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	Phil's Blogservations Thursday, January 29, 2004 Posted by philgomes 12:38 PM The Empty Promise Syndrome The Empty Promise Syndrome PR uber-blogger Tom Murphy is the PR Manager at Cape Clear. He fields a lot of pitches from PR agencies who want his business. While sympathetic, he feels that a number of these pitches suffer from a fatal flaw: However, one bugbear I have with some of these pitches is the empty promise syndrome. With little or no knowledge of my business, many of these pitch e-mails promise business coverage, national coverage etc. There's this long-running idea in traditional PR circles that a PR program has failed unless you've achieved business or national press. That's a complete fallacy. Here's why: Agencies pursue business and national press — and clients push them toward it — for the sake of their respective egos, whether the company is really ready to make that step or not. Ask, "Does the business-press-reading audience really need to hear our story yet? Are we ready to tug that tiger's tail?" Trade media readers specify and qualify products. In most cases, they have strong purchasing authority. Right there, your PR program has the basics of ROI and can hardly be said to have "failed." Now, if the product in question carries a very high price tag, any PO gets kicked up to the executive suite and probably the CFO's office. That's when business press helps: If the prospect's corner offices haven't heard of your company, they may select a bigger or more established vendor, irrespective of your product's economic or technical merits. I heard one story that a big PR firm pitched one of the biggest software companies in the U.S. by showing up to the meeting with a six-foot-high poster of the company's CEO Photoshopped into a fake BusinessWeek cover. The firm actually got the business, since the empty gesture stroked the egos of the executive suite. Sure, when you're a publicly traded software firm, business press is very important. But to promise the cover of BusinessWeek was just silly. Okay...I'll be honest with you... It was over two million dollars "silly" in terms of the PR budget at stake, yes, but that was already a few years ago and it hasn't happened yet. In sum, PR still has a long way to go in order to get credibility with the companies it seeks to represent and the influencers that it seeks to influence. HOME | OBSESSIONS | FAQ | HEROES | CAREER | BLOG | CONTACT Note that the views expressed on this site do not necessarily reflect those of Phil's employer, its business partners, its clients, or anyone or anything that doesn't come from Phil.	ABOUT THIS BLOG This blog not only discusses PR and media matters, but Phil's everyday observations about a variety of topics. EMAIL phil[at] philgomes[[dot}]com SYNDICATE Feedburner ARCHIVE YAHOO! IM SKYPE WISH LIST PITCH POLICY MY PHOTOS www.flickr.com Photostream RSS Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz COMMENT AND TRACKBACK POLICY Comments and trackbacks are unmoderated, though I will delete the patently offensive ones. Any comments and trackbacks are the opinions of the individual writer of those comments and trackbacks, and not those of Phil Gomes, his employer, its clients, or its business partners. If you have a bone to pick, bug the people who wrote the comment or trackback.