Ward to the Wise

Attracting media coverage requires telling a compelling story in a compelling way. Talking heads and cold, dry facts don’t entice the media to break away from the swirl of the every day to cover your event or announcement. To stand out these days, you need a little sizzle. You need to frame your story in a way that demands attention. You need it to be “mediagenic.” Mediagenic content includes any content that is attractive and well-suited to the…

A perfect storm has formed within the field of journalism. The combination of the 24-hour news cycle, expansion of internet news sites, layoff of thousands of senior beat reporters and the closure of more than 150 newspapers during the last two years alone were enough to change the look, feel and delivery of traditional print and broadcast news. Not surprisingly, news media also have been affected at the most basic level – the news gathering process. Reporters Follow…

Has this ever happened to you? You spend hours crafting THE pitch of all pitches to get your client or company noticed. You hit the send button and zoom…off it goes to your target media outlets. You wait…and wait…and wait. Hmmmm. No response. After the shock and awe wears off you realize no one cared about what you had to say. What a harsh truth and waste of valuable time. On average, reporters and editors receive hundreds of…

Source: Becky Myers and Deborah Buks In today’s constantly moving, 24/7/365 news cycle, massive amounts of information are disseminated via social media, news outlets and other online sites – by everyone with a handheld device. Media outlets, in essence, are competing with their own audiences to get the news out. Reporters are not only under greater pressure to tell the news first, but are now expected to produce stories for their traditional print or broadcast outlet as well…

You are ready to unveil your new brand. Your employees are aligned and primed to deliver on your brand promise. Sound research has helped you position your brand in the current marketplace, and you have committed financial resources to launch your brand appropriately. Surely, your brand won’t fail. Right? The seventh reason your brand could land in trouble – and the final installment in this Ward to the Wise series – is not thinking long term. Lack of…

Another reason brands fail is because even though the company said the brand was changing, it never really did. Perhaps your look or message changed. This attracted people, but then no real change took place in the company. Products and services remained the same. The customer experience didn’t improve. Customers who were expecting something new and wonderful from you became disillusioned, sought out another company to provide the product or service they needed, and your branding effort failed….

Like so many other priorities in business, branding requires financial investment. Underfunded branding efforts usually fail. Why? Because there isn’t enough investment to provide a sound basis to validate the viability of a brand direction, or to provide the message frequency required for the brand to penetrate customers’ minds. When the latter occurs, messages aren’t communicated to the customer well, aren’t communicated often enough or worse, aren’t communicated at all. Effective branding requires a level of investment similar…

Sometimes a brand redesign takes the company in an entirely new direction – or so it seems. While branding can differentiate your business from your competitors, if it’s not done properly, it could result in some unexpected – and undesired – effects. The problem occurs when the brand change is not based on research or is not validated as relevant and meaningful to the marketplace. In other words, the brand house is built on a foundation of sand…

Many, many brands have failed simply because the company didn’t first stop to think about where the organization fit in the marketplace. You need to know where you intend to stake out your claim in the market long before you can make relevant promises on what you will deliver. Your brand positioning work establishes where in the market the business stands, and who you intend to serve. Is yours a price-value play? A superior-technology play? A service advantage?…

The second most common reason brands fail can be traced back to how the CEO handles a branding change. If he or she does not champion the brand from the start, both inside and outside the organization, it will likely fail. A brand is a promise to your customers and your employees. It is a way of saying, “This is who we are. This is what you can expect from us.” Notice the “we” and “us” in that…