Along with the likes of ‘leverage’ and ‘outreach,’ I hate ‘strategy’. It’s a dirty word that people often hide behind. It’s a word that protects the jobs of senior PR staff, who no longer do ‘real PR’, but just saunter out their office when a good brand is in the meeting room. Strategy, you see, is expensive, and clever, and only for the crispest of suits.
Except, of course, that it isn’t. It’s essential, especially if all the hard PR work is to culminate in something worthwhile; a genuine shift in how people perceive a company. It’s logical, and you need market insight. It might even involve measuring exactly how a brand is perceived now, and some work to envisage how the company wants to be seen in the future. But it’s not a science to remain the exclusive domain of those who still lunch.
It’s about knowing where you are, where you want to be, and how to make the journey between those two places. It requires some thinking, but it’s far from mystical. Without some thought up front, all the PR tactics in the world – no matter how successfully delivered – may be rendered useless. Now that would be a waste of time and money.
One Comment
Matthew Goldsbrough
18 September 2009
08:15pm
Ooh, you had me going with that first paragraph, Rob. But from paragraph two, I was with you. You’re right, getting the strategy right – before wasting time, energy and money on poor execution – is essential. And relative to the costs of that wasted work, getting the strategy right is never expensive. I tried to demystify the strategic planning process in this blog post: http://www.goldsbrough.biz/strategic-review
1Comments
The S word
Posted by chameleon-admin September 16 2009 11:54am