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PR Fuel: Holiday Gift Guide or BustMy friends at eReleases, the publisher of this newsletter, hit the nail on the head a few weeks ago when they sent out a reminder to PR Fuel subscribers that holiday gift press releases are due now (well, then). You still have time to get your holiday press releases and press packages out, but the clock is ticking, and fast.This holiday season is going to be ultra-competitive because there are real and genuine fears that consumers are not going to be spending money like they have in the past. Three big drivers are impacting consumer spending right now: 1) High oil prices (crude hit another new record this week); 2) Trouble in the housing sector (home starts hit a fourteen-year low in September); and, 3) Unseasonably warm weather in much of the country has kept many people from making fall- and winter-related purchases. The latter pushes purchases back, causing retailers to discount more heavily in an effort to reduce inventories. Bearing in mind the economic headwinds, I think it's imperative this holiday season that manufacturers and service providers push the value element of their products when they're doing public relations. Many companies shy away from this, which I think is a mistake. Value doesn't mean that a product is cheaply made; it just means that the product is cheaper than what a competitor offers, or that the product offers a compelling value for the price. For example, I recently received a press kit for a digital music player. It's actually an updated version of the same player that I own. The press kit does a good job of showing off the product and explaining why it's just as good - or better - than the iPod, the gold standard in the space. Amazingly, however, the press kit never once mentions that this digital music player is much cheaper than comparable iPod products. I was stunned by this omission because the price difference between this particular product and the iPod is what attracted me from the very beginning. Value does not just come in the form of a physical product. Services can also offer value and be valuable. While cracking the pages of a holiday gift guide with a service-oriented product is sometimes difficult, it can be done. A few years back, one of my company's investment newsletters found its way into a holiday gift guide. We had offered our subscribers holiday gift subscriptions for friends and family, and I decided to pitch our newsletter as a holiday gift idea. We squeaked into a major magazine (had I put out a press release earlier, we may have scored more ink!), which promoted our product under the headline "A gift that can also make you money." While print publications have historically helped move holiday products, the online world has quickly become a go-to place for holiday shoppers. Companies such as Yahoo!, AOL, MSN and CNET all publish well-trafficked online holiday gift guides. Typically they launch these micro-sites a few weeks before Thanksgiving, meaning that editors at these properties are already hard-at-work putting the guides in order. The good news is that unlike print gift guides, their online brethren can be updated regularly. Not many blogs run full-blown holiday gift guides, but reaching out to bloggers should be part of your holiday gift strategy. Word-of-mouth marketing has helped land breaks for thousands of products, and bloggers are today's best word-of-mouth marketers. Target bloggers with whom you already have a relationship or those covering your industry. If you send product samples, treat bloggers as they were journalists and don't just try to grease them with free products. One of the best ways to get into a holiday gift guide is to create one yourself. I'm not saying that you should go out and print one. Instead, pitch holiday gift guide stories around your product. One of the pitches I used for our newsletter was to suggest to journalists that they write a story about what type of subscription services a person could give as a gift to another. I went so far as to break it down by subject (i.e., Buy a gift subscription to ESPN.com's premium services for your sports-loving sun and a subscription to my company's newsletter for your investing-mad mother). You, of course, want to keep your competitors out of your gift guide pitch, but by offering up an idea that's not just tethered to your product, you may score some serious points with journalists. Consumers may not be thinking about holiday shopping now, but media outlets are. The window is closing fast if you want to be included in holiday gift guides, so get your press releases on the wire and your press packages in the mail now.
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