strategy & tactics
Public Relations for Retail
Part 1
It’s time to use the tool that corporations use to build the ideal image for your business. WORDS BY SOLOMON DANIELS
As a business owner, manager or marketer, how do you get customers to walk through your doors? Thousands of retailers agree the overwhelming answer is word of mouth. It will always be the No. 1 source because of the trust value:
42 Mobile Electronics September 2018
People trust the informed opinions of those closest to them. But now that we are living in the social media era, testimonials and reviews take second place in a lot of markets. There is a high level of trust here also, though not from one person, and not necessarily from anyone a potential customer knows.
It’s a trust built from an aggregate of opinions: If that many people agree, they must be good! Of the three top ways to get customers, advertising is last on the list. We inherently distrust ads because we know from the get-go they have one purpose: to sell us something. The strategy of the advertiser is to expose the buyer to information enough times that they relent to considering the benefits for themselves. But what’s not on this list, especially in our industry, is Public Relations. Many of you may know that I help brands in our industry communicate better with retailers by managing their public relations programs. Simply put, Public Relations (also shortened to ‘PR’) means creating a situation in which an entity that a person trusts else is telling your story on your behalf. That entity can be a news channel, favorite reporter, newspaper, blog or magazine article. With PR, your news carries the high trust level of a friend or series of
