Public Relations Today

Recently I interviewed a prospective client who is in the restaurant business. He owns an upscale seafood restaurant that a year ago featured white tablecoths, 12 different sauces for his fish and all the other trappings, such as fancy micro vegetables and ‘towers’ of food presented on plates, that go with an upper-tier operation.  “I saw the writing on the wall a while back,” he says. “I knew that people want to eat more casually and simply. They still want quality, but they want it to be simple and laid back.” 

The restaurateur seized his opportunity for change when he found a larger property in a more-densely populated neighborhood, and he decided to re-locate.  Along with the move, he changed the menu and decor.  The tablecloths gave way to gleaming wood tops, and instead of all the sauces, the top quality fish are prepared in their own juice, and the plate presentation is straight forward.  So you might consider it a “geographic cure,” as they say.  Bottom line:  his business increased 50 percent in the year after the move.

I sometimes think, am I sometimes missing opportunities for change that could benefit my clients?  I ask myself this question every morning before I start making my calls.

Bill

If you’re like me, you may want to do EVERYTHING at the beginning of the year that you didn’t accomplish prior to the holidays.

 

There may be the urgent crush to roll out all the cannons to market both yourself and your product or service in this economic downturn. Leading a dual professional life, half spent in real estate and the other half in marketing, I have been experiencing some interesting challenges in discussing price with prospective clients, whether it be for property or a public relations program.

 

Everything seems to require twice as much effort as pre-crisis days, and there is price resistance all around. (Those of you in real estate need no further comment on that).  My challenge this year will be to focus on my CORE business in each discipline, to keep my sales pitch short and efficient and to have it perceived as highly valued, but reasonably priced. 

 

I have a plan in place to do this, and I’ll share more about it in coming blogs.  Join me as I re-focus and hone in on adapting to new market conditions that keep changing with lightning speed.

 

Bill

 

    In my small hometown, some of the elected officials who serve on our Town Board are being challenged in the courts with various charges of corruption, from bribery and cronyism to harassment and discrimination.  The legal fees to defend these cases are mounting, and taxpayers are nervous about the possibility of long, drawn-out proceedings, not to mention the awards being sought, one of which is $30 million.

 

    As a professional marketing person, I have always relied on communications to pay for my supper, but in “legaleze” speak, it’s the lack of communications that seems to be the first line of defense.  All the defendants in these cases have said either “no comment” or they have referred any questions to their lawyers, who also say nothing. This drives me a little crazy sometimes.

 

    If I were personally accused of even the very least of these offenses, my natural instinct would be to say, “Whoa, are you nuts?  Me?”  But in representing clients, I do say that there is a time to be open and a time to be silent. Lawyers demand that their clients always be silent however.   I called a friend of mine who has served as a state Supreme Court justice and asked him why there’s always a gag rule for clients. He responded simply, “because it’s the fish that opens its mouth that gets caught!”

 

   Yeah, but doesn’t this assume that the clients will get caught only if they’re guilty? What about the innocent ones?  Why can’t they proclaim their innocence with confidence and let others know exactly what the situation is?  Assuming of course, that they’re innocent.  Do we always have to listen to the lawyers? Didn’t Shakespeare say to kill all the lawyers first? 

     It’s so hard to say goodbye. Almost inevitably, business relationships come to an end.  You want them to last forever, and while many may be long term, nothing lasts forever. 

     Clients’ needs and expectations change.  People in power move on.  Others die.  In the restaurant promotion business, there is an axiom that you automatically lose one percent of your market each year due to death.  In the real estate business, that presentation that you just knew would result in a listing goes to someone else.  Saying goodbye and knowing how to say it is part of the sales process.

     In this period of economic turmoil, many, many relationships are coming to an end, and we have no control over them.  Both my mortgage company and my bank have been absorbed by other institutions and I expect my statements to come from new addresses in the future. Clients run out of money, homes that we sold face foreclosure, long-term friends lose jobs and have to move to other locations.  I have a favorite expression which has carried me through many hard times and lost relationships.  Acceptance is everything. 

    When I experience loss, I try to look beyond my vessel lessening in volume. I try to accept the situation, the disappointment, and strive to look at the lessons I’ve learned, both professionally and in human relations, while the relationship lasted. Did I make the best contribution I could? Was I enriched by the experience?  Did my client and I make some difference together?  This kind of accessment is more productive than resenting the situation and focusing on a negative perspective.

     And sometimes, it’s just time to say goodbye.  If I can do it with grace, congratulations, I’m a grown-up.

Local Businesses in My Own Hometown
Respond To the Economic Downturn

 

Communications and price points head the list with customers

 

     The financial crisis that captured headlines in late September has reached global proportions, and the news seems worse each day about how it is affecting all aspects of American life.  Most of us, however, relate to bad news on a very local level. How is the economic downturn affecting our businesses in our own areas?

