With Father’s Day right around the corner, marketers have been centrally focused on targeting dads’ needs, wants and desires. While most of the communications campaigns tap into men’s love of grilling or sports, recently released research on what influences today’s fathers has marketers second-guessing their approach.

The research, highlighted in a recent issue of Bulldog Reporter*, shows that fathers’ roles are shifting in households, causing marketing messages to shift right along with them. Among many others, Tide and their “The Princess Dress” ad and Well’s Fargo with their “Daddy’s Day Out with the Baby” ad bring to light these changes.

The research, taken from a sample of 1,000 adults with children 17 years old or younger, found that today’s dads are spending just about the same amount of time in grocery stores as moms. They also have been found to create detailed lists of what they need, participate in in-store promotions, use coupons and as a whole have more influence on purchases made in grocery stores than moms.

Whether or not these statistics hold true in the majority of American homes doesn’t bother Donny Deutsch, chairman of advertising company Deutsch Inc. He spoke about the fact that the campaigns featuring dads are still targeting moms and are just a romanticized adaptation of a growing trend. The recent use of dads in advertising in part is a depiction of changing times; however, it is also a long awaited discovery of dads’ untapped marketing potential.

*https://www.bulldogreporter.com/dailydog/article/year-of-the-dad-as-father-s-day-approaches-cone-communications-releases-new-research

In a follow-up to our blog post last month, Communications Trend: Consumers as Marketers—how can we, as communications professionals, get consumers to support our brands, as marketers?

A recent survey, commissioned by Redwood Software and discussed on Bulldog Reporter last week, offers one place to start. The survey found that consumers are deterred from brands when faced with “shoddy customer service, redundant questions, disconnected processes and long waits,” that it’s really the “little-big problems—the things that may seem inconsequential up front, but build up overtime to dramatically change the relationship a customer has with a one-favorite brand.”

The specific revelations included:
• “Nearly half of potential buyers terminate online purchases because they take too long (49.35%) or are too complicated (48.35%).”
• “More than 75% of shoppers leave brick-and-mortar stores—and 65.3% leave online marketplaces—because they couldn’t find what they wanted.”
• “Ultimately, 51% of the U.S. consumers surveyed have ended contracts or changed suppliers because of continued service failings.”
• “Customer service also came under fire in the survey. More than 61% of respondents reported dissatisfaction at having to repeat personal information to an operator after providing that information through an automated telephone system, and 58.85% were similarly annoyed when repeating information to multiple people or departments across transfers.”

After reading these survey findings, it seems that in order to secure consumers on our side as marketers we must continue to pay special attention to the ‘little’ details such as: making web pages and social media profiles easy to navigate and ensuring all brand messages are consistent across all communication platforms. After all, these are some of our key tasks as PR pros.

Bulldog Reporter explains that “consumer expectations are high, but so is the potential loss for big brands, with these annoyances undoubtedly translating into lost revenue.”

Source: http://www.bulldogreporter.com/dailydog/article/consumers-abandon-brands-that-dont-measure-up-but-its-the-little-things-that-usuall

Pollock Communications has an opening for a Senior Account Executive position.

JOB REQUIREMENTS:
We’re looking for a strong Senior Account Executive with at least 4 years agency or in-house health & wellness and/or food & nutrition experience for a growth opportunity. Candidate should be a team player and have a strong work ethic and commitment to a high level of client service. SAE will execute and help manage agency accounts, including plan development, media outreach, press material development, special events and social media initiatives.

ABOUT OUR COMPANY:
Established in 1991, Pollock Communications, Inc. is a national independent PR and marketing communications agency that offers cutting edge expertise for consumer brands, food and beverage clients. We have pioneered the functional food movement, creating some of the major food trends of the past 10 years. We capitalize on emerging health and wellness trends to benefit client products.

SALARY: Competitive
BENEFITS: Medical and Dental
JOB DURATION: Full-time
JOB LOCATION: New York, NY USA

Please email resume to vkulbersh@pollock-pr.com.

Pollock Communications is honored to accept the Public Relations Society of America Big Apple Award for its stellar work and results promoting the health benefits of drinking tea through the Fifth International Scientific Symposium on Tea & Human Health. Pollock was one of five finalists competing for the award in the category of Events & Observances: Government, Associations & Non-Profit Organizations. We are delighted to share this award with our client, The Tea Council of the USA!

