No Data? No Evidence? Sorry, No PR.
Our firm passed on an opportunity to handle the product launch of a piece of consumer equipment. There were some learnings regarding this new business' pitching process.
About this prospective client.
This prospective client now has access to a piece of consumer electronic equipment that first hit the US market 10 years ago. The prospective client now has the rights to market and sell this product today. The equipment has not been updated since then. According to the prospective client, the equipment still worked well and did not need to be updated. The marketing claims he has on the equipment are based on studies from 10 years ago.
What we were thinking.
We asked the prospective client if he had or planned to have any new studies caried out on how the equipment performs on current mainstream/ widely-used technology. He said no.
But the data on the technology is 10 years old.
We asked the prospective client if he could underwrite a study to see how this equipment functioned on the new technology that everyone was using. We were ready to take the assignment and even drew up a PR plan that we would execute if we had some up-to-date information on how the equipment functioned with current technology.
So we asked him about it. The prospective client said he'd look into it. The he came back and said no.
It was not his equipment.
The equipment was owned by a foreign entity. The owner gave multiple companies the right to market it. The owner has no interest in updating the studies they had on this consumer equipment.
Can't afford to do new studies right now.
Our prospective client came back and told us it was too expensive to do the studies and decided to forgo them. Instead, he was spending and ready to spend more money on marketing and PR to help him launch this product. He asked us to use what he has, even though the studies were 10 years old.
Our concerns.
1. The equipment was already featured/mentioned in big news publications 10 years ago. There are no new news on this equipment. Why would reporters cover this story? Reporters would have asked us the same questions we're asking the prospective client.
2. With no relevant data on the effects of this consumer equipment on current-day technology, consumers and the media may not be open to our product launch messages.
3. The prospective client did not have exclusive rights to this equipment. Other companies were already in the business of selling this equipment. This means the prospective client was a distributor with a non-exclusive license at this time. Any promotion activity he does could also potentially benefit his competing distributors, especially when the name of his firm was not distinguishable from his competing distributors.
You cannot do PR by spinning.
There is no public margin today that allows creative interpretation of old data in absence of new data. I am not sure there ever was or will be public acceptance of an old piece of equipment without current pieces of data.
PR firms could encourage companies like these to spend the money to have updated research first before they spend money on promotional or marketing activities. Arm your PR and marketing team with current and relevant information they can use. Without these tools, your team will not stand a chance with the public.
No Data?
No Evidence?
Sorry, we can't do good PR without it.
Do these thoughts make sense? What do you think? Would you have taken the assignment?
Photo source: istockphoto.com