     This report discovers that local business owners in my own hometown of
Yorktown Heights, NY, are responding to the radically different financial climate in a steady-handed and practical manner to market themselves, both in traditional and unexpected ways.

     Interviews this week with owners of a variety of business profiles reflect some creative, yet practical, marketing strategies to weather the storm for themselves. Their new promotional activities suggest something more than a sense of survival, however;  they also demonstrate a genuine concern for their loyal customers, offering them new and helpful options during tough times.

     Here are a few examples.

 

Ron Guarino, Autobahn Car Repairs

 

    With Ron Guarino, owner of Autobahn Car Repairs in Yorktown Heights, business has always been a matter of communicating regularly with customers, in good times and now in bad.  He was a leader in the auto repair business in utilizing a monthly email newsletter, researched to give sound advice to his customers, and at the same time, offer discount coupons to build business. As a side note, Ron says, “Recently I’ve found that two of my competitors in the area are plagiarizing my researched material for their customers’ email programs, so if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’m very flattered. It shows that I must be doing something right!”

    In addition to offering discount coupons in his emails, Ron reports that he works with customers who can’t afford “the whole ball of wax” for their car repair needs. “We point out those repairs that really must be done and suggest those that might be done at a later time, when customers can better afford it,” he says. 

    Another part of customer service which he initiated before the downturn, but seems particularly appreciated now, is his contacting each customer by phone after service to ask for feedback on their work.  “People like knowing that we care about them, even after we’ve done the job.”

 

David Shaken, The Heights Bistro and Cafe

 

     David Shaken of the Heights Bistro & Cafe in Yorktown Heights has been utilizing his email list to make it easier for his regular customers to enjoy an affordable night out.

    “My wife Melissa came up with the idea of sending a ‘Friends and Family’ coupon by email to our loyal customers, suggesting that they print out the coupon to receive a 10 percent discount.” David reports that there were no restrictions to the offer and that coupons could be printed and used as frequently as customers wanted. “Just on that one promotion, we had more than 150 redemptions,” he said.

   “Since I opened more than three years ago, I’ve learned that I must give customers what they want, not what I want, and that has never been truer than now when they want a relaxing night out that they can afford.”  To support the lesson learned here, David says that he has extended his “early bird” dinners from an early time block, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm, to the entire evening from Sunday to Thursday evenings.  Another incentive David uses to attract wine lovers is a 50 percent discount on any wine purchased on Wednesday nights.

 “So I guess we do it all to make it easier for people to enjoy a nice dinner they can afford,” he concludes.

 

Ellen Koelsch, Club Fit

 

     Ellen Koelsch, Marketing Director at Club Fit, located in Jefferson Valley and Briarcliff, says that the club has not slashed the cost of membership dues, “but we are providing outreach to our members with grass roots efforts to use the club more and to enjoy new benefits.

    “For instance, right now, we’re promoting a ‘Merry Maintenance,’ program in which we weigh members before the holidays and after. All those who either lose or maintain their weight doing the holidays receive a reward, a ‘cute’ gift.”

   Koelsch says that a modification to their member services is to become more flexible with putting memberships “on hold” when needed. “Formerly, we would offer a hiatus only for a medical or needed travel situation,” she explains.  “Now we find that someone might have taken a second job and doesn’t have the time to come for a while, so we’ll suspend membership. We’ll suspend it now for any reason if a member requests it.  At the same time, we feel that exercise helps in more volatile times, if nothing more than to get a better night’s sleep.”

  

Alan Drogy, Colonial Terrace Catering

 

     Alan Drogy, owner of Colonial Terrace Catering in Cortlandt, has taken a different route in sustaining good business in view of hard times, one that is geographic in nature.  “We have re-directed our outreach to communities south of us, where they are paying 40 percent more for the same product and service,” he says. 

     “For years, there was a ‘great divide’ along Routes 287 and 119, concerning what people were willing to pay for a catered event,” he continued. “Now we reach out to consumers in communities like Armonk and Chappaqua, telling them that they can get equal or better value and service for 40 percent less by driving 20 minutes north.”

      Alan has also changed the direction of his selling pitch. “Before the economic downturn, we ‘sold’ to the bride;  now, we sell to the parents who have to pay for the wedding.  And, rather than waiting to the end of our pitch to present the price, we start out with how much it will cost, to relieve the anxiety upfront. Then, we tell them what they get for that price.”

     To court the communities south of Cortlandt, Alan uses his own version of guerilla marketing. Rather than advertising in traditional venues, he takes ads in church and synagogue bulletins. “That’s all we’ve needed to do to get our message out, and it’s working,” he reports.

