King of Camden awards nominates the greatest, the best shops, venues, businesses and market stalls in Camden Town. The even is runned by Wedge and Camden Town Unlimited. This year the winners list looked liked that:
Was reading last week's PR Week and find out about the most successful PR campaign. Team Give Blood campaign achieved impressive results over the busy period this summer. Therefore, it is more impressive because it had to compete with Olympics buzz and to attract more attention than Olympic Games itself.
The objectives were to recruit, reactivate and remind donors to donate before the Olympics. Also, to encourage people with a rare blood type to donate and to maintain media interest.
One of the reasons why campaign was successful is creativity. To get media coverage and show who they are, images of eight blood donors were published. People bodies were painted with circulatory system and shot in iconic London locations. Moreover, they used national and regional TV and radio to announce about the campaign. Celebrity endorsement and social media were very useful tools to spread the word about the campaign. For instance, the images were sent to national and online media, so the celebrities were asked to tweet to their followers. All news and updates were posted on Facebook and Twitter as well as on blood.co.uk's website.
The results were shocking:
958 pieces of mainstream media coverage
140 broadcast items including BBC Breakfast and Sky News
National coverage included The Sun, Daily Mail, Sunday Mirror and The Guardian.
Calls to NHSBT increased by 29%
received more than 10,000 mentions on social media
NHSBT hit its 30% stock build target in time for the Olympics
In my point of view, all the campaigns are successful and can stand out of the crowd, then they are creative and know how to attract as much attention as they can. Team Give Blood campaign's images were so original and unique that it definitely wake peoples' curiosity.
Marks and Spencer, the UK's biggest clothing retailer, has reported an
almost 10% fall in profits for the first half of this year.
Womens' clothing is the biggest issue to deal with. The matter is that M&S clothing is not the priority for women as there are so many competitors in a high street.
Chief executive, Marc Bolland, blamed the squeeze on shoppers incomes and unstable trading caused by the poor spring and early summer weather. Also, Queen's Jubilee and London Olympics 2012 helped to raise the country's economy but not the higher sales.
Back in 2008 Marks & Spencer was the first retailer which made more than 1 billion pounds in profit. At the moment the company is struggling to make more than 700 million pounds and miss their target. Once again, the biggest issue is the competition in the high street. In contrast, PRIMARK is showing that retail is not that hard. Producing young and fun fashion, the company is the top retailer in the high street with more than 1 billion profit.
In addition to this, M&S thinking about their strategies how to make things work better. On of the ways is to improve the stores. To drag womens' attention they are planning to improve stores by making more attractive and more interesting displays. Also, improve on-line services and expand the business overseas. What is more, to increase womens' lingerie sales, M&S hired Victoria's Secrets model, Janie Schaffer. She will be a new director of lingerie and beauty, replacing Frances Russell. Nevertheless, new staff is hiring like former Debenhams and Jaeger boss Belinda Earl as a style director. It is expected that she will be able to make a change and raise the sales comparing with Primark and Next. Lastly, like every year new Christmas adverts will be revealed and that should attract loads of attention from women.
To save M&S name as qualify brand will not be easy. But as Bolland saying they need more time to improve their store because new team needs to do their work properly. The big changes might be seen only next July. Hopefully, all the strategies will be done and M&S will come back to his position.
Evening Standard released a story about ''yummy mummies" who are the main problem why so many cafes are closing down.
It comes up the matter of posh mummies demands to have more places to sit down with a cup of coffee and have a nice chat on Sunday afternoon. But the story made a enormous switch which comes about rent money and greedy landlords. So who's fault is that so many businesses cannot afford to stay near Primrose Hill?
Apparently, Trojka, one of the oldest and greatest Russian tea rooms, closed down a couple days ago because of 70 per cent increase in the cost of a new lease. There is nothing about " yummy mummies", it is about landlords who are trying to get the advantage of economy and get as many benefits as they can.
I live in Camden area myself and understand how the place change into a massive Starbucks empire. All over the place there are so many cafes and just couple bars or pubs. The nicest cafes are closing down because of high rent and become a very posh people meeting point. Like Amit Jain, who runs the long-established Shepherd’s cafe, estimates that one in three businesses on the street is now selling food and drink. He said: “I don’t think people realise that soon Primrose village will be cafe village.
In my opinion, the problem is the demand of people who are living near Primrose hill. If there are so many wealth people around then obviously the price of rent will go up and landlords will take as an advantage.
Big and foolish demands taking place but do people think about others? Well, I guess no.
One of the most touching campaign I ever found. It is all about Remembrance day to commemorate those who lost their lives at war.
