We were honored to be named the Best Small Agency to Work For at the 2013 SABRE Awards last week. We’ve long prided ourselves on creating and investing in a culture that’s rewarding – and just plain fun – for our employees to come to every day. But what does such an honor mean to clients, since they don’t work here and they have their own cultures to care about?

I’d like to be able to say I thought long and hard about the answer to that question but, to be honest, the answer was right there – it’s about talent. An agency that creates the best environment to work in is in the best position to attract and retain the very best talent from across the communications sector. For clients, that translates to the most engaged, skilled and motivated people working on their business.

It also means less turn-over. 360 was launched just over a decade ago and our practice leaders have all been with us 5+ years and many of our supervisors have been here just as long. They’ve created a strong base for us to add to with new talent – people who bring fresh ideas and new approaches that we readily integrate with established, proven practices.

Our key learning in building a “best agency to work for” over the years is that culture is everyone’s responsibility and can’t be owned by one person or one department. We rely on our entire staff to engage in employee engagement, whether they contribute to professional development, operational, social or other activities that enrich our collective experience and keep us at the forefront of emerging trends, tools and best practices for our clients. That means senior staff have to be open to ideas coming from all levels – and acting on those ideas. We are and we do.

One of our most recent employee engagement activities focused on “strength-training.” Each staff member had an opportunity to participate in a series of 1:1 coaching sessions to identify strengths, both realized and unrealized. Next, we hosted a “speed-dating” session, in which staff members compared strengths with co-workers and discussed how they can help each other convert unrealized strengths to realized ones. 360’s strength-training program culminated with a team-building exercise in which our coach tumbled up individual strength profiles to an agency strength profile and we discovered as a team what unrealized strength – courage – we needed to work on. We found senior team members were less willing to take risks than younger team members – and that the younger team members could be relied upon to help us be more courageous as an agency. That’s given rise to younger team members taking the reins more at weekly staff meetings, presenting their approaches and accomplishments for all of us to learn from and be inspired by.

I’m so thankful for and proud of our teams in Boston and New York, and can’t wait to see what they come up with next – for 360 and our clients!

Filed under: 360 Public Relations, PR Industry by LauraTomasetti - No Comments →

By Mike Rush, 360PR @Home Practice Leader

My trip out to Chicago for the Housewares Show was fitting.  With inclement weather following me wherever I seem to travel (which I   dodged by a hair), I hunkered down on my flight with 360PR’s latest book club read, What The Dog Saw by Malcom Gladwell, which details the rise of Ron Popeil, inventor of the Chop-O-Matic and king of direct response TV infomercials.  I couldn’t help but think of our favorite As-Seen-On-TV brand at 360PR, The Snuggie, and how we PR folks are all pitchmen (and women), too.

For those of you that have never attended the Housewares Show, especially foodies, there are a number of questions you find yourself pondering in awe:  “Do I have enough storage space below my kitchen countertop to fit this?”  “Will a magnificent lime green mixer still look good in 10 years?” and “If only they were passing out samples…and I had brought an extra suitcase or two.”

After a full day of combing the show floor (which could have easily been a week), I was able to surmise a few emerging trends for 2013:

Colors.  Lots of them.  Retro colors on appliances started to pop up a few years ago – and I wished my mother had held onto her avocado-colored blender from the ‘70s.  But, this year, housewares are emulating ‘80s fashion, with turquoise, fuchsia, baby blue, and hot pink to even KitchenAid mixers in leopard and zebra prints.  Every year, PANTONE, the world’s authority on color standardization, selects the Color of the Year – and for 2013, it’s Emerald Green.

Kids as Foodies. With the rise of food TV for the whole family, like Food Network’s Cupcake Wars or TLC’s Cake Boss, kids are becoming serious foodies.  And food creations are becoming a central part of after-school and weekend fun for parents and kids.  Take 360PR client FamilyFun magazine – they nailed this trend early (check out my favorite “Treat of the Month” from February – Punxsutawney Pudding Cup).  Baking, cooking, and even cleaning up the mess that follows are all activities marketers see as a celebrated and fun opportunities for families – from OXO and Bakelicious to smaller companies like Boston Warehouse’s “Smart Cookie” line of kitchenware, which are designed specifically for kids’ small hands but are clearly not toys.

Brands Playing Nice in the Sandbox.   Last year, 360 launched the first-ever Honeywell with Febreze fan, which merged the $38 billion Honeywell brand with Procter & Gamble’s $900 million Febreze® brand to deliver air circulation AND odor elimination.  This year’s Housewares Show spotlighted a few unexpected partnerships.  SodaStream announced a strategic agreement with Ocean Spray for “a portfolio of juice blend concentrates co-developed exclusively for the SodaStream home beverage carbonation system.”  iRobot’s Roomba also now comes with neat accessories – scent strips developed with Yankee Candle so that the mobile vacuum cleans the floor and freshens the air.