 

Lance Cerutti, Suburban Wines and Liquors

 

  When asked if  he’s changed his ways of doing business in light of the financial crisis, Lance Cerutti of Suburban Wines and Liquors in Yorktown Heights responds with a resounding “Yes!”

    “We’ve adjusted our sites to more value-oriented products because we know that people are spending less money,” he says.  “With the weaker dollar, we found that the wines we had been buying were getting more and more expensive, so we stopped selling many things that weren’t offering the value we felt customers should get for the money.

     “Instead, we work harder to identify wines that offer the same, if not better, value at a lesser price. The average wine we’re now promoting probably costs 15 to 20 percent less than those we offered before the downturn.

    “I want my customer to go home, enjoy a bottle of wine and say, ‘Gee, did I pay just $10.00 for that?’”

 

     As a public relations and marketing consultant, this reporter’s own response to changing times is to offer a “cafeteria” style format to prospective clients, where they can pick and choose those marketing services for which they require outside expertise, and perform many promotional functions in-house more concerned with “staging” than ever before.
 

    Whoever first opined that “desperate times require desperate measures” (some scholars steadfastly insist it was Hamlet) may not have considered that desperate times might also be addressed with creativity, ingenuity and flexibility.  Local business owners have obviously figured that out on their own.

 

Never in recent history, probably not since World War II,  has there been such a turnabout in lifestyles choices and expectations, from the cost of that daily fix of coffee to lessened possibilities for home acquisition among young people to anticipation about living out one’s golden years with some degree of security.

As one who works in both lifestyles marketing and the housing market, I have altered my recommendations to clients radically, just since September. I’ve been giving them some “straight talk,” some of which they don’t want to hear.  I don’t have the answers to weathering a great storm, a perfect storm, but neither, it seems, do the great thinkers on finance and the economy. When I was taking all kinds of advice from investment consultants, I was always reminded by friends that nobody really knows anything for sure and that I should go with my own intuition.

For more than a year, the economy was already slowing down, certainly in housing, but the economic meltdown and the bailout of Wall Street has business owners and home sellers alike gripped with fear while aching for that note of hope that things will get better sooner, rather than later. It may be later.

So what do we do in the meantime?  The world’s pundits would say that we prepare for the worst, but hope for (and work toward) the best.  Or, those more spiritually oriented would be advised to “pray to God, but row toward shore.”  The one quote I’m frequently using today is that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  The reason I put emphasis on the last quote is that fear mars our judgment and stifles our creativity in searching for ways to do things differently.

You own a restaurant that has suddenly lost a major percentage of its customer base? To identify the opportunities for getting old and new customers alike to choose you over the competition, creativity must be unfettered by fear. Selling a home that can’t find a buyer? Think about price, like everyone else is, think about staging, think about guerilla marketing. 

But while considering these things,  how do we keep fear at bay? It’s all about “going within,” while thinking universally. Remember how resilient the human spirit is, especially among Americans living in a great country, no matter the economic turmoil with which we’re surrounded today. As a nation and as individuals, we’ve weathered incredible odds just to win our freedom. Certainly we will survive an economic crisis…and eventually move forward again.

Was it Buddha who said, “invite your enemies into your living room?”  The Buddha’s teachings are so vast, it’s hard to remember, but the principal holds firm.  It’s amazing where we can pick up knowledge, even from competitors and foes, maybe even more so from these.

Some years ago and for many years, Primavera Public Relations was the agency of record for Ruth’s Chris Steak House when Ruth Fertel was still at the helm.  I loved Ruth like a mother and would do anything for her.  At the time, she felt that an adversary named Dale Wamstead who created the original Del Frisco’s Steakhouse was adversely affecting her chain’s reputation.  In a very clever way (I was later quoted on national television as saying it was “diabolically” clever), he had created a phony steak house rating system called the “Knife & Fork Club” that listed the top steak houses in the country and published ads in the airline publications announcing the list.  He intentionally left out Ruth’s Chris which was his main competitor in his original
Texas market.  “Please do something about this,” Ruth asked.

What I did, innocently enough, was write an article in the Ruth’s Chris newsletter, “The Steak House Gang,” called “When It Comes to Restaurant Rating Systems, Whom Can You Trust?” which rated the review systems available at that time, listing them according to credibility.  Considering that the “Knife and Fork Club” was created by Wamstead’s public relations man, it got a low ranking, along with some exposition of the hoax.

While we all expected Wamstead to react negatively, perhaps as strongly as Ruth did to his review system, we didn’t expect two $5 million lawsuits, one against Ruth’s Chris and one against Primavera Public Relations.

