I'm coming off Facebook

Reading an article titled: ‘Is Facebook really dead for young people?’ on prweek.com yesterday afternoon, reminded me of the many occasions I’ve heard chums declare ‘I’m coming off Facebook!’

And I must admit, when my own mother’s friend request popped up in my notifications, it somewhat tarnished its appeal for me.

Undeniably, Facebook is still the centre of the social media ecosystem – with its more than one billion users, who are responsible for 1.13 trillion "likes", 219 billion photos and 17 billion location check-ins (and counting).

But with the rise of image based social media - the likes of Snapchat, Instagram and Keek - it’s a subculture that is evidently more conducive to the U25s lifestyle. We like things to be sleek, smart, quick and visually pleasing to keep us hooked... as our attention spans are dimensioning by the second. Visual stimulus is nothing new; the age old saying “a picture is worth 1000 words” says it all.

When Hunter wellies launched a competition on Instagram it was a huge success, not just because of the overwhelming response, but it successfully started to pave the way for an engaged and connected Hunter wellie wearing community. Hunter could get a crystal clear picture (not metaphorical) into the where, when and what its consumer audience was doing: Priceless.

These platforms are far more compatible with the demands of all things mobile – who doesn’t have a camera on their phone?!

The PR industry is about keeping abreast with new developments and growing trends - finding creative ways to communicate and engage with our target audiences and the opinion formers. As far as I can see, with the increasing demand for all things to be mobile, the growth of visual social media just offers our industry more opportunities to communicate in creative and impactful ways.

As for Facebook, there’s no doubt that its future is safe for the short term, always developing ways to be more intrinsic, I’m sure Zuckerberg has something up his sleeve to keep Facebook at the forefront.

Alex Underwood
Account Executive

Buying into the high street

My nan’s right - the high street isn’t what it used to be.

Of course she’s not the only one to think this, with her opinion being shared, debated and echoed by retail experts, the media and general public as the boom of online sales and out-of-town shopping impacts on our traditional shopping destinations.

The demise of the likes of Woollies (am I showing my age now?), HMV and Jessops has left an often eerie gap on many a high street, and is a sight that we - the Target team – are all too familiar with as we visit towns as part of our work for Specsavers.

Fortunately, this rather sorry state hasn’t impacted on the largest privately owned opticians in the world. As we go to see the 140 stores spanning an area from Street in Somerset up to Spalding in Lincolnshire to discuss PR, we are comforted and encouraged by the bustling stores and busy staff. Here is a business that appears to be bucking the retail trend.

But it’s not plain sailing - there’s stiff competition from online, high street and supermarket offerings, and so the demands and challenges on individual stores are more prevalent than ever.

So how do they succeed?  Yes, it helps that the product demands a visit to store (if you want your specs professionally fitted), but securing sales and maintaining loyalty doesn’t happen automatically.  A vital element is engagement – engendering support with their local communities to enhance reputation.

PR helps to build these links, working with and supporting the local community, sharing positive news and offering insight and advice.  From arranging school visits, securing local sponsorship deals, fundraising for local causes or offering children high visibility vests, there’s a raft of tactics that will support your community relations.

It might not be rocket science, but is certainly a lesson that many other multi-site retailers could learn from and it’s right up their street!

Sam Kandiyali

Director

Leader of the pack

This week I’ve been thinking about what really makes a good leader in today’s dizzying speed of digital.
And that’s when it hit me – BAM!

Our client BAM is the UK’s leading student media sales agency and has been connecting brands with the student market for more than 15 years, with founder Tim Bodenham at the helm.

So what makes them so good? Well, the proof is in the pizza...

BAM carried out some research last year for its first BAM Freshers Report. Surveying more than 1,000 students at a selection of 20 university freshers’ fairs, the report gave voice to the students in attendance, while providing brands with a realistic indication of activities that this young audience welcomes. Now that’s what I call going the extra mile.

Survey said

Students rated dough doting Domino’s as the top commercial stall with the best freebies – a factor not to be underestimated, as an overwhelming 60% of students admitted it was the lure of freebies that attracted them to the fair and they hope to see a rise in attendance from food outlets at future fairs.

