Portfolio: Press Relations

There’s nothing like publicity, good publicity, to sell your services — customer success stories, industry thought pieces, product reviews. You can’t get too much of this stuff.

When public relations activities are integrated into your total marketing program the result is consistency of messaging and financial advantages that come from re-use of articles and graphics. In this example, Honeywell was a well-respected and very satisfied user of a technology offering. The client, a small software company, wanted to use this customer success story to gain maximum publicity for itself while benefiting Honeywell at the same time.

We worked with the software company’s management to define quantitative business results that were exciting to the audience, and coached Honeywell spokespeople to deliver consistent messages reflecting Honeywell’s leadership position in the new technology the software company offered.

We targeted publications, and industry analysts were identified and approached. The result was a year-long series of publicity events ranging from customer presentations at Gartner Group and Yankee Group national conferences to stories in many industry publications, to a detailed and very favorable article about Honeywell’s excellence in project management by an independent analyst firm.

The software company reaped press releases, article reprints, and speaking engagements from this campaign, while helping Honeywell gain national recognition for its early and successful adoption of new technology.

With a dream customer like Honeywell — well-respected name in the industry, articulate executives, solid business results — you can build an entire campaign. That’s PR. But for a small company to proactively identify its prospective showcase customer, nurture that company’s business success, and then develop a publicity campaign to meet both its own and its customer’s business goals — that’s marketing at its finest.