I could relate to Margie Zable Fisher’s recent blog, “The Top Ten Reasons Why PR Doesn’t Work”. Number 2 on her list is “The scope of work is not detailed and agreed upon by both parties.” We are often caught in this chicken or the egg syndrome when ramping up a new PR client. Companies won’t hire PR firms without knowing the cost of their services. Yet, how can you estimate costs before taking on an account? This would be like telling a builder to estimate the cost of designing a skyscraper without telling him the size, type of building or even where it will be located (OK, so maybe not exactly like it, but you get my point.)

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The hot talk around the water cooler this week was, of course, the outcome of season seven of American Idol. For those of you with better TV shows to watch, the winner was David Cook, a bartender cum rock-n-roll star from Missouri. In my opinion, the best, most marketable contestant won.

But this blog isn’t about why anyone should have won or lost. It’s about how American Idol’s audience demographic has shifted remarkably since the first season, and how producers have adapted to create an enduring brand.

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As if any strategic marketer needed another reason for creating and maintaining a positive brand image, here’s a true story:

An industrial manufacturer far upstream recently found itself making headlines, but it had nothing to do with its PR campaign.  A former employee was arrested for a murder committed in 1982, more than 20 years before he had been hired by the manufacturer. The man had only been employed for about a year and had not worked for the company in several. (In fact, the facility where he had worked had been closed down for more than a year.) When arrested, the accused was four states away, where he had been living and working for at least the last 24 months.

This tenuous association nonetheless put the company in newspaper headlines and articles that then ended up online. Fortunately, a good brand image helped deflect the sudden peak in negative media mentions and the issue slipped into the noise of the world’s nonstop-media machine.

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Before the internet, marketing would “fish” for new customers much like deep sea fishing. Get out to the deep water, get the right bait for the fish you’re trying to catch set your line out and wait. You feel the rod jerk, set the hook and reel em’ in. As my grandfather would say, through billows of cigar smoke as I forlornly watched my still rod on his boat anchored off some shoal in Atlantic waters… “you need to have patience”.

The internet has now changed the game of fishing for customers from deep sea fishing to fly fishing in a mountain stream for willey cutthroat trout.

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