While skimming the headlines of Ragan’s PR Daily news feed yesterday, I quickly scanned over an article from Advertising Age titled “What PR pros and marketers can learn from the movie Hoosiers”. At first, I wasn’t going to read it, but then how could I resist – the movie “Hoosiers” provides a powerful message, and NCAA Men’s Final Four is just around the corner.
The author, Tom Denari, provided an excellent analogy about the similarities between a company’s brand strategy and the lessons from Norman Dale (aka Gene Hackman), coach of the Hickory Huskers, from the movie "Hoosiers." For me, the biggest takeaways were to ensure you establish the basics/fundamentals and be willing to take calculated risks.
Similar to the work GroundFloor Media does, we tell our clients to establish the fundamentals of any public relations campaign – develop the message, build the right background materials, media train your spokespeople, etc. – before launching your campaign/program. And secondly, don’t miss a window of opportunity – whether it’s a planned activity or a trend that you take advantage of in a very short timeframe. So go ahead, expand your marketing and public relations efforts by launching a Facebook page for your company, developing an integrated campaign across all your marketing vehicles, or enhancing your SEO to generate new ways to reach a key target market and support greater ROI.
If you haven’t read the article, I would encourage you to do so. What might be even more exciting is that we are living the “Hoosiers” dream – Butler (whose Hinkle Fieldhouse is featured in the movie, “Hoosiers”) is in the Final Four! Oh, and Butler is near and dear to one of our very own... it is Ramonna Tooley’s alma mater. Go Dawgs!
~ Jen Wills
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