A good brand of PR

I've been meaning to sink my teeth in Michael Fineman's explanation of "brand PR", in two parts, which I think really gets at how those of us trained in traditional PR can apply what we know to advancing a company's strategic goals. What Fineman really gets at is bridging the divide between PR and marketing in a way that respects and stays true to the discipline of public relations:

So, in a nutshell, Brand PR as I originally defined it and continue to uphold today is about communicating meaning — what the brand stands for — with a focus on building emotional connections with shared values, creating a "persona," establishing a voice, and demonstrating clearly how the brand meets a demand, trend or issue. But the concept can only really be explained with an example.

The example he provides is a good one: A campaign on behalf of a California-based poultry company to educate local consumers about the habit of out-of-state competitors to use saltwater to keep their chicken fresh:

In the end, we earned 300 million media impressions, 50,000 signatures on petitions to the USDA to disallow the "fresh and natural" labeling on "plumped" chicken and these efforts were championed by a U.S. Senator from California (still under review by USDA.). The Los Angeles Times endorsed the Foster Farms campaign, possibly the first commercial campaign endorsed in a Times editorial. The campaign also earned Foster Farms, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, and Fineman PR an Effie, one of the most prestigious ad and marketing industry awards. Foster Farms won solid consumer positioning as a trusted brand, providing consumers what they wanted: optimal value at a time when many food producers were shrinking packages to leverage profit.

Consumers got it. Market share was maintained during this period, and that was especially notable compared to most industry producers' loss of market share to private label during the same period.

What more can I add? This is exactly the kind of public relations we should all be practicing.

A brand by any other name

When I first saw this article arguing that companies spend too much time thinking about brands, my initial thought was:  Here we go again. Someone is attacking a useful marketing/PR concept instead of criticizing those that apply it incorrectly.

But Brian Millar's article is more thoughtful than that, though it might be summed up more succintly by invoking my boss's definition of brand: A brand is not what you think of your product, but what your customers think of it. Too wit:

Brands were...a by-product of having great products and communicating them well to people. ...When was the last time Apple did a pure brand ad? Fifteen years ago? Apple went from a challenger to a leader when it stopped focusing on its brand and made its products the heroes of its communications.

True enough, though I would argue that Apple is an example of a company that not only understands that its brand is dependent upon the quality of its products, but also how to apply that brand in new areas. (Something that Millar takes Coca-Cola to task for failing to do.) Think of how Steve Jobs revived Apple with the iMac and how that computer came to define the brand: The seamless intergration of software and hardware, easy to use, a simple yet elegant design. So what was Apple's next act? The iPod, which could be described exactly as I just described the iMac. Apple focuses on the product, but the product always represents the brand.

It's interesting that Millar compares the concept of brand to two-dimensional maps that allow us to navigate terrain while representing it poorly. And yet, maps are indispensible in helping us get where we need to go, and also helping us understand where we came from. If that's all a brand is, well, then that's pretty damn good.