The discovery sessions for the lawsuit were brutal.  I’m a laid-back guy, but my hackles were really elevated by the opposition’s lawyers.  Interestingly, Wamstead and I were at the same table as were the lawyers, and we seemed to connect in some way. At one point, the lawyers recessed for some private talk, and Wamstead and I were left alone in the room.  He looked at me and said, “I respect your work, and I’m really sorry for all of this.”  I looked at him and said, “You seem to know things about marketing that I never thought of, and I’ve been in the business all my professional life.” To this, he responded, “Well, I learned everything I know from the Guerilla Marketing books.”  These are books that, to this point, I had not explored, but based on the recommendation of my “foe,” I learned about something I had been missing, something that has benefited my clients since.

My point today is twofold: We never know where or how we’re going to get valuable information AND never has there been a greater need or opportunity for Guerilla Marketing in the marketplace as there is today. While Primavera Public Relations is a generalist agency, we specialize in lifestyles accounts:  restaurants, hotels, food and wine and real estate developments.  Capturing the customer away from competitors in rough economic times, especially in these fields, requires the kind of marketing warfare that we might not normally employ under normal conditions.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be sharing some of the techniques we’re employing for our clients.  For now, you might want to visit: http://www.gmarketing.com/

Talk soon!

When I first explored the public relations field, an early mentor told me that the foundation of the practice was really common sense and, primarily, always encouraging clients to keep a cool head, no matter.  Some may say, easily said, but hard in practice, considering that all human activity is, after all, human.

 

Public relations practitioners are often called into difficult situations where emotions can run high, and putting aside all the qualities that a good practitioner should have, perhaps “keeping a cool head” is the most difficult to accommodate.  Sometimes the very characteristics that make a good public relations practitioner such as creativity and sensitivity are sometimes accompanied by emotional reaction to confrontational situations.

 

Today The New York Times endorsed Barack Obama for President.  No surprise of course, but the leading quality it proffered was his “cool head and sound judgment.” The Times calls on these essential qualities for a President:   strength of will, character and intellect, sober judgment and a cool, steady hand.  On the other hand, John McCain is credited by the paper with retreating to the “fringe of American politics” reduced to “robo-calls” and negative ads.  In short, not being cool. 

 

Biden is sometimes definitely not cool, while Sarah Palin, gaffe-prone as she may be, stays cool even when she has to “get back” to Katie to complete an answer.

No matter one’s political leaning, it’s easy to see who’s cool and who’s not.  It’s all about body language, vocal tone and, of course, what is said and implied.

 

It seems that the cool head and cool hand always prevail.  Even in Shakespearean wisdom and crime family philosophy, we are told that revenge is a feast best served cold.

 

But what exactly IS a cool head?  Simply the ability to stay calm and think clearly in a difficult situation.  In public relations, it’s essential and only those who can achieve it succeed.  But, let’s say, under attack from an advisary, the emotions flair and one is prompted to say and do things that are not cool

 

Here are two practical suggestions for keeping cool in the line of fire.

 

Face to face, whether with a co-worker, client or member of the media, a cool head can become hot when responding trigger-fast to a confrontational person.  In my youth, I had a problem with holding my tongue when I felt unfairly treated or threatened.  With maturity came the understanding that I was operating from a position of weakness if I let the other person control my reaction.  Somewhere I read that I can diffuse the negativity coming at me by visualizing a dense fog between the aggressor and me in which the heat of anger or assault dissipates by the time it reaches me, and I can better understand and deal with the content of the message, no matter how negative it might be.

 

When the negativity comes via email or text, the very best advice I could offer is to not respond immediately. Close the email or text message and do something else, maybe even something relaxing or pleasurable. This is the “fog” version of electronic communications. The time lapse offers an automatic cooling effect, and you can gain control of your response.

 

Cool headedness is associated with keeping things intact, organizational skill, intelligence and confidence. Hot headedness is perceived as being out of control, unintelligent, defensive and lacking confidence.  

As public relations practitioners, we have only once choice.

Welcome, Reader!

As I write my first entry in Public Relations Today, having enjoyed a gratifying career in the industry through both heady and tough times, I feel more positive about the benefits of good public relations strategies than ever before. While getting attention for clients is relatively easy in good times, the discipline requires a completely different approach in a transitional period, such as we’re experiencing in the fall of 2008. 

Never before has it been so important to distinguish who you are and what you do from the chatter, when many businesses are vying for the same customers.  As for service to my clients, I have broached new territory in my field:  public relations for restaurants, food companies, wine companies, and destination locations. I’m encouraging clients (and even friends who are not clients) to break away from the standard means of communications and to venture into appropriate use of the new media for meaningful web and mobile marketing.  Day by day, I will explore different facets of this expansive technology, along with different issues that can be addressed through it.. In the meantime, you can learn more about my firm and its services by visiting:  www.PrimaveraPR.com and www.JanusDirect.net.

Bill