On Thursday, March 5, the Florida Pubic Relations Association, Central West Coast chapter, joined forces with the Suncoast Advertising Federation for its monthly luncheon, a panel discussion about the mix of advertising and public relations. Our enthusiastic moderator, Charlie Cusimano, Marketing Consultant at WWSB ABC 7, introduced the panelists:
Gwen Bennett, VP of Advertising & e-Commerce, Beall’s Department Store; Josh Haas, Director of Sales and Marketing, Hyatt Hotels; Lisl Liang, President and Editor, SRQ Media Group; Steve Smith, President & Creative Director, Stephen A. Smith & Associates.
Moderator: How are you handling PR and advertising in today’s tough economy? Everyone is looking for something and they all want it for nothing.
Gwen (Beall’s): That’s a big challenge for us, to compete against a JC Penney’s or a Kohl’s. We’re keeping our message out there, focusing on frequency of our message. We ran a whole spring launch around PR; we received a significant presence across the state. People are watching more TV and moving into cinema advertising. We did it during the holidays. Our biggest goal is frequency of messaging.
Josh (Hyatt Sarasota): We’re in a different industry. We’ve just revamped the Hyatt on Sarasota Bay. It’s fresh, posh. To go with marketing and PR, we had to put our best foot forward. Some of our best practices are opening the floodgates. Occupancy is down about 10% across the nation. Summertime sale: 3 nights, 4th night free. Kids can eat free at the restaurants. It all comes down to the partnerships in Sarasota, which is such a tight knit community. Community involvement and flexibility are key. It’s not new, but you’d be surprised what comes together. We’ve been such an ala carte company and a big change in our marketing has been the package.
Lisl (SRQ Media Group): Now is not the time to take for granted everything you have been doing. Ask “Am I as lean as I need to be? Is my message where it needs to be?” What do I do that my competition does differently? Make sure that is captured in the PR & marketing that you do. Reinvigorate the tag line. Relook at your audience. Where are they? We started a Best of SRQ Local – we’re looking for businesses that are local. In our April issue, we’ll have 30 local businesses featured
Steve Smith (Stephen A. Smith & Associates): There is no business that I am aware of that has not been acutely affected by the recession. Go back to fundamentals. Be careful with the budget and making cuts. Reconnect with your customers. Make sure you have that well-defined brand personality. Public relations and direct marketing are coming to the surface now. Nothing gives you better impact than that paid advertising. You can’t throw that out. Don’t make an announcement like GM did, announcing they aren’t sure if they’re going to make it. Make sure everything you do reassures your consumer that you will be here. They need to hear from you that you will still be around.
Audience Q: I see that your background is with Savannah. What is the Hyatt’s stand on having a conference center downtown?
Josh: I think it would be great for Sarasota. We should all work together to bring business to the city. The challenge? I think the convention center is to be located on top of a parking garage….That brings up several questions of convenience. How are you going to store everything? The customer needs to be happy and how will this be an easy load in and load out…..it needs to be convenient. ….but I see the pros to doing this project.
Lisl: In tying it back in to marketing, it points to the fact that our community being more reactive to proactive. It’s not that it’s a mystery. When you look at that question, we need to be looking farther out than we do. They are starting to look at how we change behavior in this community. We can’t do this in a month.
Moderator – It underscores what Steve said which is not taking everything for granted.
Audience Question: Have any of you used Facebook and what are the pros and cons?
Gwen: Beall’s has a blog called “Passion for Real Life,” where we post articles about fashion through a spokesperson. We get interaction and a lot of hits. We’re managing it all internally and have also posted to YouTube and a little on Facebook.
JP Penny just conducted “Put Your Husband in the Doghouse” campaign, one of the best retail uses of social marketing. The key is that you need to have a reason for doing it. What are you trying to do or accomplish? It has to be authentic, not just sell something.
Audience Question: How have you used YouTube?
We do a promotion every year with all of the high schools in Florida. They design t-
shirts, we give the winner $1,000, give $1,000 to the art teacher and have the shirts for sale in the store. We put a video of this on YouTube.
Moderator: Is there a danger in getting too enamored in new media, when every nickel has to be looked at?
Steve: Don’t just get involved because it seems like the thing to do. We’re planning on doing something in our office with a Facebook photo album. Social media is so powerful—never before in the history of PR—have we seen something like this. Tropicana, for example, didn’t connect with their consumer with their recent re-branding. They redesigned the packaging and realized after it was too late that they made a mistake. It (dissatisfaction) was posted everywhere. How do we use it in a crisis mode is an important question as well.
Moderator: Obviously, a lot more people are looking at the public relations way to go because it’s free, but you lose control of the message. How do you maintain control over the message?
Steve: What I’ve always been talking to my clients about is the importance of message development. Stay on message. If you do a good job in message development, you understand who your product is and who you’re trying to reach. Media relations, merchandising strategies should always be part of the mix with advertising.
Gwen: There is a new program called backyard Economics that the Florida Retail Association is putting on. For every $100,000 of online shopping, 1 in-store job is lost.
Go visit www.backyardeconomics.com, a new program encouraging buying local Florida stores and stores in your community. This will trickle down to the local Chambers of Commerce. Put your money in the local economy, vacation locally. This will help us, one of the worst economies in the country. If Beall’s does any business, they do business with people in Florida first. We use local printers, a Jacksonville ad agency. We support the state’s economy as much as we can. All of us need to do that.
Josh: We believe in a good mix of PR and a traditional marketing. Florida business is huge when you think about partnerships. The PR side of the state of the economy, it’s all about being flexibility—working with businesses. We have pages of options, coming up with them as we go. With cancellations, for example, our message is that we expect your business to come back when you can. We’re trying to develop partnerships and be flexible with fees, etc.
Lisl: If you have an advertising campaign, you are getting 6 x more value out of PR. I have a couple of closing thoughts. There is a huge need for us to connect. This is one of the things that we have utilized for our company. Take one of your clients and program something special around that client. Find something about that client that works for them. If you don’t have great programs, than create them. Let them know “We’re going to do something together and we’re going to get it out there.”
Invite others to come and hear their story. Make your own news. Identify those people who are influential. Know who you are speaking to (generationally and otherwise) and how to cater to that generation. I want to underscore what I recently heard: Find out how you can fascinate people. If you what you do isn’t fascinating, create something that is.
Moderator: Say one more thing that is fascinating.
Steve: You mentioned being engaged. It’s more important than ever. We need to be doing business locally. It’s constructive and potentially profitable businesses come out of this. I hate WalMart because they blow away that whole sense of community. The chambers and business leaders can try to develop that, but it’s really up to the consumers.
Many thanks to ProForma for sponsoring the luncheon.
Posted by CWC Blog Team members Susie Bowie & Suzanne Dameron
