Stories by Melissa Hoffmann

Companies like Nike and Ben & Jerry’s have demonstrated the power of brand activism in marketing. With consumer expectations shifting in a tumultuous political environment, what happens when a brand decides to take a neutral approach? Online home furnishing company Wayfair is right now finding out the hard way.

In this regular feature, PR News asks movers and shakers in the industry to share a little bit of their personal history and personality through answering a series of 12 questions.

Brands taking a position on social or political issues has been all the rage. Alan Jope, the new Unilever CEO, might be pushing things to the next level. At Cannes Lions he said Unilever will “dispose” of brands that lack purposeful messaging. Is this strong statement a shot across marketing’s bow?

Nearly 18 years after a terrorist attack on America snuffed out thousands of lives, the first responders who fought to restore order and rescue the injured that day are back on the front pages. Former Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s appearance on C-SPAN yesterday in testimony to a congressional subcommittee was powerful and relentlessly on-brand. But a celebrity face and voice isn’t a guarantee that your message will be received, or received well. Here are some questions to keep in mind if you think you might need a celebrity to get people to pay attention to your cause.

In this regular feature, PR News asks movers and shakers in the industry to share a little bit of their personal history and personality through answering a series of 12 questions.

If you are following the crisis communications playbook, you know that taking swift, deliberate and public action to right a wrong is enough to not only mitigate a brand’s crisis—it can even flip the narrative and earn that brand new followers. So after singer/songwriter SZA was racially profiled in a store and blasted the brand on social media, Sephora’s declaration that it would shut down operations for an inclusiveness and diversity training today seemed a smart crisis response. So why is the brand declaring its training has nothing to do with the incident?

Pride Month in June is not only a celebration of how much better things have gotten in a country that once treated LGBTQ people as social pariahs. It’s also a reminder that we still have a long way to go to true equality. Two PR pros discuss the past, present and future of LGBTQ issues and how they relate to PR. This also will be the subject of a June 6 panel at the Museum of Public Relations in NY.

Brand personas as a concept has been gaining ground as businesses seek for new ways to differentiate themselves and gain competitive advantage in the face of increased competition and generational shifts in loyalty. Differentiation through personality is a way to keep consumers loyal to a brand even though other elements may resist differentiation (i.e., service, product selection, and price). How can you determine your brand’s persona and apply this to your strategy?

Nike found itself in the midst of a major PR crisis when The New York Times published an opinion piece on Mother’s Day that revealed Nike did not provide pregnant athletes with paid maternity leave. Nike has now released a statement saying that all future contracts will be written to protect pregnant athletes from discrimination. In this action, Nike is clearly following the crisis management playbook and changed the narrative in its favor in its quick remediation. What can we, as PR professionals, learn from this?

In this regular feature, PR News asks movers and shakers in the industry to share a little bit of their personal history and personality through answering a series of 10 questions.