In 2010, The Royal British Legion wanted to amplify messaging around the work it does
supporting the Iraq and Afghan generation of serving and ex-service
troops and their families. The biggest aim was to reach younger audiences via modern media and receive as much support as they can.
The strategy was set by the Burson-Marsteller (B-M) which is leading global PR and communication firm. They decided to make a completely silent track entitled “2 Minute Silence” and
releasing it into the UK music charts along with a celebrity-packed
“music” video for Remembrance Sunday 2010.
Burson-Marsteller (B-M) campaign targeted young generation via social media: creating Facebook page, Twitter account and having "2 minute silence" on the radio. It was very successful as it reach youth centers, young communities. The campaign achieved high interest of young bloggers which were sharing the fantastic campaign all over the world.
At the end the great results were achieved:
More than 20 leading celebrities secured to appear pro bono
More than 260 pieces of media coverage
More than 35,000 Facebook likes in three weeks
More than 200,000 views of video trailer on YouTube
More than 16 million reached through celebrity social media support
The video is really touching and emotional as there is no sound accept of background noises. It catches the attention and all the people shown in the video shows how many people support the Royal British Legion. That two minutes of silence make to respect, remember and to think about those who gave up their lives in the war.
All PR practitioners have to follow rules and restrictions about their professionalism. I was reading the Guardian article about chef Gordon Ramsay and his published personal information which was not supposed to be to public.
According to Guardian the information was sold by Phil Hall to Daily mail and had shocking results. In a court spokesman said that Hall "absolutely" did not know the provenance of the emails but the harm was done so there are no excuses.
He made a public apology and agreed with donation to Ramsay's charity. But even the apology doesn't change the fact that PR man did not follow the rules and did not care about his client's confidentiality.
Next time he has to read the rules again!
100 Club is famous for its historical heritage because it has seen performances from acts as diverse as The Sex Pistols, Muddy Waters, Hugh Masekela, Lee Konitz, Oasis, Lonnie Donnegan, Jimmy McGriff and Travis to The Clash,The White Stripes, Yank Lawson, Sinead O'Conner, Nico, Chris Barber and Beverly Knight.
Unfortunately, the venue certainly needed help. According to Guardian. co.uk, the venue Amid rising costs, higher rent and lower revenues, the venue that helped launch acts such as the Sex Pistols was on the verge of closure. I think that government has to support such venues which are important to cultural life and music history. Especially for London, it will have better image in young peoples' eyes and more people will trust the government.
The funny fact is that punk club was saved by Converse!!! Absolutely different attitude and understanding about music. But 100 Club was really struggling so they got a great deal and the music venue was saved and not changes.
Still there are some questions about changing the name and becoming independent. But as Horton said: "They were the first people to come and see me and ask if they could do anything to help ... The fact that the club will remain independent [is what] appeals to them so much."
He hopes that the club is going to be opened another 68 years.
In the beginning of my course I had a lecture about Radio 1 and the way they work by choosing which tracks to play. We got the task to choose some song from A, B and C list and to share with others.
A list songs are the most popular and are played very usually. B are on the radio not so often maybe for a spacial day or for certain period of time. And C list songs are not popular at all, so they have a very little chance to be played.
Social Media Week is one of the world's most unique global platforms, offering a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries.
In just under three years, Social Media Week has expanded to 21 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Sao Paulo, Rio De Janeiro, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Istanbul, London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Glasgow, Berlin, Moscow, Beirut and Hong Kong. Starting in 2012, SMW is adding Tokyo, Singapore, DC and Miami.
Annually, SMW attracts more than 60,000 attendees across thousands of individually organized events, with half a million connecting to the conference on-line and through mobile.
One of the events in London was about social videos which were the most popular on the web. During the event people could enjoy free drinks and vote for the best one and share their opinions about what they saw.
The idea about making a film from the most popular videos brought a great success and received many positive feedbacks.
One of the videos was Carlsberg advert called "The date". It was one of the best adverts I have ever seen. Rude and agressive bikers really scared off people and it was not so comfortable environment for lovely couples. The challenge was not to get confused and scared of bikers and still find the seats in the middle of the audience. And those who did it received massive applauds and cheers from all bikers. The adverts touches some key point. Firstly, the image of bikers. They are the same humans but because of their bad reputation and image people are afraid to get in touch with them.
The Carlsberg stunt below is a good example of low-risk, high-reward guerrilla marketing. Carlsberg introduced its new strap-line at the beginning of the year to promote itself as a beer that stands for tradition, quality, great taste and right choices. This idea has been a fantastic success and with this video they made really good choice.
