How can you stitch together your PR story, and who is the best person to spin the yarns in public? — EASTWEST Public Relations

Cision survey that I mentioned a little while ago about reputation and spokespeople, actually, the most trusted spokespeople of companies are the product experts and the technical people. We normally field the MD or the CEO for spokespeople opportunities for the media, for office openings, or product launches. But ironically enough, the CEOs and sales directors are actually probably the least trusted when it comes to getting the public relations message out there. If you think about it, it’s because we think that those people are going to be trying to sell us something, whereas a technical expert or product expert is going to be representing the truth in an unvarnished way about that product, and this is really what Mr. Pickles was doing. He didn’t seem like a salesman. He wasn’t dressed like a salesman. He didn’t sound like a salesman, but actually, it was his own business and his passion and his product knowledge meant that he was very much such a salesman. If we look then at our own opportunities for PR, it’s worth thinking about whether we’re going to put ourselves forward, or whether we can put forward other people with training and with supervision and some guidance to actually articulate what the company is doing. Certainly, this can be true, for example, in restaurants, we always see the chef. If you think about toothpaste commercials, it’s the dentist. It’s the practitioner that is brought out.

Originally published at https://www.eastwestpr.com.