PR and branding in a demassified scenario

Last week I wrote about the brand and PR. Today I would like to continue on the same and go a little more in depth.

Recently I saw a headline in this newspaper which read ‘Making a brand relevant, the Philip Kotler way’. I was struck by the word relevance as this is an important aspect when looking at PR and branding too. A local radio station has a tagline for its news segment, which says ‘news that is relevant’. A rather daring statement I would say for this day and age when everyone is concentrating mostly on the swiftness in delivering news and project themselves as being the first or the latest. This description goes completely against the speed aspect.

I made a quick call to the guy who was handling this news and asked him the yardstick he uses to judge – i.e. how he frames his news to be relevant. He said that it was all about perception – they knew their target audience which was age 30+ and with that guideline, they sift through the information that flows in and make a quick call on what they think would be relevant to their audience.

From a purely news point of view, this method could raise some eyebrows as to the objectivity of the journalism practiced – i.e. since journalists as a rule are expected to have a pluralistic approach to news coverage. But this radio news was not run by a traditional news guy and he had thrown all caution to the winds when it came to journalistic objectivity.

Is this a bad thing?

A couple of years ago I would have said that this was the desecration of the holy grail of news. But today I see it differently – because, in a way, journalists too use a frame when dealing with a story. This means there are bits and pieces of the whole story which are dropped out, so why not use another frame to select stories that one could use or not use?

Achieving brand relevance is a strategic task.

The holy grail of strategic brand management is carving out a niche in the marketplace and achieving brand differentiation; and doing news that is ‘relevant’ is also important in today’s market place, where more and more radio stations are targeting and creating their own audience space.

Brand relevance in this case is how this particular news caters to the need for their audience; it is not about mass appeal. Thirty years ago, when Alvin Toffler wrote the book ‘The Third Wave,’ which was tagged ‘the controversial new perspective on tomorrow from the author of Future Shock,’ he predicted the demassification of media.

This was a time when I had started out as a journalist in a newspaper which had not even gone into offset printing. Back then they used a printing method which was called a hot lead press; where they injected molten type metal into a mold that had the shape of one or more glyphs. The resulting sorts and slugs are later used to press ink onto paper.

 This was long before the era of the internet.

It was as long ago as this that Toffler predicted the demassification of the media, which he said would happen in the future; i.e. instead of masses of people receiving the same message, smaller and smaller groups will receive messages that are unique to them. He was talking about consensus of the mass mind being shattered and a new format re-emerging. Today this reformatted information stream is being branded as relevant news to targeted audiences.

Given this, PR agencies too need to understand the absolute necessity of talking to smaller and smaller audiences and creating formulas that would create content for more niche groups – which means large circulation figures or the number of eyeballs may really not be the answer. What is more important is how relevant the news is to the audience one wants to reach.

(The writer, a PR consultant and head of Media360, was previously a mainstream journalist in print and electronic media. He also edits a new media website.)