Purpose and Goals of the Chapter

This chapter offers further views on some of those areas including promotion, employee communications, business-to-business communications, public service messaging, and measurement.

Outline of Key Chapter Themes

• While not all public relations campaigns necessarily follow a RACE format, public relations operates best when it is approached from a strategic approach that centers on how the needs and desires of stakeholders need to be of the highest consideration.
• When considering a major ad buy or campaign, it is important to assess not only competitors, but also the political, economic, societal/cultural, technological landscape, or environment in which the ads/campaign will take place.
• As is the case with successful public relations, Freese and Nichols’ continuous-improvement journey has used continuous communication with employees and clients to positively affect employee morale and performance and client service.
• Cultural and logistical issues can’t be managed quickly or tidily. Organizations need to consider time and create clear expectations for all constituencies.
• Customers will purchase a high-quality item, if the company communicates to the right audience with messages that address their needs.
• Audience exposure to both paid and earned media significantly improved the odds of taking the desired behavioral actions.

Chapter Outline

Make 90 Seconds Last a Month: The Story of the 84 Lumber Super Bowl Commercial

One Company’s Quest For Quality: From Baldrige to Lean Six Sigma

Addressing Internal Communication at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda*

Tenneco Builds Employee Engagement Through Recognition

Beating the “Big Three”: Publicizing Fox TV Network’s 1987 Debut

My Press Needs Challenge: Creating a Brand in a Mature Market

A Strategic View: #Whatididinstead: A Social Media Rather Than Social Norms Approach to Curb Teen Drinking

A Strategic View: Driving Behavior Change Through Public Relations: How Earned Media Lead Consumer Decision Making About Medicare

Case Summaries

Make 90 Seconds Last a Month: The Story of the 84 Lumber Super Bowl Commercial

Political campaigns--particularly long presidential ones--can heighten and intensify people’s emotions about issues, and the 2016 Donald Trump–Hillary Clinton contest, in which candidate Trump vowed to build a wall with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants, was no exception. By using a reference to the border wall in a Super Bowl commercial, 84 Lumber was able to garner significant media coverage and successfully raise recruitment among its target audience of millennial men.

One Company’s Quest For Quality: From Baldrige to Lean Six Sigma

Freese and Nichols, Inc., decided in 1996 to embark on a long continuous-improvement journey to earn a prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. After identifying employees and clients as the most important target publics, the company management demonstrated its commitment to continuous improvement through its actions and communications. All those efforts paid off. The employee turnover went lower than average, and both employee and client satisfaction increased.

Addressing Internal Communication at the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda*

The American embassy in Kigali, Rwanda attempted to display American support for the Rwanda after the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. The United States was singled out for its alleged apathy during this crisis, with observers noting that America had evacuated its embassy at the onset of the mass killing of Tutsis. Beyond internal ethnic and tribal tension, cultural differences and mistrust created serious difficulties between the Rwandans and their American supervisors. To attempt to address misunderstandings between constituencies, I developed a series of open communication sessions comprising local staff and American officers.

After completing these sessions, internal evaluation from 50 participating employees revealed an overall 3.8 on a four-point effectiveness scale. Unfortunately, subsequent performance evaluations in the months after the program showed no sustained improvements due to lingering issues related to organizational and cultural communication.

Tenneco Builds Employee Engagement Through Recognition

Tenneco wanted to get a better understanding of employees’ concerns. Tenneco launched an employee communication campaign, called TEN10, that was designed to:

• Create a unified global recognition program involving all Tenneco employees.
• Celebrate those who embody Tenneco’s Shared Values.
• Incentivize performance and instilling a sense of pride.
• Build the reputation internally for a credible, authentic program that could be sustained.​
  TEN10 has met every objective the company set.

Beating the “Big Three”: Publicizing Fox TV Network’s 1987 Debut

How do you publicize the launch a new TV network of small, upper-channel broadcast stations covering less than 75% of the nation’s TV households against the established “Big Three” networks ABC, CBS, and NBC? Meanwhile, the Fox public relations team focused on the launch of five Sunday night shows and four Saturday shows by generating media attention for the shows, the stars, and the Fox network brand. Fox quickly realized that we needed to establish our own, younger stars identified with our brand. Along came the first three Fox sensations--Johnny Depp of 21 Jump Street, the Bundys of Married…With Children, and Bart Simpson of the animated series The Simpsons.

In addition to pitched media interviews, our early publicity efforts capitalized on events, such as the Sunday night launch party, the Television Critics Association press tour, affiliate-generated cast appearances, and a multicity integrated communications campaign called “The Fox Tune-In Tour.” Fox’s top publicity coup was totally unexpected, however. On March 2, 1989, The New York Times ran an inaccurate front-page story about a Michigan woman who allegedly convinced “several of the nation’s largest advertisers” to pull their spots from the Fox comedy series Married…With Children. The resulting national media feeding frenzy gave the show saturation publicity exposure--and ratings.

My Press Needs Challenge: Creating a Brand in a Mature Market

As a relatively new player in an established industry, My Press Needs LLC of Tampa, Florida wanted to build a brand in a highly competitive market segment with its high-quality clamshell at a higher price point. To better understand the client’s public relations needs, we used a “Listen, Watch, and Read” approach to gather information. How do we increase the sales of a high-priced item that, to some, may appear dated? The answer was to communicate that a higher-priced item fulfills some unmet need.

One of the tactics that naturally flowed from our research included creating online case studies that highlighted how individuals used the Crest Clamshell to achieve results. We specifically targeted publications read by people who purchase and use clamshells. We developed a time line advertisement that showed the company’s commitment to the clamshell across the years. An important part of this campaign also included gaining credibility by participating in industry events.

A Strategic View: #Whatididinstead: A Social Media Rather Than Social Norms Approach to Curb Teen Drinking

In the Spring of 2016, Floyd Against Drugs (FAD), a nonprofit located in rural Northwest Georgia approached a public relations cases and campaigns class and requested assistance with campaign planning aimed to discourage underage drinking. The only problem was that one of the stakeholders, from the Council on Alcohol and Drugs, imposed restrictions upon the campaign research process. Contributing to the problem was the hiring of a new FAD director who came from law enforcement, not public relations. In this case, students in the class were answerable to two stakeholders who held conflicting opinions about how to plan, implement, and sustain a campaign. In order to meet the needs of both stakeholders, the class designed three traditional posters with positive social norms messages (e.g., “92% of you have fun without alcohol”) but included, #WhatIDidInstead, an interactive, social media campaign component. Following the focus group, the class recommended listening to the voices of local teenagers by creating a programmatic campaign utilizing a social media platform. In order to measure success, FAD teenage representatives can organize and measure social media reach, impressions, and engagement by recording the number of views, number of posts, and number of likes, comments, shares, and retweets.

Driving Behavior Change Through Public Relations: How Earned Media Lead Consumer Decision Making About Medicare

The CMS team’s objective was to design and implement a research program to create and ensure key messages broke through the clutter and impacted consumer behavior during a brief OE period (October 15 to December 31) in 2010. But more importantly, the research program had to measure the relative impact of paid and earned media tactics to determine which most efficiently communicated key CMS messages, and do so within the confines of standard tools for data collection. The key research strategies were communication and collaboration. Before any research began, the CMS team discussed how we could best work together to develop a holistic set of key metrics. Despite the unique challenges facing the OE campaign, post-campaign evaluation research confirmed that it successfully achieved a quantifiable outcome among its target audiences.