Filed under: Consumer Marketing, Events and Conferences, PR Industry, Retail by Admin - 2 Comments →

Last time, we dug into three invaluable, big-picture takeaways from last month’s annual PRWeek Conference, all relating to culture. Now let’s take a look at three practice-oriented learnings that emerged from the conference, all ready-to-use:

- “Player-Coach” is the new model for senior agency leadership
- Marrying content with the right social and digital channels to optimize it is part art, part science
- Multi-platform content delivery is moving from innovation to expectation

Former Chief-of-Staff to Hillary Clinton (during her White House years), and current EVP of Marketing and Communications for Travelers, Lisa Caputo, revealed what she looks for in senior staff-people and agency personnel: “Player-Coaches.” In other words, strong mentors and business leaders who also stay involved in the day-to-day work. Things simply move too fast today, and are too complex, Caputo explained, to ever disengage, rendering decision making an ongoing process. Big cheers from the gallery at 360, where a roll-up-your sleeves work ethic is a longtime operating principle.

Dusty Tucker Jenkins, Target’s VP of Communications, gave insights from her company’s uber-successful social media experience. “At Target, content is queen,” and is used to build engagement, traffic and love, Jenkins shared, blazing an affinity-building path paved by storytelling. The foodie in me loved her way of looking at channels – “Twitter is a bite, Facebook is a snack, your website is a meal” – echoing Marshall McLuhan’s seminal, and still entirely relevant observation that medium is message.

A refreshingly (and often, hilariously) candid John Skipper, President of ESPN described his network’s leadership in multi-platform distribution, arguing that great content can, and must, find a home wherever the consumer wants it. His network pioneered numerous ways to satisfy ravenous sports’ fans hunger for sports programming, starting nearly two decades ago on the desktop, then mobile, and more recently becoming one the first networks to introduce a “watch anywhere” tablet app.

Asked with all those distribution channels why ESPN didn’t land the London Olympics, he brought the crowd – and his own rhetoric – right back down to earth. “Oh, that’s easy,” Skipper quipped. “NBC outbid us by a dollar.” Reminding us all that nowhere does money talk louder than in big time sports rights.

Filed under: Events and Conferences, PR Industry by Rob Bratskeir - No Comments →

PRWeek’s annual conference this month reminded me how healthy getting away for a day can be. Kind of like hitting reset — with benefits — as some of the world’s top marketers and communications leaders made what can look so hazy crystal clear, and, if only for a moment, beautifully simple. The learnings were so rich, I’ve broken them to two posts (stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2). First up, let’s talk about these take-aways:

- Brands start with cultures that thrive inside a company’s own walls

- Public communication is a C-suite function, and agencies must develop deep industry expertise in order to participate

- CSR isn’t a solution to short-term image problems; it’s an operating principle

Sean Connelly of The Hillshire Brands Company discussed the naming of the company he leads, following its creation out of the former Sara Lee earlier this year, creating a new home for brands like Jimmy Dean and Ball Park. Rather than an exercise in branding, Connelly started with a question: what kind of culture will this company have? In his view, everything starts with culture: how every employee, at every rung on the ladder, treats one another; how retailers view a supplier, taking the discussion beyond price; and ultimately, what is promised and delivered to consumers, and communicated to shareholders.

Openness, Connelly decided, would beat at the company’s cultural heart. From that grew the decision to name the company Hillshire Brands, after deciding its Hillshire Farms brand best represented a spirit of openness and possibility, while telegraphing to all stakeholders the “meat-centricity” and heritage of the new company. Self-hosted, webcam-powered virtual town halls held every Monday morning are among the ways Connelly is making good on his cultural pledge.

Connelly left the stage with words every PR person loves to hear from a CEO, that communications now is a C-suite function – a theme echoed by Jack Martin, Global Chairman and CEO of Hill+Knowlton Strategies. Currently leading a multi-year, also largely culture-driven reinvention of the multi-national giant, Martin is agitating with his counterparts at some of the world’s biggest companies to give public communications a seat in the boardroom suite, giving our work its rightful place alongside law, finance, marketing and outside advisors in corporate decision-making and governance.  As part of the campaign, dubbed “The Fifth Seat”, and for fundamental health, Martin urged agencies to develop deep, industry-specific expertise. That seat at the table is earned, not given. The gang here at 360PR couldn’t agree more.