London impatiently waiting for a big event and started preparing for it with new campaigns and surprises for Londoners. It's couple of months left but Tfl already started to prepare. Recently they released its Underground Olympic Legends Map, which has swapped out the names of London's 361 tube stations and replaced them with the names of famous Olympic competitors. It was created by sports journalists, Alex Trickett and David Brooks. They mentioned that they faced a few misunderstandings and conflicts about the names but they are happy what they done.
The big surprise is that one of the stations has one of the most famous basketball player's name from Lithuania.Arvydas Sabonis was the best basketball player in Lithuania as well as in United States.
So if some people will try to analyze the map they will relate this to my country and more people will get to know about it.
Of course, sports fans know that Lithuania is good at basketball, as it is one of the best team in Europe. But this small campaign will help to promote the country.
Each brand and company has their good or bad images in public eye as well as set identity and built reputation. To begin with, corporate image means what customers think about the brand. Image is formed from products and services, social responsibility, communications and also the environment of the company. If the company’s offices look nice and adorable the customer feels more confident, comfortable and it helps to make a decision. Besides good quality products can guarantee customer’s loyalty and good feedback. Also, good image helps to deal with customer demands, increase sales and go over the crisis period. In addition, to build a good image is very hard without public relations. Public relations take a responsibility of all sectors because all sectors taking part in communication with customers. For instance, if the company launch a new product PR role is introduce it to target audiences and build an opinion about it. Basically, whatever the company is doing public relations help to communicate with customers and build the right image.
The other part is about corporate identity which means how the company sees themselves. It is about identifying who they are, what they do and how they are doing it. It also includes how they represent themselves, using logos, colours and uniforms as well. Besides, identity means what kind of values and beliefs the company wants to show and share. So if the company send the right messages about their personality by using PR it helps to create the right image and reputation.
Talking about reputation according to CIPR definition PR is all about reputation, building and maintaining goodwill and mutual understanding. So PR role in the company is to build better reputation and build transparent relationship between customers and the company. Unfortunately, PR is not that powerful. The company can lose a good reputation very easily and PR has to deal with it.
For example, o.b. is a really big brand and it had good reputation and image about its products. Unfortunately, the company received many complaints about discontinued popular Ultra item. They received some threats about destroying their reputation and it will damage it a lot. So o.b. came up with a unique idea how to apologise by making a PR campaign “Triple Sorry”. The campaign included a music video where every woman can use their name and it seems that the singer is singing for them personally. More than 100 000 women received an email which led them to their own music video. It received a really great success and the reputation was not damaged that much. PR worked on crisis management and achieved good results, more than 3 million hits only in one weekend.
As the example shows PR is very valuable for a company, to deal with crisis and make two way communications. Even PR can be affected by factors like history, environmental and sector issues it is powerful tool to use. Corporate identity, corporate image and reputation are all related and PR taking responsibility to create it, change and manage the whole process.
Society means group of people having the same point of view about an issue. So it can be related to finance, environment, politics and ethics. PR role in society means community involvement in solving issues. That means sponsorship, volunteering, hospitality and donations. Also it is about corporate social responsibility by company to the community. Corporate social responsibility means try to achieve success in ways that community will be involved and any of their values will not be disrespected. As I mentioned it includes issues about business, ethics, human rights and environment.
For example, Sainsbury’s, one of the biggest supermarkets in UK, showed their responsibility of the society by setting up the partnership with South Camden Community School (2011). Their aim was to develop leadership behaviours and to find better ways of working for the leaderships. They were educating and sharing ideas with six-formers about retailing and leadership. Some of school graduates were helping other students to get involved in community’s activities. Sainsbury’s team were participating in school’s careers day sharing their experiences and knowledge about wide range of job opportunities in retail industry. The results of Sainsbury’s involvement in community were incredibly amazing. The school teachers said that working with Sainsbury’s team was very beneficial to school community. It helped in organisational development, staff training and primary-secondary school transition as well as individual mentoring and work experience for students - has been extremely effectively targeted.
This example showed that the school community gave only positive feedback about Sainsbury’s participation. They received loads of valuable information and get some self-confidence and knowledge about leadership and retail industry. What is more, Sainsbury’s build their image and showed that they care about students and new opportunities for them. This campaign helped Sainsbury’s to save their reputation and attract new customers.
Coca-Cola is known as one of the oldest brands in the world. This is how their logo changed over 125 years of brands history.
The first logo looked like simple and plain but still highlight two important little words were added to the tail of the first ‘C’.
Later the company decided to try new design with extra swirly script. Unfortunately, it didn't show the real spirit of Coca-Cola, so this logo was only for one year, then it came back to an old one.
