Red roses, chocolates and messages

edited Valentine's Mailer

Valentine’s Day cards, red roses and boxes of chocolates will be wending their way to specifically targeted persons all over the land today, with the intent of delivering specific messages. Whether these items are to just express love or make a proposal or send a reminder, there are specific intentions behind the messages. These gestures capture an aspect of communication, albeit on a very personal and intimate scale, quite familiar to PR: delivery of specific messages to specific persons or audiences with particular intentions in mind.

The supermarkets and shops have become brilliant at making use of occasions such as Valentine’s Day to promote sales and sell specially created lines of products. Can your company learn a lesson or two from the success pages of these special occasions to apply to how you deliver your PR messages?

Obvously, whether this will be applicable in your field will depend very much on the nature of your business or industry and the audience to which you cater. But special days, anniversaries and national events are dotted all over the calender year and it will be great to take advantage of them when you can. For instance, Easter is around the corner; Wimbledon fortnight will be here come summer; also on the sports calender are the FA Cup Final and  Grand National Weekend. For particular businesses and industries, there are special trade shows. And there are the big ones like Christmas and New Year.

Clarity about your messages
Of course, we assume your PR effort will be aligned to your business goals and strategy – as you aim to build long-term customer relationships. It helps to clarify what you want to achieve whether you are sending out a one-off announcement or planning a series of ongoing messages for your target community. May be Valentine’s Day cards have an easier (?) job to do: to say “I love you”, or “Please marry me”, or “Get that I’ll have you in my heart always!” Whatever it is, the clearer the message, the more likely it is that both the sender and receiver will be clear where they stand. Similarly, your PR messages will have maximum impact if you first clarify the intended outcome: is it a call to action, an attempt to influence the way an issue is perceived, or create clarity and calm in a period of crisis?

Being creative and appropriate
Your newsletters and announcements are going out anyway at particular times of the year. A little advance planning will help you to choose which special events and anniversary occasions on which to focus, to make the best use of resources. It may be possible to craft your messages to ride on the back of special occasions and events when appropriate, to generate greater interest and resonance with what’s happening in the wider community. This may require an effort in creativity, but the effort may be worth your while. Depending on the occasion, there may be scope for choosing illustrations, photos and colours to use in a publicity campaign without compromising the integrity of the messages you wish to convey.

Using humour
It’s been argued that tasteful humour is a key to success at work. The appropriate use of humour and the lighter touch can also go a long way to support your PR messages on occasions when you wish to echo anniversaries or national celebrations in your communications. This will make the messages more appealing and easier to receive, especially if you are using social media and other channels where short and conscise delivery is more effective. If you are creating a photo call with a team of people, will dressing up in a particular way make a bigger impact to your message? A team dressed in Santa Claus uniforms may make a bigger impression at a Christmas charity launch than the team dressed in normal office attire. Or consider this example of Fortune PR’s work for the Choral Foundation, Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace: would this choir have been more noticeable in school blazers or their red choir robes?

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