Write a PR brief when managing a complex product or service

If you've ever bought something on an e-commerce platform, it's almost impossible not to have read the comments that consumers post after purchasing that product. With few exceptions, there are many comments that refer to an unsatisfactory experience with the product and that lead other potential buyers to the conclusion that it is “not worth the money”. I studied some of these comments and found that people did not know how to use the product properly, and this can be seen in many areas, from financial services, telecom, to home appliances or technology. In general, areas that incorporate innovation are more exposed to misuse and can more easily generate negative experience and reputation. Can PR correct such perceptions?

Any approach to marketing communication starts from a point of differentiation of the brand that is often built through complex technologies and innovations that cannot be explained by a 30-second TV spot. The role of PR is to develop a narrative thread that explains the complexity, as happened in the case of a campaigns of PR in Dubai through which the world's first underwater showroom was launched to demonstrate the water resistance of the new Sony Xperia.

We also talk about complexity when managing products or services with high added value for consumers, such as marketplaces, a category whose dynamics have intensified in recent years. A Swedish real estate ad portal differentiated itself through PR from its increasingly aggressive competition, analyzing the data that its clients generated by publishing or searching for certain properties. This is how it turned out House of Clicks, a house built solely on the basis of these consumer preferences expressed through the data they generated on the site, interacting with the properties listed there.

Other brands choose complex communication themes in order to affirm their values as memorably as possible. Inspired by the honeymoon — manifesto spent in a bed in room 702 of the Hilton Hotel Amsterdam by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the Hilton brand launched “Room 702"— a campaign about finding balance in an ideologically fractured world.

Complex can also be the context in which a brand has to communicate — an agglomeration of messages that compete for the attention of the consumer, sometimes with unbalanced resources. In such situations, one of the options is to, through communication, build a broader cultural change than the limits of the category to which the brand belongs. Mucinex, an OTC that treats cold symptoms, has developed a campaigningby which he awarded himself the Monday after the Super Bowl gala, in which, it is known, brands compete in expensive and unique advertising spots and productions. A hitherto unexplored insight — that the day after the gala people were absent from the office citing a cold — was turned into a brand campaign that later became an entire PR communication platform for Mucinex.

The future does not await us with simpler things, but on the contrary, with more and more complex challenges. So write a PR brief to explore possible and valuable solutions for the brands you manage.

The Xperia Aquatech Store, the first underwater showroom in the world to demonstrate the water resistance of the new Sony Xperia

Room 702 Amsterdam, complex communication themes help brands affirm their values in a memorable way

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