Ten Short Case Histories
How public relations measurement has helped some of America's most admired companies improve their business results.
by Katie Delahaye Paine
1. The Case of the Missing Sales
In my earlier days in the measurement world, one of my clients called us to check some results for their media analysis. A product manager had come to her in distress, saying, "We need more PR, the product isn't selling." As frequently happens when something doesn't work, he was looking to publicity and communications for the answer.
The problem was that our report showed that his product had received more and better press coverage over the last year than any other product the company had. I double checked our numbers, and the results were the same. His launch had outstripped all others by a factor of four. So why wasn't his product selling?
Turns out that it was a Macintosh-based software program, and none of the sales offices or sales reps had a Macintosh in their offices. Once the sales reps had Macs with which to demo the product, sales took off.
2. The Case of the Disappearing Market Share
A leading manufacturer in the consumer electronics field was concerned that their market share among small business and home office users (SOHO) was declining. They commissioned a study to analyze media coverage in the top 25 publications most frequently read by SOHO buyers.
As it turned out, the firm was mentioned in about half the coverage of consumer electronics in those key publications. Not bad, and very much in line for what you would expect for a company with 60% market share.
However, when we looked at just the negative press, the firm received 89% of all the negative coverage. And when the press recommended products, or wrote favorably about these products, the firm was only capturing about 30%, i.e., two out of three articles recommended a competing product. Separate research had shown that trade press coverage was a major influence on purchasing decisions, so we knew this was a critical weakness for the firm. We also knew that the factors most likely to influence purchasing were things like "being rated best in class," "being rated a good buy/value," "being the best technology."
When we looked at how the media positioned the firm on those specific issues, the firm was frequently second or third after the competition by a significant margin. The only positioning that the firm clearly owned was "market leader," a positioning that testing had shown had little impact on buying decisions for this category. By refocusing their messages, the client was able to regain their lost market share.
3. The Case of the Wrong Positioning
A major health insurance company conducted its first ever competitive positioning analysis, interviewing both subscribers and business decision makers who actually made the final decision on which health insurance company to go with. They were asked what was most important to them when it came to making a decision and how the company ranked on those issues. They were also asked what came to mind when they heard the name of the firm and the competition.
The results were dreadful. The company came in dead last on every important issue except choice of physician. Of all the "words" used to describe the various companies, 66% of the ones describing the firm were negative, compared to 30% or less for the competition.
With some trepidation (as a messenger, I've been shot many times), I walked them through the results. After quite a lot of blustering and defensiveness, the CEO said, "All I can offer is more excuses."
Shortly thereafter, the company revamped its entire marketing program and added a marketing expert to their board of directors. They reworked their ad campaign to focus on choice (even using "Choice" in the name of a new product). By the end of the year, for the first time in five years, the company had stopped losing market share and was finally gaining on the competition.
4. Press Tour Triumphs Over Shrimp
I actually started my first company as a result of one chart. While I was director of corporate communications at Lotus Development, a product manager came to me and said, "I want to launch my product with the same kind of party that you had for Manuscript."
So I asked him why he wanted that kind of party. He said, "Everyone was there, and the shrimp were great."
Now, I knew very well that that particular launch had not been much of a success. (In fact, few people -- today or back then -- can recall the product.) Most of the people in attendance had been employees of Lotus, and it was all a huge waste of time and money.
But it wasn't until I pulled out a chart that showed him how the media covered a variety of different launches that he actually got it. My chart showed that for the Manuscript launch, half of all coverage incorrectly positioned the product and only one in four articles said anything we wanted to say about the product.
The chart had similar statistics for the other ten launches we had done, and I pointed to the one for "One Source." One Source was launched with a press tour, the total cost of which was somewhere around $15,000. On a cost-per-message basis, the press tour was about 10 times better than the party. The product manager decided to go with the press tour.
5. Helping the Board Make Better Decisions
A major insurance firm had been using Advertising Value Equivalency as a standard measure for their PR program for some time. Their results showed that every month they received a little more coverage, and that meant a monthly increase in the Ad Value.
In order to better understand what was really happening, the company asked me to do a complete competitive analysis of their media image. The results showed that most of the increase in coverage was negative, resulting from a number of lawsuits brought by angry customers.
The communications group took the information to the Board of Directors and for the first time could clearly show the impact their decisions were having on the company's reputation. Furthermore, the study showed that by sponsoring a major community relationship program, the competition had outstripped them on the "market leader" and "responsible corporate citizen" positioning. The board began making better decisions immediately.
