Marketing and Public Relation – Old and New Paradigm

Below are the old and new of Marketing and Public Relation Paradigm

Old Paradigm

• Marketing simply means advertising and branding
• Advertising needed to appeal to the masses
• Advertising relied on interrupting them to get them to pay attention to the message
• Advertising was one-way: company to the customer
• Advertising was exclusively about selling products
• Advertising was deemed the most important component of advertising
• It was more important for the ad agency to win advertising awards than for clients to win new customers
• Advertising and PR were separate discipline run for different people with separate goals, strategies and measurement criteria
• The only way to get link was through the media
• Companies communicated to journalist through press release
• Nobody saw the actual press release except a handful of reporters and editors
• Companies had to have significant news before they were allowed to make a press release
• Jargon was OK because the journalist all understood it
• You weren’t supposed to send a release unless it included quotes from third parties, such customer’s analyst and experts
• The only way buyers would learn about the press release content was if the media wrote a story about it
• The only way to measure the success of press release was through ‘clip books’ which noted each time the media design to pick up on a company’s release

New Paradigm

• Marketing is more than just advertising
• PR is more than just a mainstream media audience
• You are what you publish
• People want authenticity, not spin
• People want participation not propaganda
• Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at the precise moment your audience needs it
• Marketers must shift their thinking from marketing to the mainstream masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of under-served audience via the web
• PR is not about your boss seeing your company in TV. It’s about your business seeing your company in the web
• Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It’s about your company winning business
• The internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media
• Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content
• Blogs, podcast, e-books, news releases and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate
• On the web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred