A recent Wall Street Journal article, House Training: Now, Employees Get Brand Boost, caught our attention. Mars Inc.’s Masterfoods USA just dedicated a large portion of their $200 million advertising budget to making their 35,000 employees better ambassadors for Pedigree Dog Food. In addition to employee identification tags and office murals that feature employees’ dogs, their employee handbook has been renamed “Dogma.”
When it comes to journalists’ pet peeves about PR professionals, what tops their list of complaints? Calling too much? No. Sending unsolicited emails? No. Pitching a product they no nothing about. Still no, because there’s always room for effective PR people to work around this. A journalist’s single biggest annoyance is a PR person who pitches a story without knowing anything about the outlet s/he is pitching. For example, pitching a story on children’s toys to AARP; it’s probably not a good fit.
What is effective PR? A lot of clients and PR practitioners seem to have this issue confused, so let’s try to straighten things out.