Through carrying out surveys to spill the student beans on what works, and continuously meeting with media suppliers to build new and existing business relationships, BAM always strives to ensure it remains ahead of the competition.

What’s more, despite the prevalence of social networking, BAM truly believes in the power of face-to-face marketing at university events because unlike other traditional marketing methods, it becomes part of the student experience, instead of interrupting it.

At Target, we work with BAM to communicate the company’s big and bold achievements, allowing brands to understand how to reap the rewards from a market that has an estimated spending power of more than £15.5 billion.

It’s certainly an exciting time for us to be working with a company that connects brands such as KitKat, Kelloggs and Cath Kidston with the student market. We’re sure most 18-24 year olds in higher education are also pretty pleased!

Zainab Rahman
Account Executive

Community relations

Gloucester Rugby CEO Stephen Vaughan, ADEY Managing Director Kelvin Stevens, Gloucester’s Mike Tindall
and ADEY Marketing Director Haimish Mead unveil the club’s new shirt at Kingsholm Stadium.

I think it would be fair to say that one of our clients has had a particularly good week: on Wednesday, ADEY Professional Heating Solutions was announced as the new primary sponsor of Gloucester Rugby Club.

At Target Towers, ourselves a Gloucestershire-based company, we were bursting with pride to see Mike Tindall holding the newly sponsored Cherry and White’s shirt aloft next to ADEY MD Kelvin Stevens and Marketing Director Haimish Mead. Yet what pleased me the most was to hear GRFC’s CEO Stephen Vaughan say that ADEY being a local business undoubtedly helped them to win the bid.

See, we should never underestimate the power of local relationships. They can bring big dividends.
Over the past couple of years particularly, we’ve been helping our clients to create and nurture community relationships on the ground, wherever they’re based. For one large retail client especially, local relationships are literally life or death.

‘Local’ has been a dirty word for far too long, killing off our newspapers and slowly strangling our high streets. However, as I read an article in the Nuneaton News about a group of retailers banding together with the local community to ‘save their town’, I realised I’d recently read a few similar stories in the local media of other towns.

So, maybe the tide is turning as many surviving ‘local’ newspapers report on ‘local’ campaigns by ‘local’ businesses trying to breathe new life into their ‘local’ towns.

I for one hope this sea of change continues all around the country. For us here at Target, I know it’s great to be a part of a local success story that’s reaching national audiences, from a garden shed to The Shed and beyond!

Rachel Meagher
Account Director

Time for a new perspective

The last couple of weeks have presented two blinding examples of the benefits to be gained by making time to attain new perspectives about our businesses.

Working with clients that are innovating and growing at a pace is very exciting. One such Target client is defying the challenging market trends experienced by so many parts of the UK’s heating industry to consolidate its market leading position, and achieve growth year on year.

Making a hugely ambitious marketing plan work in an orchestrated, coherent and effective manner requires a strong team – and a marketing director who understands the value of bringing the full strength of that team together to pause, share and create together.

We’re great collaborators at Target, so getting together with in-house departments, multi-disciplinary teams and partner agencies is second nature to us. Taking a day out to reflect on recent activity, market position, business objectives and to power up our imaginations to conceive of new solutions is invariably time well spent.

But it’s not just when developing award winning PR strategies for clients that we feel the benefit of making time to stop, stand back and view challenges from a different vantage point. It’s true of our own business development too.

I’m proud to be among a group of MDs and business owners to be taking our first steps towards a new type of Masters Degree, through a partnership between leadership development experts QuoLux and the renowned Lancaster University Management School (LUMS).

Having participated in an exceptional ten-month leadership and business development programme, called LEAD, the experience we’ve gained within our own businesses can now be formally assessed and awarded a Post Graduate Certificate in Professional Practice (Leadership Learning) – which we can build on subsequently to gain a Masters. To be honest, while writing for business is second nature to me, it’s been a long while since I faced the rigour of academic assessment.

Masters level learning is about being open, challenging, critical and reflective.  It’s about trying out new perspectives. That requires a bit of time, but the beauty of this unique programme is that it’s time spent on my business, not on abstractions or distractions.

