How can Public Relations be effectively used in building/promoting a Brand?

Public Relations are increasingly about communicating credibly with key audiences who affect business results, such as media analysts, policymakers and policy influencers, customers and shareholders. It is an important element in supporting the power and value of an organization’s BRANDS to all stakeholders. All the elements of corporate brand, from tone and personality, functional and emotional benefits, core message and end goal, to its reputation – if fully leveraged with internal and external audiences – can help raise performance and credibility. Enhancing the awareness, understanding and commitment to a BRAND through PUBLIC RELATIONS is usually an essential part of any overall strategy aimed at sustaining and raising standards of performance and credibility.

PR's importance is changing, according to The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR (HarperBusiness). American marketing strategists Al and Laura Ries argue that public relations has become the most effective way to build a brand. Well-known brands like The Body Shop, PlayStation and Harry Potter spend little on brand-name advertising. The same is true for many entrepreneurial companies of this era of hours. Business owners become known in their respective fields of concentration many times through public relations and the associated media generated.

There are many ways to use classic PR strategies to add depth, color, and cohesion to the building blocks of BRAND identity; the most effective ones can be summarized as follows:

1) By Using data:-  Yes, “big data” is a buzzword that’s overused in our business, but what some companies don’t realize is that even small amounts of data can be useful for a PR outreach to media and influencers like analysts. For example, if we notice that millennials represent  our  largest  and fastest-growing customer segment, then this  simple fact, backed by the right data and company history, qualifies us  to build content and create speaking platforms around what we’ve learned about marketing to millennials. It’s one of several differentiators we can use to help them stand out.

2) By Telling stories:- Storytelling is another overused term, but at its core, it means packaging information into meaningful and entertaining narratives to forge stronger emotional bonds with customers. And the best stories aren’t just splashy entrepreneurial chronicles, like Steve Jobs’ life or Richard Branson’s latest exploits. The most persuasive might be closer to home; they can be customer testimonials, community happenings, or employee exploits.

3) By Looking Inside:- Employees, in fact, can be both a rich source of stories and a powerful channel through which to tell them. For instance,  just imagine that  one of our clients is a company that has landed on a few “Best Places To Work” lists, but they want  to gain more visibility for their commitment to workplace wellness;  we can place a local newspaper story about an employee who lost pounds and regained her health with the help of the fitness and wellness resources available to her at work, it can add depth and credibility to the client’s reputation. Who wouldn’t want to work there?

4) Via Third-party endorsement:- To be strong, a brand promise must be credible. The essence of good PR is having someone else talk about your brand rather than the company itself. The third-party endorsement – either implied or explicit – is often very effective, sometimes more so than paid media. It helps when the publicity results include “proof points” that reinforce a brand proposition or identity. A customer testimonial is an obvious example, but third-party endorsement can also come with content sharing and social media community-building.

5) Via Executive leadership:- Staking out a position on a topical or important issue and offering insights or ideas can yield far-reaching brand benefits. When Starbucks’ Howard Schultz weighs in on marriage equality, or Sheryl Sandberg urges us to “lean in,” it’s more powerful than a corporate reputation campaign. It’s an example of thought leadership around a key issue relevant to many customers that has nothing to do with coffee or social networking. Yet, I’d argue that it has a strong impact on the brands attached.

6) By Educating:- “Education” can mean campaigns that look to change behavior for reasons of public interest, like anti-smoking programs or the wireless industry’s #itcanwait campaign against texting and driving. For instance, if we wanna embrace a campaign around financial wellness, we can sponsor  a series of Financial Learning Seminars, underwrite  research about the cost of financial stress in the workplace;  and raise funds for financial wellness causes.

Thanks Farhana for invinting me 

I am totaly agree with your answers :)

Thanks Dear Farhana for the invitation. I totally agree with your luminous as well as voluminous answer. Excellent answer from you. Thanks.

A brand can be promoted by using a number of marketing strategies including direct mail, personal selling and sales promotions, as well as communicating through Public Relations (PR).