Perhaps no communicator has had their feet held closer to the fire of late than Lucas van Praag, until recently head of global communications for Goldman Sachs. Among many tales he told of the war room he helmed in the wake of the financial meltdown, the one that rang loudest for me was his steadfast resistance to plugging leaks in his bank’s reputation with kneejerk, short-term, cause-related tactics. Corporate Social Responsibility, Van Praag explained, needs to be a core, cultural commitment, and a strategic driver of a company’s long-term goals, pursued in a way that is transparent — that demystifies how and why a program truly matters for society.

At a time when “do something cause-related” has become a cure-all to remedy shortcomings in creativity and bigger thinking, Van Praag’s counsel got lots of heads nodding. It was a good thing to see. Indeed, it all starts with culture.

Filed under: Events and Conferences, PR Industry by Rob Bratskeir - 1 Comment →

For a car nut PR guy, it was a pinch me moment: the top comms executives from Ford, GM, Toyota and Nissan, all assembled on one stage, trading friendly(ish) barbs over whose hybrids were greener, whose muscle cars brawnier, and whose road back from financial peril more noble.  But you didn’t need a Motor Trend subscription to appreciate their remarkably candid opinions at the Council of PR Firms’ annual Critical Issues Forum late last month.

Their discussion, along with all-star panels spotlighting food and beverage, consumer packaged goods and not-for-profit, examined the interplay of corporate reputation and the brands under corporate umbrellas.  The big question that opened the conference: which has more influence on purchase consideration and recommendation, reputation or brand?

As new research presented by Robert Fronk of Harris Interactive revealed, the answer depends on what dimension you’re looking at. The Harris study found “excitement,” “quality,” and “outperforms expectations” rating high among brand-centric influencers, while “clear vision,” “strong growth potential” and “good company to work for” mattering among reputational factors.

None of that should come as any surprise.  The big wow came from Harris’s painstaking cross -tabbing of data. As it turns out, the combination of positive brand equity and positive corporate reputation drives purchase and recommendation to a degree that often far exceeds the sum of parts.  The Council packaged it up well as Hidden Harmony, a valuable white paper on the study.

The lesson is that brand and reputation, often built and defended in separate (and sometimes, antagonistic) silos, need to be managed in lockstep with one another.  Each matters a ton, and even more so together.  If social media lifted the veil on consumer opinions of brands and companies’ reputations, here’s validation, big data-style, that it all really matters.

The automakers and other corporate icons represented on the Council’s panels – McDonald’s, Pepsico and P&G – had already gotten the message.  Ford’s Sara Tatchio characterized her company’s Go Further campaign as one built to impact everything from the ground up, starting from the employees who had to believe that just surviving wasn’t enough, to its individual car brands being challenged to create vehicles competitive with Europe’s and Japan’s best, to a dealer network asked to rethink what a domestic car buying experience could be – and to shareholders, who needed to see a company being remade for the long haul.

Employee engagement was also underscored by Bridget Coffing, McDonald’s Senior VP for Corporate Relations, who laid out the challenges and opportunities special to a global icon with a shared corporate and brand name.  She explained how that reality renders decision-making and public communication at every level, from the C-suite to the front counter, an extremely self-conscious act – waters that McDonald’s navigates by keeping everyone focused on its mission: Good Food. Good People. Good Neighbor.

Kelly Vanasse, a global communications VP at P&G, described her company’s super-sized first foray into overt integration of its corporate and individual brands, through its London Olympics campaign.  Reminding us that great marketing grows from sharp insights, Vanesse recounted the a-ha revelation that inspired P&G to go “all-in” on the Summer Games, and take flagship brands like Tide, Duracell and Gillette with it: that every Olympian has a mother.  That in turn opened the door to powerful storytelling aimed right at the consumers who are the company’s and its brands’ very lifeblood.  Vanesse took us into the trenches, into a global war room that told those stories in real time, was physically embodied as The P&G Family Home that invited families of Olympians to relax and recharge (amidst healthy exposure to P&G brands), and that generated more than one billion earned impressions.  (Of course, having a nine-figure advertising campaign driving massive awareness never hurts.)

Perhaps what stuck with me most is how Harris’s findings present yet another opportunity for PR to lead – in this case, by bringing it all together.  Doing that effectively requires a longer-term view, thinking beyond the next campaign, to what a company wants to say about itself, and how its brands contribute to that narrative.

Filed under: 360 Public Relations, Events and Conferences, Food & Beverage PR, Industry Organizations, PR Industry by Rob Bratskeir - 2 Comments →