Yet, this is from a company I’m often at pains to keep in touch with, and whose list of press contacts must be horribly long and unreliable because I keep dropping off it. Still, thank you for the strange, untargeted package.
I’m an advocate of being as direct as possible without willingly offending anybody (though I admit to being unwillingly offensive from time to time). And because I’m human and slightly egocentric, I’d like everybody else to be direct and not hide behind politics, bureaucracy, lazy PR agencies and fluff.
I sometimes think that the dairy industry could benefit from a bit more understanding of how marketing works, especially in trying to communicate not only with customers and potential customers, but with those people who are more than willing to lend a helping hand. (That’s people like me, by the way.)
Writer and broadcaster David Hepworth recently said, ‘Why, in this day and age, would you send any kind of message through an intermediary?’. I’m not saying don’t use public relations experts to help you and your company get a foothold in the fuzzy world of communications, but don’t rely on them too much either. Some of them are amazing, but I suspect most of them don’t care enough about you or your company to be diligent enough to send targeted messages to the right people.
Contact me directly. Let’s swap names in our address books. Let’s get savvy about internal and external comms before we get left behind.
Shaun Weston is editor of FoodBev.com. You can contact him here, or read his blog here.
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