This week Yahoo is trying to make a comeback as they have been seeing a gradual decline in recent years. On Monday it became official that the major search engine has purchased the blogging-service Tumblr for $1.1 billion. In comparison with other monster companies Facebook purchased Instagram last year for $1 billion and Google purchased YouTube for $1.6 billion in 2006.

So what happens to these companies when they’re purchased? Advertisements. Sales. Clutter. Those things that take up your sidebar and even interrupt the middle of your computer or mobile screen when all you want to do is look at comments and posts your friends wrote or took pictures of. Chief Executive of Yahoo Marissa Mayer who decided on the acquisition has now put in for a long-shot/long-term result process. Although the combination of the two powerhouses will be an immediate plus in numbers for Yahoo in terms of visitors and demographics, there are many concerns already rising.

Yahoo has made it clear that they don’t want to ruin the functionality that Tumblr has already, but there are worries of Yahoo’s influence transforming the site into a more corporate and straight-edge version compared to its original purpose of individuality per each blogger. There is also concern over the previously existing content and image of the site. In 2009 Tumblr was almost 80% adult related content and gave it a particular reputation that still lingers. Now they’ve minimized that content to about 5%. But what about when Yahoo decides to “ramp up” Tumblr’s dashboard? Will it become the next Facebook with endless advertising that consumers argue about every time there’s a new update that resets your settings and spams your homepage with ads? Tumblr was started by a guy, David Karp, after he dropped out of high school for the preference of home schooling and wanted a new, uninhibited way to share what interests him and others. Wasn’t that a similar aim of what Zuckerberg was going for? What kind of future does Tumblr have to look forward to and what sort of pattern might we be seeing for all social media platforms these days?

Yahoo doesn’t have the greatest track record for big purchases, as seen by its failed purchase of Geocities for $3 billion. Maybe Mayer has a new strategy and understanding of the relationship between social media and general media. The coming months will tell if her gut feeling was the right one.

Have you seen this headline recently? White House picks Twitter lawyer as Internet privacy officer.

Obama has just appointed Nicole Wong, former Twitter lawyer, as the White House’s Chief Privacy Officer—a brand new position for the government. If you’re like us, you thought, “Wow, that’s smart.”

Finding the right person was no easy task considering there’s not a huge pool of people to choose from. Internet privacy is a relatively new concept, yet this job requires someone with loads of experience.

Enter Nicole Wong. She’s had to deal with hacks, addressing governments that want to sensor, police request she deemed out-of-line and more. No, she wasn’t Chief Privacy Officer at Twitter (or Google, where she worked before), and no she doesn’t have government experience, yet the skills she has are really relevant to the new job she’ll be handling in government.

So that got us thinking. In a PR agency, we tend to be jacks of all trades—pitchers, writers, event planners, strategizers, etc. But beyond that, if you look around your office, there’s a chance everyone possesses skills that aren’t specifically related to PR, but still offer a lot toward the job at-hand. At PCI, as we look to hire a new SAE, we’re reminded of this.

Don’t just look at standard PR skills when searching for a team member or expanding your capabilities. Instead, look to people’s other skills and passions as a way of rounding out the team you have and the services you offer—whether you’re looking for a new employee or simply growing from within.

Here are a few “non-PR” skills and personalities we’ve seen over the years that can really help an agency:

• The person in the office who always seems to wear a new fad just before it shows up everywhere
o You’ve got a trend-spotter who is likely great at crafting trend pitches.
• Anyone who’s worked as a restaurant server or host
o Customer relations at its finest—these people are usually great at making clients and the media feel taken care of on a daily basis.
• Have a great gift wrapper in the office?
o Use them to make new product kits look beautiful, wrap client gifts or come up with creative event decor
• Former retail employees
o As people who are used to rattling off product attributes and answering questions on the spot, they’re often great brand ambassadors if you’re ever doing a sampling program.

While some things will always be important to PR people—writing skills, detail orientation and efficiency to name a few, it can be the little, seemingly unrelated things that make an employee stand out and fit right in.