We all know publicity can be helpful to a brand but there is often confusion about what publicity aims to achieve. Publicity basically helps you with 3 important factors: Awareness, Credibility, and Buzz building. A good publicist can ensure that everyone knows about your brand and the latest information about your company’s products and services.
Awareness
You can’t be a successful brand if people do not know about you. We live in an era where the market is saturated with brands. You cannot simply launch an advertising campaign and expect that to be enough. Publicity helps people find out not just the name but also the properties of the brand. It starts a conversation among your key audience which further propagates awareness. Proper brand awareness is a self propagating mechanism. It gets people talking because people are already talking about your brand.
Credibility
The number one obstacle when it comes to a new brand is credibility. How do you convince people to give you their hard earned money if they have never previously used your brand and have no reason to think it will work the way it is supposed to? Publicity changes this situation. People are nervous about the unknown. They don’t like eating at restaurants they have never heard of or using any product which is a complete mystery.
Publicity takes your unknown brand and turns it into a known brand. Just the fact that people have heard of your brand previously allows them trust you. This is how most of us think; if you had to choose between two brands, none of which you had used but you have heard of one of them, would you pick the one you have heard about or the one that is completely unknown? All of us would select the brand we have heard of previously because we associate trust with known things.
Buzz Building
Buzz is completely different from awareness even though they are very similar. Buzz can be best defined as momentum or traction. To better understand the difference between awareness and buzz compare the Bulls to the Warriors. The Bulls definitely have more awareness; Michael Jordan was a worldwide phenomena and he elevated the Bulls brand all over the world. The Red logo with a bull can be found in basketball courts all over the world.
Warriors, on the other hand, have much more buzz. They are in an amazing season, Curry is poised to break several records, and they started this season with one of the best records ever. People know about Bulls but they are excited about Warriors. That is what publicity does; it makes people excited about your brand and makes them talk about your brand with a sense of urgency. It turns your brand into something which needs to be talked about in the moment.