Public relations practice is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation's brand and its public.

Social media offers huge benefits in terms of PR, as it enables a business to directly communicate to a worldwide audience in a number of ways. Harrods social media strategy is based on two way communication and the company sees its audience as important contributors in the social conversations that take place around the brand.

depend on Public Relation skills and charactristic like Active Listening - Giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, Social Perceptiveness - Being aware of others' reactions and understanding why they react as they do beside he should have good communications and relations in marketing so he can share and introduce the Brand.

this is small comment beside your amazing answer Farhana

Completeness and cooperation

conciseness

consideration

concreteness

courtesy

clearness

correctness

Passion about Brand when properly used as the foundation it is.

PR, when done properly, can drive growth, raise a company's profile, change perceptions of a company and help build a brand. 

Take Netflix, for example. While I was there PR was a part of Marketing. Like everyone in the company they were charged with building the Netflix brand around the brand position - Movie enjoyment made easy. 

With that as the basis, PR was handled with a two-pronged approach, consumer and corporate communication.

Consumer

This part of PR was charged with driving what is called cultural integration. 

Things like running the Movie Watching Marathon on a NYC street to beat the world record, being featured on Ellen as a giveaway, or product placement on TV shows. All of which helped drive mainstream awareness of the Netflix as a movie rental company.

Corporate Communication

This was focused more the business side of things. From getting the CEO on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine to talking about DVD distribution in the New York Times to getting coverage for The Netflix Prize. In the case of The Netflix Prize, it got us covered as a tech company. The goal of that coverage was to help with recruiting engineers who were flocking to Google, Facebook and Apple and who perceived Netflix as just a movie company. And it worked beautifully.

PR at Netflix now reports into the CEO but even with this arrangement they are a key driver of international growth leveraging all that comes from accessibility to stars and content from Netflix Originals. 

One quick note though, if your company is spending heavily on PR and advertising (and I assume marketing in general), I do hope they've done the research and know what their brand position is and what their attributes should be. Otherwise they're just spending money mindlessly.

i fully endorse my answer to Ms Farhana and Mr. M. Negm. thank you for your invitation. 

Haven a good rapport between the company relationship officer and its customers will ease simultaneous product promotion. Inform the esteem cus about the new brand how to use it and its benefits to people. Convince the existing customers to buy and test the new brand. To mentioned a few. Thank you.

Thanks Farhana for raising this important issue.

The tools an organization have to build a brand are few. The main tools are direct advertising and public relations.

In my opinion public relations is a very effective tool. Compared to direct advertising, public relations in also cost effective but more important than that, public relations uses an obliquely intervening approach. It makes other people talk about the brand not the owner of the brand.

When you sponsor an activity it gives you advertising coverage that can cost you more than your capital in value.

Let me give an example, since you are form the beautiful country Pakistan I will take the Pakistani National Cricket Team, now here if your company sponsors partial sponsorship with the provision of the team training suits for a year what will the result be on your brand?

Your brand will jump immediately to become international and loved and accepted by all the fans of the Pakistan Cricket Team.

I have had a challenge to promote the products of life insurance and personal accident for Oman Insurance in the UAE.

I went to a major Arabic Daily News Paper (Albayan). I did not ask for an advertisement space. I told them that we want to sponsor Ramadan Knowledge Contest. They agreed and I offered a free AED100000 Accident Insurance to cover one winner every day throughout the holy month of Ramadan. The cost to my company was the premium of accident cover for 30 people (less than AED2000 in total for the month) but the result was that Albayan displayed the daily knowledge questions I provided (relevant to our brand and product) giving us free advertising that we would have purchased for (AED1.5 million)

This is a real life experience that provides the evidence for your indicative understanding of the efficiency of Public Relations.

 Tariq

Your confidence in your product and the confidence of others in you a great centerpiece to the success of any product you want to spread among your social environment individuals and therefore needs to be a social relations and the general development and leadership because the goal of our work is the consumer and hear the reaction through my relationships for treatment or continuity.