Advertising kings Leo Burnett, Bates and Ogilvy & Mather might not welcome the results of a new survey about brand building, but both the PR industry and those corporations devoting more to communications are sure to find it welcome boardroom conversation.
Of 200-plus marketing executives in the high-tech sector, 57 percent reported increased PR "involvement in branding in the past two to three years," according to The Weber Group and Socratic Technologies, sponsors of the survey. Thirty-eight percent said the PR role in branding had remained the same and six percent reported a drop.
The only brand booster which surpassed public relations was Web site activity, of which 77 percent reported an increase (20 percent said Web contribution to brand building was the same, with only three percent noting a decrease).
Last in its influence on brands was direct marketing, which only 30 percent of respondents thought was increasing as a brand builder. Promotions, collateral materials and advertising rounded out the results, with 40, 47 and 55 percent wedges, respectively.
Corporate communicators and PR agencies that court big business should consider these results when budgeting brand priorities.
These findings were first released at the San Francisco American Marketing Association's Conference on High-Tech Branding.
Brand Happy
Several days after it released the findings, Weber's parent company, Interpublic, reported the debut of FutureBrand, a New York-based company which will both create brands and reinvent lackluster ones (it helped Kodak morph from a film company to a digital science brand). The consultancy was formed out of Interpublic's roll-out acquisition of Diefenback Elkins (New York), Davies Baron (London) and N.Y.-based The Coleman Group Worldwide (the only subsidiary whose name is staying the same and not being merged under the FutureBrand moniker).
The players specialize in corporate brand, retail, industrial and packaging strategy and design.
Before coming together as an independent company, the FutureBrand methodology was used to combine three separate petroleum brands in Argentina into Eg3, Buenos Aires, says Camille Hardy, manager of client services for Ludgate Communications, a sister company to FutureBrand. The shift resulted in a market share jump to 16 percent, from nine.
FutureBrand now has 20 offices in 15 countries and has $65 million in annual revenue.
(Ludgate, 212/688-5144; Socratic Technologies, 617/796-7737; Weber, 617/520-7072)