So Rogers has a new on-line, on-demand marketing campaign.
Basically they are pitching the ability to watch tv shows online now. I've talked a lot about this phenomena and how we are entering a new age of how people get their digital content.
Basically the carriers are switching to making their money from data transmission as opposed to the traditional cable to your television model.
With Rogers, their extreme package gives you a cap of 80 GB per month. Every gig you go over costs you $1.50. So essentially they want customers using up as much bandwidth as possible, because that will translate in to increased internet charges.
It's funny, Rogers use to throttle bit torrent - meaning you couldn't really use bit torrent because the speeds would be so slow it was pointless. They have since lifted that throttling, because they've reversed their position and want their customers using bandwidth.
This whole phenomena is another great example of the difference between marketing and PR. From a marketing perspective Rogers is positioning itself well. It's marketing its new delivery model as 'watch tv anywhere, anytime' - watch it on your tv, watch it on your laptop, or on your computer, or on your mobile device.
What they hide very well is that as people shift to this model the 80 GB they get per month won't be enough and they'll probably need about 100GB (or even more in the future), which means their extreme package which costs about $59.99 will end up costing customers almost $100.00 when their final monthly bill arrives.
While marketing concerns itself with pushing out a well packaged offering and emphasizing the benefits customers get (and obfuscating any trade-offs they may be making), PR has to concern itself with the intricacies of how the offering exists within a greater ecosystem of concerns (from the CRTC's role in all this to the technological and CAPEX / OPEX reasons that Rogers has realigned its service offering).
PR has to concern itself with how key stakeholders, who are often very smart, such as journalists, technology editors, and bloggers, will comment on the new offering and marketing campaign. Which means they have to deal in the nitty-gritty realities of what is going on within the ISP landscape. Failure to be able to answer tough questions damages the brand.
This is also why PR and marketing have to work together so closely. Because anything marketing does (for better and for worse), comes knocking at PR's doorstep eventually, usually with the question "I know you are saying x, but what does it really mean? And what about y and z issues, how are they affected?"
Now, what I find interesting, is that while Rogers has launched a massive on-line and traditional media marketing campaign for their on-demand offering, a quick Google News search shows that there has been almost no media coverage of this offering.
Why is this?
If I had to guess (and it really is just a guess), Rogers PR folks can't get behind the new marketing campaign with a PR push because there are simply too many difficult questions that key stakeholders would ask. Answering those questions (or avoiding them) would seriously harm the core message associated with the marketing campaign.
And there's the big difference between PR and marketing. One is answerable to key stakeholders, to responding to their questions, while the other isn't. And that's very important to remember for those starting out in PR... work with your marketing folks and do your best to make sure they understand that what works for marketing may not work for PR. Many marketing folks are extremely talented and have the ability to modify their creative concepts so that it's easier for PR to discuss the company's initiative with key stakeholders without creating problems in the process.
Sometimes, such as the case here, PR simply is not going to be able to off-set what marketing is doing, because for business reasons, there's an ugly reality that simply can't be made to look appealing when you dive in to it. However, it then becomes PR's job to come up with alternatives to keeping the corporate brand strong. That might include making the company a better place to work, supporting community-based social programs, launching social-media based contests that give customers a chance to win something, etc.
Sometimes it should be PR's job to say: "I know from a marketing perspective we need to do this, but then we should also do these other things to offset the negative impression key stakeholders will get from our marketing activities."
Bell Canada's PR folks (and management) understand this. You can't just take a marketing approach towards doing business, you must integrate PR in to your strategic vision or in the long run your brand will suffer.
While it's just a guess, I strongly suspect in one or two years the Rogers brand is going to suffer because I simply do not see PR as being integrated in to their strategy decisions. But time will tell.
Basically they are pitching the ability to watch tv shows online now. I've talked a lot about this phenomena and how we are entering a new age of how people get their digital content.
Basically the carriers are switching to making their money from data transmission as opposed to the traditional cable to your television model.
With Rogers, their extreme package gives you a cap of 80 GB per month. Every gig you go over costs you $1.50. So essentially they want customers using up as much bandwidth as possible, because that will translate in to increased internet charges.
It's funny, Rogers use to throttle bit torrent - meaning you couldn't really use bit torrent because the speeds would be so slow it was pointless. They have since lifted that throttling, because they've reversed their position and want their customers using bandwidth.
This whole phenomena is another great example of the difference between marketing and PR. From a marketing perspective Rogers is positioning itself well. It's marketing its new delivery model as 'watch tv anywhere, anytime' - watch it on your tv, watch it on your laptop, or on your computer, or on your mobile device.
What they hide very well is that as people shift to this model the 80 GB they get per month won't be enough and they'll probably need about 100GB (or even more in the future), which means their extreme package which costs about $59.99 will end up costing customers almost $100.00 when their final monthly bill arrives.
While marketing concerns itself with pushing out a well packaged offering and emphasizing the benefits customers get (and obfuscating any trade-offs they may be making), PR has to concern itself with the intricacies of how the offering exists within a greater ecosystem of concerns (from the CRTC's role in all this to the technological and CAPEX / OPEX reasons that Rogers has realigned its service offering).
PR has to concern itself with how key stakeholders, who are often very smart, such as journalists, technology editors, and bloggers, will comment on the new offering and marketing campaign. Which means they have to deal in the nitty-gritty realities of what is going on within the ISP landscape. Failure to be able to answer tough questions damages the brand.
This is also why PR and marketing have to work together so closely. Because anything marketing does (for better and for worse), comes knocking at PR's doorstep eventually, usually with the question "I know you are saying x, but what does it really mean? And what about y and z issues, how are they affected?"
Now, what I find interesting, is that while Rogers has launched a massive on-line and traditional media marketing campaign for their on-demand offering, a quick Google News search shows that there has been almost no media coverage of this offering.
Why is this?
If I had to guess (and it really is just a guess), Rogers PR folks can't get behind the new marketing campaign with a PR push because there are simply too many difficult questions that key stakeholders would ask. Answering those questions (or avoiding them) would seriously harm the core message associated with the marketing campaign.
And there's the big difference between PR and marketing. One is answerable to key stakeholders, to responding to their questions, while the other isn't. And that's very important to remember for those starting out in PR... work with your marketing folks and do your best to make sure they understand that what works for marketing may not work for PR. Many marketing folks are extremely talented and have the ability to modify their creative concepts so that it's easier for PR to discuss the company's initiative with key stakeholders without creating problems in the process.
Sometimes, such as the case here, PR simply is not going to be able to off-set what marketing is doing, because for business reasons, there's an ugly reality that simply can't be made to look appealing when you dive in to it. However, it then becomes PR's job to come up with alternatives to keeping the corporate brand strong. That might include making the company a better place to work, supporting community-based social programs, launching social-media based contests that give customers a chance to win something, etc.
Sometimes it should be PR's job to say: "I know from a marketing perspective we need to do this, but then we should also do these other things to offset the negative impression key stakeholders will get from our marketing activities."
Bell Canada's PR folks (and management) understand this. You can't just take a marketing approach towards doing business, you must integrate PR in to your strategic vision or in the long run your brand will suffer.
While it's just a guess, I strongly suspect in one or two years the Rogers brand is going to suffer because I simply do not see PR as being integrated in to their strategy decisions. But time will tell.
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