HOW BROADCAST PR WILL SABOTAGE YOUR BUSINESS IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO IT.

From the end of World War II and the creation of the mass market, brand experts and PR companies have pioneered the concept of brand awareness.
Thus, given no cultural alternative,  

entrepreneurs have invested an endless amount of resources to get their name out there.

There is a tangible problem, though...

As described in detail in my book Sabotage & Subversion: The 10 Principles of Business Guerrilla, brand awareness follows a conceptual and therefore practical misunderstanding.

Given an analysis of any single category of products, a trend emerges:  

people buy the leader in the category,
the opponent to the leader, or
​the cheapest version of the product sold in that category.

This leads us toward a reasonable conclusion:

If I am neither the leader in the category nor the opponent to the leader (Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Red Bull vs. Monster, Apple vs. Samsung…), it’s more than logical to consider myself a commodity trapped in the lower price circle.

What’s the purpose of brand awareness?

The purpose of brand awareness is to get my name out there.

Fine.

But what if I am not the leader, the opponent to the leader, or the cheapest version of product in my own category?

This is exactly where the pain starts.

Let’s make it pragmatic.  

 At this point two tangible problems appear:

1. When I do PR, certain broadcast regulations limit my exposure, and what I am really doing is partially promoting myself but mostly promoting a solution to a given problem that a pre-existing category of products is already called to solve.

 

1. In spite of investing £25.000 in an awareness campaign, I still cannot rely on a sufficient marketing budget to overspend my competition and disqualify it.

​Conclusion:

I am investing my budget to promote a category I do not fully represent, money that will be a free return on investment in the accounts of my fierce competition.

What’s brand awareness about, after all?

 Brand awareness is about getting my name out there.

 Which is completely different than brand positioning:

getting my name out there to let them know why they MUST buy from me,
being the only one who can solve their problem, not because I do it better
but because I do it in a completely different way. 

​Is brand awareness as bad as it gets?
I don’t think so.
But on the premise of a wrong brand positioning, it’s suicide.