In our busy lives, time, deadlines and demands seem to wield power over us. Far from ‘making time’ (which suggests at least some element of us calling the shots in this process of time creation), we are instead buffeted from pillar to post trying to keep up with time and its megalomaniac tendencies.

Making time to view your own business practice through new perspectives is a revelation, and a process that I can recommend.

Sarah Bryars
Chief Executive

Monkey business

I wasn’t expecting to learn about chimps at the last World Class Development Programme squad session I went to.  Speak to riders to glean PR opportunities and watch beautiful horses – yes, but not discuss primates.

And yet when I returned to the office the next day I was energised by what I’d learnt and quickly shared my chimp anecdotes with the rest of the team.  They thought I’d gone ape...

The discussion of chimps came up during the World Class sports psychiatry session, where athlete case studies including Ronnie O’Sullivan, Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton were used to discuss the theory of Steve Peter’s Chimp Paradox.  That is that the brain has a rational ‘human’ part and an emotional rash ‘chimp’ part (plus another part which stores all our information and experiences).

Managing the chimp, it appears, is key to success.  The riders discussed how their unruly chimps could impact on their competition results, with mine in particular seeming to run riot ahead of the dressage phase – to the extent that he seems to spur my horse’s chimp into devastating action  too (I’m not quite sure why I’ve referred to my chimp as a male...)

Sir Martin Sorrell has also taken note of Peter’s theory claiming that people in advertising could benefit from disengaging the emotional side of their brain and not being chimps.  But I’m not sure that PR professionals would benefit from quite such dramatic action.

Yes, while we don’t want our chimp to run riot to the detriment of our thought processes, presentations, internal communications or crisis handling (and ultimately the success of our businesses), we do still need to retain that emotive insight, which our chimps provide, as it’s so important in our communications industry.

Understanding our clients, target audiences and competitors requires humanity and emotional intelligence – and we need our chimps, albeit carefully under control, to do this.

Samantha Kandiyali
Director

11 years in power; one tremendous divide in opinion

It seems most appropriate to use that somewhat overused and infamous brand strapline to sum up the nation’s divided opinion of the late Margaret Thatcher – ‘you either love it or you hate it’. Not a fan of using such a strong word as hate, but her death has certainly conjured up reactions resembling the uproar she caused during her time in power.

I should really state at this point my first hand experience of Mrs Thatcher is hugely limited, having been born in the late 80s (I was a bambino of the John Major era). Therefore my musings are simply a view of the nation’s reaction. It’s great to see younger generations discuss, engage and debate politics, but rioting, jumping on the download bandwagon to ensure a certain song  commemorates her passing and publishing poorly formed tweets are pretty despicable acts and certainly something this twenty (something) year-old cringes at.

Throughout history there have been notoriously loved and hated public figures...Richard III, Robin Hood, Jeremy Clarkson, (Damien Hurst, Bansky, Tracey Emin, Germaine Greer, Jade Goody, Russell Brand, list could continue). The two things that make me sit on the fence about Margaret Thatcher, are firstly, she was a woman, our first lady Prime Minister; although I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a bra burning women’s libber, there is a great deal of respect to be had for someone who achieved such a historic landmark in a time when “equality in the work place” was far from common practice. Secondly, this iron lady served and stood as Britain’s PM for an impressive 11 years, winning three general elections. Talk about stating the obvious here, but to win a general election you have to be voted for.

You don’t receive the title the ‘Iron Lady’ for being a pussy cat, from my understanding Lady Thatcher knew what she wanted and indeed how she was going to get it, regardless of who may have been standing in her path, which is where the divide appears - those who fell fowl to the changes she implemented and those who believed the changes were for the greater good of the country. Perspective and experience is everything.

There will undoubtedly be conflicting views and opinions on any public figure that is charged with representing the interests of all of us, despite the way we vote. Tough choices will bring hardships, often to those least equipped to deal with it. But what is central at times when these tough decisions have to be made, is the buy in of trust. Trusting an individual in power - much like the reputation of a business – can take years to gain and build upon. However, all that hard work can come crumbling down in a split second – especially in today’s world, thanks to our ever evolving social media habits.

Like her or loath her, Margaret Thatcher left a legacy that changed Britain forever.

Alex Underwood

Account Executive