Many firms try to segment their markets by age, or income, or attitudes. Yet the most telling thing about someone is none of these-it is where they live. Where we choose to live says more about us than anything else, simply because we choose to live in places that we personally find conducive. People who like the countryside live in the country, people who like plenty of nightlife live downtown, people who like family life live in the suburbs, and so forth.
This is why people often develop fierce loyalty to their region, and even their neighborhood. For the astute public relations practitioner, this represents a golden opportunity. Tesco, Britain's biggest supermarket chain, has run a Computers for Schools exercise every year since 1992. For every £10 a customer spends in store, Tesco gives the customer a voucher that can be collected by local schools and used to buy computers.
This is more than just a sales promotion, though. Note that the vouchers do not benefit the customer directly: they benefit local schools. The Tesco customer has the warm feeling of helping a good local cause, but without actually having to spend anything.
Tesco has the kudos of helping a local cause, while still operating on a national basis-yet the cause is branded across the country rather than being linked to a specific area. The scheme not only has an effect on the customers, but also creates a degree of gratitude among the children who benefit from the computers-and children grow up to be grocery shoppers.
Finally, Tesco has ensured that a higher proportion of school leavers are computer-literate and therefore are likely to be useful employees-many of the children who benefited from the original 1992 scheme are now adults working for Tesco.
Pressure groups are great for creating negative stories about products and companies, and no pressure groups are more adept at this than the environmentalists. The environmental lobby sees itself as campaigning for a crucial issue-the saving of the only planet on which humanity lives-and in view of the importance of the issue one can hardly blame them for being extremely determined in their approach.
This does, of course, leave firms with a lot of firefighting to do, and many of them immediately become adversarial in their behavior. Direct attacks on the environmentalists are unlikely to do anything other than fan the flames-but entering into an honest debate might well be more successful.
During the 1980s, research by the British Antarctic Survey revealed that there was a massive hole in the ozone layer, centered over the Antarctic. The ozone layer is what protects us from excessive ultraviolet light and damaging cosmic rays, so it is of considerable importance. The British Antarctic Survey research indicated that the hole was caused by the use of CFCs (a gas) as a propellant for aerosol sprays.
The British Aerosol Manufacturers' Association wanted at first to produce press releases showing how important aerosols are to business and consumers. This was intended to counteract the negative publicity generated by the environmentalists. However, the BAMA's PR consultants, Grayling PR, realized that telling people how convenient it is to have aerosol hairspray would be unlikely to carry much weight against the Doomsday scenario coming out of the Antarctic.
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