PR Visionaries

High-Technology and Healthcare Public Relations:Innovation Demands Marketing

Two decades ago it wasn’t at all common to see feature stories on small companies in big-time media. Today it is not unusual for conceptual announcements by our high-tech and healthcare clients to attract more media attention than announcements of giant orders by multinationals. Against all odds we have succeeded in leveling the playing field so smaller companies can have equal, democratic access to powerful markets through these media. In doing so we have helped our clients transform the post-industrial landscape. Helping to jumpstart these little companies, and helping them to create thousands of new jobs, has been an important part of America’s engine of growth.

The infrastructure of U.S. marketing and media has become the envy of emerging companies all over the world. High-tech PR’s power to accelerate speed-to-market for entrepreneurial innovation has enormous implications for the future. As we are increasingly confronted worldwide by staggering new challenges in terrorism, disease, hunger, and the environment, it may be the nimble and inventive entrepreneurial venture that delivers the most meaningful and rapid response.

The key to achieving these gains is democratic access. We have generally represented the challenger, up against either entrenched competition or old ways of doing things. So the role of PR has been to stir up these markets and to provide equal access for our companies to the media and thereby to markets. High-tech public relations has played an important role in terms of providing democratic access for our clients to media and markets. Public relations has had a major role in helping small companies become big companies, helping start-up companies become bigger and create the job growth and pioneering technologies for which America is justly famous.

In high-technology industries, public relations has a bigger piece of the marketing pie than public relations in some other venues. PR is important in Hollywood, it is a mainline activity there; but it is also a mainline activity in high-tech areas. One of the reasons for this is that editorial coverage of technical products is more credible than advertising, and that is why over the past decade we have seen more and more marketing resources move out of advertising and into public relations. Technology products also are often complex and better explained in the more lengthy editorial space of a publication than in the space of an ad. Technology purchases are not impulse buys they are more strongly influenced by editorial coverage, product reviews, and positive customer references.

While technology purchases are partially influenced by emotion, the performance characteristics of the product or service are typically the most dominant considerations. An editorial format conveys this information far more credibly than advertising. It is far more important for a high-tech product than, say, a laundry detergent, to receive a positive evaluation from a credible reviewer. Similarly, it is more important for a high-tech product to be validated by a customer case study in a credible trade publication. These factors make PR the most important subspecies of marketing for technology companies. Whereas public relations might not be the most important component of a packaged-goods campaign, PR is often the core of marketing for high-tech companies.

Having said that high-tech buys are largely performance-based, it’s also important to point out that, typically, virtue is not its own reward in high-tech. Which is to say that if you build a better mouse trap, that may not be enough to get people to buy it. Potential customers have to know about it first, hear about it over and over again, learn of the experiences of others who’ve tried it out. That’s where PR comes in.

Companies with technical founders are often frustrated by the amount of marketing it takes to cut through the clutter, to get the word out on the new mouse trap. More seasoned CEOs understand the sheer volume of work involved and push the high-octane button on PR, because they have been there before and realize the cost-effectiveness of, and indeed the necessity of, the PR effort to their company’s success.

On the other hand, companies that cut back on PR in tough times often put themselves into a death spiral because they make the fundamentally false assumption that their competitors are doing the same thing. Often they are not, and their competitors that do not cut back will gain market share at their expense and thus the rout begins. High-tech industry veterans will look to gain share in an environment in which their competitors cut back on PR.

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