PR agencies and corporate communications may focus on the newness of a product or service when they launch a campaign, when they should instead be focusing on a spokesperson for the brand. The spokesperson is able to give the brand a face and a voice; and the success of a PR campaign will often depend on the efficiency of the spokesperson.

Who should you choose as the voice of your brand?

The CEO, in most cases, is responsible for making or breaking a brand.

• In the technology industry it would help to have a famous CEO.  Bill Gates is as famous as Microsoft itself and if we look at the South African market, Hirsch’s is a great example.  Allan Hirsch features in many ads himself but in the family run business, Lucy, the darling daughter, features predominantly as the spokesperson for the brand.
• SA celebrity, Nataniël, endorses supermarket chain Checkers, which is an example of the retail industry.  Nataniël owns the Kaalkop brand and endorses Checkers boerewors (sausage for non-South Africans), Turducken and sosaties (kebabs).  Although there is a close relationship between Nataniël and the Checkers products, not all product relations have successfully increased through this relationship.  Nataniël saw a drop in Kaalkop sales countrywide after Checkers’ chicken sosaties famously went rotten.  The focus was all on Nataniël and his relationship with the brand and not much was mentioned about the sosaties that were left in a car for over two days before they were consumed.
• The slow food industry is influenced by the same principles.  To gain exposure in the media, one cannot open a fine dining restaurant without having a well-known chef.  If the media does not talk about you, how would a customer know you have a celebrity chef? Reuben’s would merely be a name of a restaurant if Reuben himself was not a famous chef.  Good publicity, and not advertising, is key to these high-end restaurants.  Once a restaurant becomes established, customers will start talking and good old fashioned word of mouth will take care of the rest.

Many branding success stories in history are also PR success stories.

• Richard Branson, founder and CEO of Virgin, has been and still is the spokesperson of the airline today.
• Oprah Winfrey started out with a barely watched early morning talk show.  In almost no time at all she had the most successful and most watched show in Chicago.  It was officially named after her and went to become a national and international phenomenon.  Her forever evolving brand has blossomed into her OWN television network: the Oprah Winfrey Network.
• Zumba Fitness started out as VHS videos made in a garage, and is now distributed to over 12 million fitness instructors around the world.  The brand is still being nursed by its founder Alberto Perez. Beto, as he is known, still features on every single DVD that gets sent out.
• The fashion industry has endless examples of the necessity celebrity designer.  Coco Chanel, responsible for the little black dress, is the only fashion designer to be named in the Time 100:  The Most Important People of the Century.  She never attended a fashion school and learnt to sew from nuns.

To give your brand a competitive edge it is important to have a public presence and you are not going to achieve that with a marketing programme alone.  You will have to add a personal touch through PR.  You will need articles in industry magazines and you will need the favour of journalists.

The spokesperson should be the one most capable of dealing with the media.  Not all CEOs can do this, in which case you will have to select the best suitable spokesperson carefully.

The media cannot interview a piece of Nando’s Chicken, a Mercedes or an Apple Mac.  They can only interview a real life person.   Products do not have the ability to create publicity but people through the products do.

Source:  The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR – Al Ries and Laura Ries

This guest post was written by Eleanor van Niekerk on behalf of a specialist PR company based in South Africa. Eleanor is a freelance writer based in Cape Town, South Africa.