Intro:
If you are looking for that bit of extra publicity or noise about your brand, then a PR Stunt is something you could consider. A planned event or story created specifically to attract public attention and media coverage, these stunts can draw in a much higher amount of media coverage for your brand than a regular press release.
News:
If you are looking for that bit of extra publicity or noise about your brand, then a PR Stunt is something you could consider. A planned event or story created specifically to attract public attention and media coverage, these stunts can draw in a much higher amount of media coverage for your brand than a regular press release.
With any PR stunt, originality is the key to taking off and starting to gain the coverage and attention desired. An effective PR stunt can really increase your brand recognition and elevate the company / product to a much wider and higher level audience than otherwise, with outside media sources often becoming interested and helping widen this reach further.
The scope of these PR stunts can be local or national depending on the company and purpose behind them, with there being many famous stunts of old which might be known for great success – think Tinder’s 2014 campaign which helped boost dog adoptions dramatically – or for falling short of the mark – Pepsi’s harrier jet case for example, now an actual Netflix documentary.
Clearly therefore, a PR stunt has to be well thought out and considered. It is not as simple as just having a fun idea, a good stunt has to be clever and well-timed, with visual elements often doing well. A well defined goal or objective is vital, whilst you need to ensure you have looked at all elements of the promo and what could potentially go wrong with it. With the right audience in mind to target, and a definition of what success will actually look like, you have to then select which platform they will actually be using and therefore where to launch your stunt.
This ties in with perhaps the most vital consideration of all – make sure the idea is connected with your brand. A great idea and vast publicity is fantastic, but at the end of it all the audience needs to know who it was by and what it was for. They have to feel part of your brand, connected to you otherwise there is no actual benefit to the company from this stunt. The best PR stunts are uniquely yours, fitting into the wider brand or company culture and ethos whilst being aligned with the core values. A birthday bus tour for example, showcasing your products and partnering with Facebook Live.
One key thing to consider as well, is over complication. If the wider public can’t talk about your stunt succinctly, explaining it and sharing it with friends and acquaintances, then it won’t be able to take off. If you can tap into a core emotion with this then even better, as this allows the audience to connect even more with your brand and increases the impact of your messaging.
April Fool’s is, of course, a key day for these PR stunts, when social media and news reports have to be carefully examined for hints of satire and mirth. Whether we are looking at diet water, a Duolingo and Peacocks dating programme or perhaps the debut of the world’s first pink sheep (we were rather proud of that one), this showcases some of the opportunities around a simple stunt and that they really don’t need to be expensive or complicated to take off.
If you would like to talk about accessible PR solutions, including stunts, then do reach out to You Do Better and we would be happy to talk to you about what is possible – it might be more than you think.