Public Relations: the way brands and corporations interact/communicates with the public and the media. Brands need to ensure that they maintain a positive image to ensure consumer loyalty, and make the public perceive them in an optimistic light.
Marketing: marketing the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising
Promotion: the publicising of a product, organisation, or venture so as to increase sales or public awareness
Advertising: the activity or profession of producing advertisements for commercial products or services
Edward Bernays is known as ‘the Father of Public Relations’, and he had claimed in his book called “Propaganda” that by being able to fully comprehend the group mind, it allows one to manipulate people’s behaviour without them even realising it. He was so good at rebranding products/ services that he managed to make smoking not a taboo amongst women in the 1920’s- due to the fact that smoking was seen as a taboo for women back then. He was able to turn something so looked down upon and negative, into something positive, that exactly was why he was coined the name ‘Father of Public Relations’.
Task:
To adopt the role of Bernay, we were split into groups and assigned very mundane topics/objects, and were told to act as a PR team to completely rebrand the given topic. My group were given the ‘basic biscuit’, so we decided to play on the word ‘basic’. As nowadays, people use the adjective basic to describe people that predominantly mainstream products. We used decided to rebrand the basic biscuit as the ‘#notsobasicbiscuit’, and portray the biscuit as a hipster, indie and different. We photoshopped stylish, vintage clothing onto the biscuit and place it infront of various hip locations in London for the ad campaign, making it the true ‘#notsobasicbiscuit”. It was extremely difficult re-branding the basic biscuit, because it is not popular amongst the population for a reason.
Below I have attached a PDF version of the Powerpoint that our group had produced on the day as part of the task:
References
Christensen, W. (2012). Torches of Freedom: Women and Smoking Propaganda. [online] The Social Pages. Available at: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smoking-propaganda/ [Accessed 28 Nov. 2018].
shanae.video.blog 