Good PR – Bad PR

10 February 2014, 14:01 pm
Speciality Bites by Paul Hargreaves

A comment from Deborah Meaden last night on Dragon’s Den has prompted this week’s blog. “You can’t do anything with £3,000 per month spent on PR”. I think this was in connection with a business, called Rustic Indian, that did get a rare investment from Piers Linney. A lovely range of chilled curry sauces – samples have been sent and devoured by members of the team at Cotswold Fayre – delicious. This was before we started thinking about chilled!

Actually, guess what, I disagree.  Admittedly more funds would be great, but with a good product with eye-catching packaging, you can achieve quite a lot with this kind of money.  Articles from the Telegraph appear on my desk every Monday morning from one of my colleagues who is an avid reader of this particular broadsheet, and I am sure the same is true of other broadsheets, in particular. 

This national coverage is often for relatively small brands and is achieved for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to advertise in said publications.  I guarantee that many of the beneficiaries of such coverage are paying their PR company less than the figure above.

The frustration for us a distributor of such products into the retail market is that often such publicity is achieved far too early, so many of the consumer benefits and pull-through are completely missed.  Often good publicity is achieved before products are in a decent number of independent retail outlets, let alone any of the larger groups. 

This level of publicity is worth so much more once there are products within 10 miles of 90% of the population.  We have seen the impact of publicity too early by our office being bombarded with phone calls by members of the public who have googled the products and found them on our web-site.  If possible please hold back consumer PR until the products are out there, which means that you will have had to spend some money on B2B PR first.

Have a good week – and get yourself out there!

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