COM 658 3-2 Short Paper
Using public relations to launch a new product or product line has been shown to be an effective marketing tactic; naturally, there are a number of different approaches, sometimes as a result of the particular industry, and sometimes despite the established practices of a particular industry.
Consider, as an example, the “premium” ladies’ clothing company, Cabi. Cabi positions itself as a clothing company made “by women for women” (Cabi, n.d.), touting the advantages of non-traditional clothes shopping. Its clever, upbeat, positive messaging partially but artfully disguises its multi-level marketing (MLM) sales structure (Investopedia, 2018). Cabi doesn’t use the usual advertising or sales venues: their clothes are not to be found at department stores, nor at discount retailers; their clothes are displayed primarily on their own website, and marketed by their stylists, who are women in Cabi’s own target audience (aged 30 and up, for the most part) groomed to hold style events in their own homes or in the homes of friends, selling the clothes directly on commission.
Cabi, however, does not rely on its stylists to do all of its marketing: before the launch of each seasonal collection, it uses market influencers (Caywood, 2012) to basically implement a PR campaign ahead of the actual collection launch. Cabi’s influencers are well-established fashion bloggers whose target audience is basically the same as Cabi’s target and actual consumers as well as its stylists: women between the ages of 30 to 60 who are parents, and who put some amount of pride in their appearance (the term “leveling up” is a frequent buzz phrase of this industry niche) and who create their marketing networks using other women like themselves.
A number of these influencers have a fanatic following as a result of perceived value: Kelly Snyder, for example, is one such influencer who runs a fashion blog for women in their 40s who are also parents (Snyder, n.d.) She successfully deployed and runs a number of online fashion courses for those women who want to learn how to dress the bodies they currently have (rather than change the bodies they have in order to dress well). Snyder already has access to and influence over a concrete network of potential consumers as a result of her courses, and she maintains said access and influence with weekly live video sessions on Facebook as well as her own commissions schemes and frequently emailed newsletters. She was given access to a preview of Cabi’s Fall Collection most recently, and thus her network was also primed for the launch. Snyder used her preview opportunity to actively market to her own network by culling the best buys, dividing them into categories according to her lesson principles (based on body type, color palette, etc.). She then distributed this information to her followers, practically guaranteeing that both she and her stylist received commissions from their social networks. All this adds up to a particularly effective PR strategy to launch each of Cabi’s seasonal collections.
Apple’s marketing playbook followed a similar premise to Cabi’s when it comes to the use of PR to launch a new product: like Cabi, it has traditionally used influencers such as the technology blog Mashable and various YouTube personalities to create excitement and “buzz” ahead of the actual launch of the product (CP Communications, 2017). Apple’s traditional method of doing so mimics that of many other organizations, technology or otherwise: they release a handful of units of the new products to various influencers to be reviewed, and those influencers then post their reviews on their blogs, YouTube channels, social media platforms and so forth, thereby creating the market for the actual launch. By reviewing new and differentiated features, comparing them to shortcomings in other products including in the previous version of the same product, these influencers in essence do Apple’s marketing work for them using themselves as a public relations campaign. This was how the iPhone 5, for example, was launched.
Apple made a 180-degree turn, however, with the launch of its iPhone X: rather than send its preview units to the usual cadre of technology influencers and reviewers, Apple instead distributed these units first to “seemingly random” YouTube personalities (Zitron, 2017, Paragraph 1). This brilliant strategy manifested itself in the number of established Apple bloggers who unleashed their metaphorical pens in anguish at not being among the first recipients of the iPhone X—this created even more of a furor over the new product, increased its visibility and arguably its market share.
Cabi’s ongoing and Apple’s previous PR strategies for product launches are based in solid, proven integrated PR strategy (Caywood, 2012), and are effective and foundational. The use of influencers who leverage integrated communications to further their own brand effectively becomes a PR strategy, and a lucrative one at that. Apple’s new take on PR strategy was very much a disruptor, and even more effective as a result… caution must be employed in such an antagonistic strategy, however: as Zitron (2017) points out, it is very possible that the only way Apple was able to get away with this disruptive strategy is that it already enjoyed significant influence and market share of its own: it already had such a brand presence that it was able to get away with this PR strategy, as it were. Zitron bestows such market status on only one other company: Amazon, and cautions that lesser brands not take such a risk.
References
Cabi. (n.d.). Personal Shopping at Home | What is cabi? Retrieved from https://www.cabionline.com/what-is-cabi/
Caywood, C. (2012). Strategic public relations and integrated marketing communications. (2nd. Ed.). NY: McGraw-Hill.
CP Communications. (2017, January 23). Be like Apple and use clever PR to launch your new product [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://publicrelationssydney.com.au/be-like-apple-and-use-clever-pr-to-launch-your-new-product/
Investopedia. (2018, August 29). Multi-level marketing. In Investopedia. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/multi-level-marketing.asp
Snyder, K. (n.d.). Adore your wardrobe. Retrieved from https://adoreyourwardrobe.com/
Zitron, E. (2017, November 3). What public relations can learn from the iPhone X launch. Inc. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/ed-zitron/what-public-relations-can-learn-from-iphone-x-launch.html