we're leaning toward the former) this discontent manager earned himself and local minor league club worldwide acclaim. The video of his tirade has been viewed by literally thousands of people, and news stations across the country have aired the video.
Companies strategize for hours on end to get this kind of exposure that associates the company with a relevant and lasting image in people's minds. And yet they often fall short. The fact is, it's difficult to make your brand "cool" or "popular" and Wegman's on-field antics did just that: they made minor league baseball cool.
Think of the implications for minor league baseball after Wegman's antics: Despite a perceived lack of talent (after all, there's a reason it's called "the minor league"), minor league baseball can be exciting. While the tried-and-true baseball fan will come to a game regardless, the casual game-goer looking only for something to do, now has a reason to choose the minor league game over other excursions. Like the hockey-game attendee who only goes to see the fights, consumers previously apathetic to minor league baseball may now go to games just with expectations of deeper entertainment value. Even if for a moment, Wegman gave character to the lesser alternative to major league baseball.
The take-away: good public relations is often about creating exposure or publicity, great public relations creates a recognizable image for your company, and carves out a memorable place for your brand in the minds of consumers. Too many companies count clips and evaluate their efforts based on their level of exposure, but such an approach says nothing about what your public may be thinking about you...or if they'll even remember you at all. Creating relevance for your brand (as opposed to merely creating awareness) begins with choosing the images you want the public to associate with your company. Do you want to be seen as fun? Cutting-edge? Reliable? Controversial? Edgy? This step always entails research: how does the public see you now? How do your employees see you? Your clients? How do they want to see you? Once you've found a character that works for your organization, you can then strategize your communication efforts to match that image
...and even if it doesn't mean making a fool out of yourself in a minor league baseball game, creating relevance for your brand over awareness will inevitably make your brand memorable.
As seen in this clip, Phillip Wegman, the miffed manager of the Mississippi Braves took a tour of the baseball diamond, wreaking havoc on everything in his path, even the pitcher's Rosin Bag. After covering home plate with dirt, he made an artful recreation of the base the dirt. He then trotted to third base and second base, relocating them into the outfield. His finest moment came when he mimicked a military crawl to the pitcher's mound, grabbed the Rosin Bag, and tossed it like a hand grenade towards homeplate. He finished his rant by throwing the ump out, and bowing to the crowd.
On the surface, it would be easy to call this a manager tirade gone awry, but here at TnP, the surface isn't good enough for us. Whether he planned it or not (and we're leaning toward the former) this discontent manager earned himself and local minor league club worldwide acclaim. The video of his tirade has been viewed by literally thousands of people, and news stations across the country have aired the video.
Companies strategize for hours on end to get this kind of exposure that associates the company with a relevant and lasting image in people's minds. And yet they often fall short. The fact is, it's difficult to make your brand "cool" or "popular" and Wegman's on-field antics did just that: they made minor league baseball cool.
Think of the implications for minor league baseball after Wegman's antics: Despite a perceived lack of talent (after all, there's a reason it's called "the minor league"), minor league baseball can be exciting. While the tried-and-true baseball fan will come to a game regardless, the casual game-goer looking only for something to do, now has a reason to choose the minor league game over other excursions. Like the hockey-game attendee who only goes to see the fights, consumers previously apathetic to minor league baseball may now go to games just with expectations of deeper entertainment value. Even if for a moment, Wegman gave character to the lesser alternative to major league baseball.
The take-away: good public relations is often about creating exposure or publicity, great public relations creates a recognizable image for your company, and carves out a memorable place for your brand in the minds of consumers. Too many companies count clips and evaluate their efforts based on their level of exposure, but such an approach says nothing about what your public may be thinking about you...or if they'll even remember you at all. Creating relevance for your brand (as opposed to merely creating awareness) begins with choosing the images you want the public to associate with your company. Do you want to be seen as fun? Cutting-edge? Reliable? Controversial? Edgy? This step always entails research: how does the public see you now? How do your employees see you? Your clients? How do they want to see you? Once you've found a character that works for your organization, you can then strategize your communication efforts to match that image
...and even if it doesn't mean making a fool out of yourself in a minor league baseball game, creating relevance for your brand over awareness will inevitably make your brand memorable.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Creating Community from the Can
In this inuagural post, I take on what it really means to make something out of nothing...
Creating community--it is the essence of PR and MarComm. Priority #1 for companies is to create a common bond between people that turns one consumer or supporter into thousands. Harley Davidson's Harley Owner's Group (HOG) is an excellent example. Buying a Harley Motorcycle is your ticket into a culture built around black leather, boots, and Posse Rides (where owners from across the country get together, share their experiences, and ride on...together).
For companies like Harley Davidson, creating a community is simple: build an image for your brand based on your customer's interests and *let it ride*, but replicating their efforts is another issue. It's a point of interest that even Academia has taken on. Jim Grunig, John Ledingham, and Stephen Bruning, among many others, have posited theories to better understand the phenomenon of groups of people forming relationships with a company's brand, including the level of involvement people have with the company, and people's trust, commitment, level of control in decision-making, and their overall satisfaction.
But here's an example that defies the deeper insights of these gurus...
In an attempt to drum up publicity for the efficacy of its toilet paper, SCOTT Tissue created a campaign around the Halftime Flush for Super Bowl XLI this past January. Citing that 90 million tiolets will be flushed during halftime of the Super Bowl, they claimed that Scott's toilet paper disolved 4 times faster and prevented unsightly and emotionally draining clogs, and even enlisted Mike Ditka to get the message across. The focus of the campaign: A Share Your Cloggiest Moment Contest with a $25,000 reward for the person with a story of the most inopportune moment for a toilet clog.
Even if their claim that everyone flushing the toilet at Half Time would cause sewage problems wasn't true, their campaign was successful, and the eventual winner was a guy from Pennsylvania who rushed to the rescue of a clog with a ski pole (There were others that were funnier...).
What SCOTT probably didn't expect was the community it created among people, particularly bloggers. With a chance to capitalize on people's "dirty little (toilet) secrets," bloggers didn't hesitate to feature SCOTT's promotion on their blogs and talk about their own stories, even if it was tongue-in-cheek.
The genius of SCOTT's promotion was that it got publicity AND community for the price of one. For a brief moment, SCOTT successfully got people to talk about their most embarrassing toilet experiences AND they effectively linked their own product to the emotional release from people "coming out of the bathroom" about their own experiences (and not to mention, they linked their product to preventing further embarassments).
Here are a few examples:
- In a random post on a blog entitled Fresh Preserves, the blogger added that she considered entering the contest, and then bore her most embarassing toilet experience.
- On Adfreak.com, Blogger David Kiefaber posted his own embarassing moment in the water closet.
- On family blog FamilyOf9.blogspot.com, the father of nine expounded his on kids' toilet mishap that he had actually submitted to Scott, featuring a practical joke that went awry.
The point is, creating community is about getting people to relate, and getting people to relate, is about getting people to talk. Or as Scott Clog Clinic rep Mwanza Lumumba put it, "Everyone has experienced a toilet clog at one time or another, and whether the stories are embarrassing, unfortunate or downright gross, they always describe a situation people can relate to."
In cases like this, creating community and branding go hand in hand--branding at the core is about getting people to relate to and talk about your product. The example of SCOTT's campaign shows that if you can find something intriguing for people to talk about, and get them to link it to your brand, you can create a community of people who associate your brand with something your competitors don't. And creating community is as much about creating differentiation as anything else.
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