TFTM ... A VELCRO APPROACH TO COMMUNICATIONS

The first in what will become a monthly series of pieces on neat pieces of thinking that we have come across at conferences, in articles or conversations. This month, we salute Russell Davies' "velcro communications strategies".

We first came across this at the Marketing Society's Drinks Forum: for those who want to read the full argument, Russell has posted a run-through of his presentation on his blog in this post on his "schtick".

Maybe ads/brands/whatever work more like velcro than like a bullet or a tennis ball. It's not about one big, simple hook, but thousands of little ones. If some of them fail it doesn't matter. Some of them are verbal. Many of them aren't.

They're mostly the things that happen in execution, not in strategy. They're to do with tone, manner, character, attitude, look, feel. Or to be more specific, they're to do with design, font, colour, photography, music, casting, copy, typesize. All that.

The reason that this resonated was that PR, more than almost any other marketing discipline, requires multiple executions of an idea not just to get consumer cut-through, but to gain media space in the first place.

As a discipline, it's our role to come up with lots of different hooks that will catch different media outlets, different segments of a brand's consumer base - while no single piece of activity is likely to grab everyone, the cumulative effect is to create a bond with the audience through lots of individual hooks.

The ultimate argument - and one that helps us in PR no end - is that strategy should emerge from execution, as well as the other way around.

The other thing (and this is something that might be implied by the thinking, rather than stated by it), is that PR (because of its relatively low execution and media costs) can afford to create lots of different executions, actually tailoring the strategy to the medium and the end-audience as it does so. Which means that, if a client will buy into the premise in the first place, their strategy and messaging can be tweaked and nudged to be highly relevant to the end-audience in different ways, each time it is consumed.

Interesting, we thought ... any suggestions, additions, violent disagreements, please feel free to throw them at us ...

Comments

[Max]

It's interesting you should say that. I've recently started working with a PR agency (I'm an integrated agency planner) and the thing that struck me first away is that they don't really seem to get the idea of strategy.

But if I think about it, they are circling around one place with lots of different ideas.

I think what would help me and I'm not sure how you guys do it, is if they at least made it clear that they were approaching the same topic from lots of different angles with lots of different hooks, and why these different angles would work.

At the moment in my experience it seems to be more the case: we could do some lobbying and then we could do some press work and then we could talk to some KOLs etc. but not why and what it will bring.

Otherwise I basically agree with you. PR is about the public and getting them to talk about things, and as we all know the public likes to talk about lots of different things and in lots of different ways.

[James Gordon-MacIntosh]

Max, it could just be that you are at the wrong agency ...?!

But you are right, an awful lot of strategic thinking in PR is - often at best - a handful of slides that say "here is the commercial objective and here is the way that we will try and crack it with some stuff that will get media coverage/the ear of someone who might influence the people we want to get to as an end audience".

And that is more-or-less it.

This is driven by the fact that PR is tactic-led and relies on third parties to carry messages. For too many PRs therefore, success is getting coverage or getting a meeting with someone influential - from politicial to pop star, depending on the brand.

Too few focus on what the impact will be of that third-party endorsement - actually because that in itself is a really hard thing to measure, so generally, we try not to.

The thing that people don't really get about the whole "velcro effect" of good PR is that it has to be about lots of people hooked BY THE SAME OR A SIMILAR THING. Otherwise, you don't end up with a single bond made up of lots of hooks.

SO, the objective in all activity has to be the same - it's just that there are lots of little ways of achieving it. Glad that you agreed with the basic premise - and nice to know that someone from outside PR recognises the usefulness of it all.