Far too many companies make the mistake of waiting too long to hire an agency and/or staff up internally. By the time everyone’s in place, the pressure for immediate results is so great that the time to plan and execute is so short and expectations are so unrealistic, the marketing/PR people given all that due diligence have been set up to fail—by you.

Marketing and public relations are not a magic bullet. The minute revenues miss projections, the simple-minded executive’s instinct is to start pulling marketing dollars or making whiplash changes. They mess with the creative. They abandon the strategy everyone signed off on, just 90 days ago! They fire the agency. Winners are the ones who recognize that marketing is all about repetition and building momentum, especially in a crowded jungle. When people knee-jerk, they actually shift their company into reverse not second gear.

When you hire a software programmer you don’t micro-manage his code, randomly changing some ones and zeros just because you can. Yet when it comes to marketing and public relations, suddenly the executive team or CEO miraculously knows more about messaging and perception than the PR firm, and more about color and composition than graphic designers.

Just because avocado and pink looks good in your kitchen doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for your sales collateral. Trust the designer who has studied years of color theory, even if you don’t “like” their suggestion. The market is too saturated to try ideas that have been watered down by subjective taste or deconstructed to appease the lowest internal common denominator.

Jim Collins and Seth Godin have eloquently illustrated that companies who win are ones who understand that the goal of marketing and PR is to stand out. In all of today’s chatter, if your strategy is old-fashioned, safe or conservative, you will lose. Embrace all of the new forms of media referenced earlier. Ads and press releases aren’t enough anymore.

Was Intel’s Blue Man Group campaign all those years a “risk?” How about IBM’s use of an illegal, street stencil campaign in San Francisco in 2001 that attracted millions of dollars in national publicity? Think about it. “Big Blue” broke the law. And, I bet you know whose tagline is: “So easy a caveman can do it.” Enough said.
There is more noise out in the marketplace than ever before, and there are more ways to be famous than humans were ever meant to have. Witness Survivor, Fear Factor and Amazing Race. Darwin was right, too. The only way to survive is to find new ways to cut through the clutter and get your story heard. The alternative is not an option.

David Eichler has supervised public relations, branding, advertising and marketing campaigns in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and now in Phoenix as co-founder of David and Sam PR—whose mascot, Reggie, is a green gorilla.

www.davidandsampr.com