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Technical PR and planning for peace
27 January 2022
(Richard Stone, next to a rusty lamppost, most likely trying to look cool.)
“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” This quote is generally attributed to Dwight Eisenhower, but in his own writing he attributes it to an anonymous soldier – and the quote is a little different. Here, Richard Stone, Managing Director of technical PR agency Stone Junction, explains why.
Eisenhower’s original version of the aphorism reads, “Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.” I think both versions have very similar meanings, and similar impacts on technical PR and marketing. But the peace time version resonates a little more for me at the start of 2022.
The fundamental meaning of both is clear. The process of preparing a plan teaches us to successfully improvise as the plan progresses, even if the shape of that progress is very different to the one that we originally intended.
The shape of peacetime
As marketers and technical PR people, we very rarely plan for peace. Blame Aristotle and his incontrovertible argument that in order to be interesting, the hero in any drama must have struggle. Blame George Bernard Shaw and his much-quoted adage, “drama is the soul of conflict”. Blame Steve Jobs and his belief that in every story a business tells, it should create an enemy against which to position itself.
Because the idea of conflict is so ingrained in us as human beings and marketers, we plan for trade shows as if they are battles. We plan PR, content, and advertising campaigns with an enemy in mind, whether that’s a big competitor, an unfavourable market, COVID-19 or the cost-of-living crisis.
Hell, some companies even run Google advertising campaigns against their competitors names, despite these rarely, if ever, delivering a lead! The point is, we plan as if we are going to war.
The shape of conflict
Most of the time, this isn’t a bad thing. It gives our campaigns shape, context, and an argument that the audience can buy into. It gives them passion.
Furthermore, this kind of planning gives us a framework around which we can be inventive when the plan must be changed. Think of it like a musical style. When you are playing cool jazz, the style itself is a framework that tells you how to improvise, safe in the knowledge that your fellow musicians will respond well. Probably by saying, “That’s zoot, cat”.
If you suddenly started playing punk rock, the rest of the band would be confused. You might not be playing badly, you might not be playing out of turn, but you are playing music from entirely the wrong framework.
Put simply, a marketing plan gives us a common language that we can use to re-write it as we work our way through the campaign.
Zen and the art of PR planning
But what would happen if we didn’t plan in the context of conflict? What if we forgot about our enemies and focused only on ourselves? What if, like Eisenhower’s colleague, we put our focus into peacetime planning for a while?
Imagine a marketing meeting where there is no baggage. Where there are no ‘buts’ and no reasons why you can’t. Only the benefits of the product or service, coupled with ideas about how to present them to the right audience.
A nirvana for sure, but a useful one as an experiment. How different would your marketing be if you assumed that all you needed to do to sell something, was to present its features and benefits in a compelling way to the right audience, using the right medium?
What if you didn’t have to counter the fact that your software is poor and that’s the reason people don’t buy the hardware? What if you didn’t need to worry that your technical support isn’t good enough, or that your connectivity is limited?
The real benefits of you
If you focused only on your strengths and opportunities, and forgot for a moment about your weaknesses and threats, how different would your product and service claims and statements be? How different would your key messages be? How differently would you think about yourself and the organisation you are part of?
I believe that you would be able to articulate in the simplest way what you sell and why it’s worth buying. You could clearly understand why a customer would buy from you, without muddying the water by thinking about why they wouldn’t, or why they would buy instead from a competitor.
The reason for this is that it’s much easier to sell the products and services that you have than it is to first unsell the audience on the competition and then sell them on you.
Remember those people advertising against your company name on Google – and remember their lack of sales as a result? That’s because when people search for your company name, they already know where they want to go. They already understand why they want to buy from you and mud slinging from a competitor won’t change their minds.
What comes next?
It’s once you have completed this process, of thinking about only your product or service without negative context, once you have made sure you have planned for peacetime, that you can start to prepare for battle.
It’s at this point that it becomes useful to ‘build an enemy’ as Steve Jobs would have done; to build a narrative around the product and begin to tell a story that resonates with the audience on multiple layers. It becomes useful to understand the environment around because you have first understood your own offering.
If you have built your campaign on a foundation of your own strengths – the reasons why someone should buy from you – then you will find that, not only is it more successful, but your framework for improvisation is more robust and effective. Your peacetime planning and your battle planning will finally be able to work together and become truly indispensable.
Richard Stone is the Managing Director of Stone Junction, an international PR, digital and content agency with offices in the UK, Germany and Romania. He has nothing against Eisenhower, Aristotle, George Bernard Shaw or cool jazz, but he isn’t a special fan of any of them. Now, punk rock and Steve Job’s storytelling style, that’s a different kettle of limbless, cold-blooded vertebrate animals with gills. Give him a call on +44 (0) 1785 225416 or email richards@stonejunction.co.uk if you want to talk about building a PR, content or marketing strategy.
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