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Measuring PR PR'S BOTTOM LINE Managers are used to thinking of PR as a cost centre rather than a revenue generator, but the summer 1999 issue of The Public Relations Strategist found four examples where PR led
marketing. ·Gillette's PR campaign for its Mach 3 razor preceded the marketing campaign by several months. This gave the company time to cement the brand identity in the minds of key opinion leaders. By the time the
ads started, the Mach 3 had a 35 percent share of the US razor market. ·Proctor & Gamble needed PR more than marketing for Wow, a potato chip brand made with a controversial fat-free cooking oil called Olean. The
campaign talked about 25 years of testing and research, and $58 million worth of Wow sold in just two months in the US. ·Likewise, Pfizer wanted Viagra to be known as more than the punch-line of a million cheap jokes,
so it used PR ahead of marketing to emphasize the medical benefits of the drug. The jokes came anyway, of course, but so did the medical awareness, and by the time the consumer ads had begun, US consumers had bought
$250 million worth of Viagra. ·As discussed in an earlier Edge, Volkswagen stoked public anticipation when it revived the Beetle, using the Internet and car shows to slightly re-position the venerable brand. THE NEED TO MEASURE Managers want to see measurable results. However, PR people
often can't provide any numbers at all. As two recent Ottawa seminars prove, measurement is more than the barometer of your success; your success is impossible without measurement. After all, measurement is about
meeting objectives, and unless you've set objectives, you're not planning and you're probably adrift strategically in the first place. But if you measure where you are now, you have benchmarks against which you measure
the impact of your program. Instead of saying that your goal is to "educate staff about the strategic plan," you should be saying, "We want to double the percentage of staff who can name three of the
four elements of our strategic plan." And ideally, you should know why this result will make a difference. As Fraser Likely APR explained to a November 27 1998 CPRS workshop, measurement has become a permanent
fixture in such fields as human resources, and managers accustomed to ISO 9000 will expect communicators to think the same way. "The management team wants to see something that looks like a complete program, that
looks strategic and that ties into the goals of the organization." HOW MEASUREMENT GOES WRONG Too often, we find ourselves measuring activity instead of results. We count the number of news releases we send out, or maybe the number of column inches that these releases
generate in the media, but we rarely measure how this activity changes awareness, opinions, attitudes or behaviours. It's rarer still that we assign a dollar value to these changes. Unfortunately, this kind of
research requires time and money, two scarce commodities in any communications shop. Some of the latest techniques are decidedly expensive: in a Delphi study, you try to achieve consensus through multiple rounds of
polling; in deliberative polling, people get briefing books and spend time learning about an issue before reaching a conclusion. Moreover, measurement is complicated by the fact that publics aren't labs. In an open
system, it is impossible to tell if your communications actually produced the changes you've recorded. This is especially the case when you are influencing publics through many media at once. However, you can pick up
valuable information from even ad hoc measurements, many of which Angela Sinickas explained at an IABC workshop on December 18, 1998. SOME MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES While a focus group is an expensive way of getting the opinion of a statistically suspect group size, a well-designed
survey is an inexpensive way of getting a more valid idea of what more people are thinking. (Surveys have their own drawbacks, of course. It's hard to ensure that they are representative, they don't allow much
flexibility and some respondents will "game" their answers.) One survey you will want to do right away is a survey to find out which media your audiences use. With this in hand, you can draw a grid with your
audiences down one axis and the various media outlets along the other. If you know which audiences use which media, you can review those media to see how they carried your message. You can further ask people what they
remember from their exposure to those media. You can even do this for your in-house tools. What do people remember about a given newsletter article or speech? Did your message come through? Now you've identified
communication gaps. A MEASURABLE IMPACT Once you have this basic benchmarking information, you can build a more effective communications plan, and you'll have something to test against. As you expand this model, you can start testing behavioural and attitudinal change. If you can find ways of establishing cost savings or revenues as well, then you have the kind of planning that changes another set of behaviours and attitudes ... those of your boss!
Cornerstone is a writing and editing firm that uses marketing and PR principles to create "words you can build your business on."
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