Years after years, they kept the first design, just improving the style and colors. So in 1969 the Arden Square logo was unveiled to the world. In this red box, the familiar Coca‑Cola script was underlined with the iconic white ‘wave’ known as the ‘Dynamic Ribbon Device’, which is still used to this day.
Still keeping the "C" tails and magic white "wave" they decided to make it more real and more attractive with including little yellow wave and bubbles.
But after such changes and different designs lastly Coca-Cola logo stays simple and classic.
Nowadays marketing is completely different than it was before. The main reasons of changes are media development, bigger budget to all the campaigns, the influence of the environment and different attitude to customer. All these changes led to development of companies using marketing communications activities which include advertising, sales promotion, public relations and personal selling, to provide better services, attract and engage new customers.
Definitions can help to identify the difference in the first place.
According to UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) marketing is “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements profitably”. It means that if marketers want their business to be successful they need to build good reputation of their company and to build good relationships with their customers. In addition to this, marketers are using PR practitioners to help them to deal with their publics. The reason why they using PR is because firstly the company needs to gain good reputation to get more customers. So as UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations definition of PR is: “Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics”.
In order to this, public practitioners are very important to marketing because it helps to build good relationships between company and its publics, and to maintain good reputation.
Marketers view to PR
As Ralph Tench (2009) showed the chart about how starting, growing and mature organisations are using PR. For example, organisation which starting the new business is using PR for face – to – face communications, to meet new people, attract different audiences. Also, they are trying to show what kind of product they are selling and what kind of services they provide. Basically, PR “is undertaken as marketing duties” because it is used to write press releases, run the conferences, use social media to show the product and keep updating the news and information on company’s website. So in the beginning of organization’s development PR plays only an introducing role. In addition to this, for the growing stage PR’s role is changing because the organisation meets more challenges and its objectives are a bit different. In the growth PR I orientated not only in marketing communications but also in internal communication. It means that before dealing with other audiences organisation needs to have good relationship with their employees, because they are the public which knows the best what is happening inside the company. Besides, it is very important to build good relationships between employees too because team working provides more effective results. The third part of chart is about maturity period of the organisation and as well they view PR in different perspective. Organisation needs more than only PR consultancy, they give more power to PR practitioner because as a mature organisation they need to keep interested loyal customers and attract more publics. PR department is responsible for wider range of activities like charity giving, inform shareholders, be ready how to manage crisis and to show more interest in their publics.
PR practitioners' view to PR
To begin with, public relations is about two – way communication between an organization and its publics. It focuses on organizational actions and process how to provide that information to different publics. On the other hand, there is a difference between marketing and PR because Jacquie L’Etang (2008), claimed that public is not “’customer care” or simply “promotion”” or being likeable or not, it is about analysing the problem and effects to an organization and honestly provide the right information. PR practitioners view PR like argument and case – making industry which requires all ways of communication and critical understanding about the issues. The issues might contain many different spheres like environmental, organizational, local, national or international, so PR practitioners’ job is to analyse, evaluate and solve the problem through communicating with different publics. Publics are also different, so PR needs to evaluate problem from different perspectives like culture, economic stability and interests. Basically, PR is presenting not only organizational issues, but also technological, economic changes. Also give the information about society problems and governmental aims. Besides, to announce any issues to the publics which might affect publics’ motivation, deal with public complaints, and listen what people want. So the biggest difference between marketers and PR practitioners’ point of view to PR is that PR is taking care for the whole picture, the main issues which includes not only organization. It looks for long – term communication and is non - profit, which will help to improve the relationship between publics and organization or issue and maintain goodwill. While marketers need communication with their customers for increasing sales and promote the product to keep the brand on top.
King of Camden awards nominates the greatest, the best shops, venues, businesses and market stalls in Camden Town. The even is runned by Wedge and Camden Town Unlimited. This year the winners list looked liked that:
Evening Standard released a story about ''yummy mummies" who are the main problem why so many cafes are closing down.
One of the most touching campaign I ever found. It is all about Remembrance day to commemorate those who lost their lives at war. 
For example, Sainsbury’s, one of the biggest supermarkets in UK, showed their responsibility of the society by setting up the partnership with South Camden Community School (2011). Their aim was to develop leadership behaviours and to find better ways of working for the leaderships. They were educating and sharing ideas with six-formers about retailing and leadership. Some of school graduates were helping other students to get involved in community’s activities. Sainsbury’s team were participating in school’s careers day sharing their experiences and knowledge about wide range of job opportunities in retail industry. The results of Sainsbury’s involvement in community were incredibly amazing. The school teachers said that working with Sainsbury’s team was very beneficial to school community. It helped in organisational development, staff training and primary-secondary school transition as well as individual mentoring and work experience for students - has been extremely effectively targeted. 
