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

A week in the life of a Target PR intern

No matter what you’re taught at university in terms of theory, practice and knowledge, I believe you don’t really start learning until you’re in a working environment and gaining hands-on experience - something I have always been eager to do. When I was offered the chance to work with Target, it was something I was very much looking forward to.

Now, coming to the end of my work experience placement with Target, I reflect on my week.

Arriving on Tuesday, I was filled with pre-placement nerves. Still in my first year studying Public Relations and Communications at Leeds Metropolitan University, I really didn’t know what to expect. But, there was no reason for me to have been worried. From the moment I arrived I was made to feel very welcome. After meeting everybody and having a tour of the office, it was straight into work.

Working on behalf of a number of clients including Specsavers, Cotswold Outdoor and ADEY, my week has consisted of a variety of tasks. These included checking newspapers for relevant articles, drafting press releases, conducting research, and helping to create a newsletter. I also sat in a discussion for a campaign which I found very interesting as I was able to see the thought process and different ideas bounce off one another in the office.

Throughout the week, I have been able to gain insight into the PR industry and how a PR agency operates. I feel that the team at Target has given me valuable experience and feedback which I will use constructively to help me both within my studies and in the future.

After an enjoyable week, I am very grateful to have been given this opportunity and I would love to come back to such a lovely agency.

A huge thank you to everyone at Target!

Jess Collier
PR student

Ecobuild 2013: reflections

There can be no disputing the relevance of ‘energy efficiency’ as a theme central to the construction industry at large.

But as we pursue the business of designing, producing and selling products, materials, systems and technologies that will deliver energy efficiency, do we sometimes get lost in the detail – how often do we pause for reflection?

Is the Green Deal creating or meeting market demand?

There’s a lot riding on the success of the Green Deal. But in the melee of voices explaining, questioning, lambasting and championing, are we confusing the market driver with the vehicle for delivery?

Are we trying to sell a clever new treatment for an ailment that the patient hasn’t yet asked their trusted GP about (they just moan every time they get a twinge), by telling them that the clever new treatment may be really expensive but we can help them to finance it?

In an interesting panel discussion on the opening day of Ecobuild, Rt Hon Ed Davey MP, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, was predictably buoyant about the first few months since the Green Deal’s birth. He spoke about the importance of the ‘energy efficiency market’, not just within the UK marketplace but also as an export market. ‘Green growth’ already accounts for 136,000 jobs in energy efficiency, with a forecast/ambition that this could grow by 5% per year. Broadly, Davey saw the scope for Green Deal to create a market.

Paul King, Chief Executive of the UK Green Building Council (UK-GBC), followed Ed Davey on stage with a positive but more measured tone: ‘Green Deal is not a panacea, it is a finance mechanism’. He spoke about the need for competition, welcoming Nationwide’s alternative funding product for energy efficiency retro-fit projects, and called on the government to develop ‘incentives for the many, not just the few.’ In essence, King presented Green Deal as an opportunity to meet a need, solve a problem, satisfy a market.

As I see it, energy efficiency is a market driver and Green Deal is a vehicle for delivery.

It’s natural that much of our time in recent months has been spent addressing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of what the Green Deal mechanism is, how it works, what’s included, what it will cost, how it will be assessed, and what role each part of the industry will play.

So, Green Deal is here, we’re ready. What next?

The persuasive power of communities

Both Paul King and Ed Davey passionately identified the need for industry to work together with each other, and with government, to deliver Green Deal successfully, but Richard McCarthy, Executive Director of Capita Symonds, struck a real chord when he spoke of ‘neighbourhood’ delivery. He made the point that not enough people understand Green Deal at the moment, and questioned how we could move from focusing on individuals towards neighbourhoods who can support, influence and encourage each other to take action. In doing so, McCarthy brought the customer back into the discussion.

‘Neighbourhoods’ speak of people like us, people we know and trust. They embrace our local tradesmen and the small businesses that are part of our communities; the micro-businesses and installers who will be central to delivering Green Deal. Thinking in terms of neighbourhoods could allow us to bring the customer in closer synergy with those able to meet their energy efficiency needs.

Customer communications

To return to my simplistic health analogy, we’ve developed a complex but effective range of treatments, understood that our ‘patient’ is feeling pain that these treatments can relieve, identified the obstacle of cost and invented a solution. But where’s the trusted family doctor in this scenario? Where’s the mum that says, come on love, time to act? The mate down the pub that tells you his experience and persuades you to take action?

Our challenge is to tune into the needs of customers, understand what energy efficiency means for them, their motivators and drivers, their ‘pain threshold’ and to be ready with the solutions.

The industry has been preparing for Green Deal; preparing to meet market demand for energy efficiency in our homes. We’re ready to go, but are our customers? Are we talking their language, or ours?

Communications will be the next big step in making Green Deal successful, but we should be cautious about focusing too hard on ‘selling’ the Green Deal product, and instead concentrate on helping customers to recognise the remedies we offer for their energy efficiency ailments.

Local installers, contractors and heating engineers are well placed to deliver these messages with trust and credibility, which means that the industry must make a mission of engaging more thoroughly with this key group.

Sarah Bryars
Chief Executive

“The role of imagery has always been central to PR”

That line comes from the recent rising power of images article on PRWeek.com and those ten little words have given me much food for thought over the past few days.

It’s safe to say that images have had a close relationship with many communication disciplines over the years: not just PR, but marketing and advertising too; semiotics has always played an important role in influencing public opinion and reinforcing brand recognition.

In fact, here’s a quick pop quiz to reinforce that point. Take a look at the following images – I’d eat my hat if you didn’t get all of them correct.

What’s more, with the advent of social media, the bond between images and public relations has grown even stronger. It began with Facebook and Twitter as the sharing sites of choice, but as consumers’ need for simplicity has expanded, so has the number of platforms available with Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest fast becoming big contenders in the ‘content is king’ boxing-ring.

But “what does this mean for PR practitioners?” I hear you say. It means now is the time to become even savvier when spreading the word - or sharing the picture. We’ve all heard about the rise of the citizen journalist, but what about the rise of the citizen paparazzo? According to The Daily Telegraph Picture Editor, Matthew Fearn, “Ten years ago, The Daily Telegraph received about 5,000 images a day. Now, it can receive up to 50,000 on a busy day”.

This speaks volumes about the public’s need to interact and be a part of the news stories that are generated on a daily basis. PR practitioners need to embrace this and realise the benefits of having an even bigger capability than before to spread awareness about a particular brand or product.

This is something that we at Target PR have taken on board and used as a PR tactic for our client Specsavers in a competition called ‘Life Thru the Lens’. The competition, which has been running for many years, sees both print and online newspapers across the country teaming up with Specsavers to invite members of the public to capture the essence of their hometown - whether it’s the sun shining on a local landmark or simply capturing the local hustle and bustle – entries continue to flood in year on year, with a host of prizes up for grabs for the cream of the crop.

So, as you can see, there is huge room for added authenticity by engaging the public, but the onus is on PR practitioners to provide the credibility while ensuring imagery remains the focal point of this marvellous mix.

Zainab Rahman

Account Executive

P.S. Logo answers: L-R Reebok, Nike, BMW and Levis. I hope I don’t have to eat my hat!