6. Saving a Program That Works
Country Music Television (CMT) had initiated a program of a traveling country music show that could be transported in 18-wheelers and quickly set up in parking lots. The goal was to increase the number of cable operators carrying the program, by encouraging people to call their local cable providers and say, "I want my CMT!"
They had teamed up with Wal-mart to secure the parking lots and had done one season's worth of shows. The problem was they didn't know whether they should continue with the program or not. The only gauge of success they had so far was a guesstimate of attendance supplied by the truck drivers, whose reports were considered with some skepticism because of the inherent bias.
So we conducted surveys of attendees to determine the degree to which they were influenced by the shows. A stunning 90% of all attendees said that they would contact the cable companies. Another 60% said that they would encourage a friend to do the same thing.
What made the research even more valuable was factoring in costs. CMT could tell on a location-by-location basis which sites persuaded more people for less money -- a calculation we called "Cost per Persuasion." Going forward, that research helped them make better decisions relative to how many trucks to lease and how many cities to plan for. They could use Cost per Persuasion in conjunction with demographic and population data to determine where the return on investment would be the greatest.
7. Help Establish Leadership Positioning
Long before most athletes had even begun to step up their training for the 1992 Olympics, a major technology company had signed on as a sponsor and was starting to leverage their investment. With almost a year to go before the date, their PR staff and their agency began to seed the press with stories positioning the company as a leader in high technology.
To check their progress, a monthly media positioning study was done to compare the number of times the firm had been mentioned in key media as a "technology leader" compared to the two other technology sponsors. Each month, in reviewing the report, the staff and agency would sit down and evaluate their progress, determining which editors and reporters were missing the message, which ones hadn't covered the topic at all, and what groups of media should be targeted going forward.
As a result, the client's positioning as a technology leader increased steadily each month, easily trumping the competition by a factor of two and occasionally three. While other sponsors received scant mention before the games actually opened, the firm had amassed some 500 articles -- all of which positioned the company as a technology leader -- by the time the games began.
8. More Effectively Allocate Resources
For years, AT&T has been spending a fortune in advertising, trying to get us to believe that the company is good to do business with. In fact, they've been doing it for so long, they can predict how many people they'll persuade before they even place a single ad. The trouble is that they're not always right.
In fact, when managers at AT&T were recently going over some numbers, they discovered a significant gap between predicted behavior and actual behavior. While they were scratching their heads looking for a reason, someone noticed that the times when customer loyalty was lower than predicted happened to coincide with times when they were getting pummeled in the media for "slamming." .Conversely, loyalty numbers were significantly higher when their CEO was featured prominently and positively for his role on the President's Council on Volunteerism.
After integrating all the consumer and PR data, trend studies showed that they could dial back their advertising significantly during times of heavy, favorable press coverage. They also found out that when negative press fills the pages, there's absolutely no point in trying to promote their products, it just mades people angrier. The money they saved on advertising more than covered the cost of the research.
9. Manage Your Agencies Better
An international company was in the process of getting its marketing efforts off the ground in Europe. It had just moved and cut the ribbon on a beautiful new office facility in Germany.
It gathered its four European agencies around the table and showed them the results of the latest media analysis. While coverage was steadily increasing in all countries, the percentage of articles that contained a key message was minimal. The agencies were clearly told: "Go forth and communicate messages, for this is how you will be measured."
Six months later the same agencies gathered around the same table to review the latest results. Message communication had increased 300% and overall coverage had doubled. By far the greatest gains were in Spain. Even more interesting, the greatest sales increases, as well as the largest increases in market share, were also in Spain.
10. Getting to Say "I Told You So."
My client at a major semiconductor company is much too polite to say "neiner, neiner, neiner" when she's delivering a research report, but she will confess to thinking it once or twice. She understands that measuring things that don't work is far more valuable than measuring the stuff that does work. Especially when some other department has railroaded PR into changing the timing of a major launch or when budgets have forced odd bedfellows to be announced in a joint event.
More than once she has been able to clearly demonstrate the downside of such actions. Downsides including fewer messages communicated, less positive press, and incorrect positioning.
Several of my clients have compared the results of different product launches and learned interesting lessons. One client compared a launch conducted via press tour with one conducted by a major press conference at corporate headquarters. Research showed that the press tour yielded nearly twice as much positive press and communicated twice as many company messages.
Another client was able to demonstrate that when a launch was moved forward by a week due to an unforeseen leak, 30% fewer messages were communicated than in a normally handled release. Additionally, press coverage was significantly lower than for other releases. All of these studies gave the clients plenty of practice in "I told you so."
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