Thoughts on Black Friday Events

I heard on the news this morning that a woman actually pepper sprayed other customers during a Black Friday sale at Walmart in LA. Authorities said the woman was trying to keep others away from the merchandise she wanted to purchase. She left 20 shoppers with minor injuries from the spray. It’s nice the stores want customers to get good deals but at what costs? Missing Thanksgiving dinner and family time because they were camping out to be the first inside the door?

This was the first year that many stores, including ones in the local malls, opened their doors at 12:00 p.m. the day after Thanksgiving. This would mean that employees working that shift, would have to be there before Thanksgiving Day was even officially over. I used to work in the retail world and if I was that associate that had to come in at that time I would be pretty upset. With that shift starting at midnight I wonder what time employees had to get to sleep that afternoon in order to be prepared for the madness of the event? Wouldn’t retailers consider that this could cut into their employees family time, which that is what Thanksgiving is supposed to be all about, isn’t it?

After thinking of this, I got to thinking of all the college students that work in their college town area but are originally from hours away. How did they have to spend their Thanksgiving break? Did they even get to go home in all the madness over Black Friday? if not then I hope employers at least gave some extra incentives to work those hours or with those out of control shoppers like raises or some kind of benefits.

On a brighter note, I was happy to see the Target Black Friday commercials were back. The crazy Christmas “champ” that was in it to “win” has 12 new spots this year. I think these commercials are honest and hilarious. They do the job of allowing customers to know about the 2 day sale but also to warn them of the crazy customers, like the woman in the commercials, that might be around when they do go Black Friday shopping. You should check out the videos on youtube. com or adage.com!

Chapter 19: Success Measurement

In the book, Public Relations Writing and Media Techniques, chapter 19 discusses the importance of measuring success. There are many reasons why you should measure success and it’s importance listed in the book. Some of the reasons the reading lists are to document if PR efforts actually achieved objectives, apply lessons learned to future PR efforts, to demonstrate the practitioners are actually doing their jobs, and show the impact PR had on the organization.

The book goes on to discuss how important it is to first have the management and PR professionals agree on criteria that is used to evaluate. This can make a big difference on how you structure your campaign. It also makes readers aware that they shouldnt wait until the last minute or the end of the campaign to determine how successs will be evaluated. Another good thing  to remember when thinking about measuring success is to ensure your objectives are not vague.

There are many ways to evaluate and measure success of a campaign. One of the ways is to focus on the measurement of production and distribution. This method focuses on the number of news releases, feature stories, photos, etc. that were produced for the campaign. This is not a great method always because it lacks meaning. Instead of focusing on quality of materials produced, this method focuses on quantity.

The most common way to evaluate PR programs is to measure the message exposure. This is a compilation of print stories, broadcast mentions, and number of visitors to websites. Many use the media mentions to evaluate success but today it is becoming more relevant to know who is being reached by the message and what they are doing once they are reached.

The book lists many ways to play “the numbers game” when measuring success of campaigns such as media impressions and advertising value equivalency. These are important but now there are more systematic content analysis that can be done thanks to computer and various software programs known as systematic tracking systems.

Measuring audience awareness is important when evaluating PR success. This can be done using surveys asking audience what they remembered about the message. Measuring audience attitudes is extremely vital because it will decided if audience actually changed its attitudes and opinions. One way to do this is to conduct benchmark studies, which means to sample the opinions of the target audience before and after the campaign.

Measurement of action is also discussed in the book. While it is hard to accomplish this it is easy to measure. By using sales figures, market share, or voting results one can see the results of measurement of action.

Once a campaign is over and you have finished with the evaluation stage, you need to report the results to the client. When you are reporting to your client you need to refer to the original plan and state what you accomplished under the categories of situation, audience, objectives, strategy, tactics, timing, and costs.

While chapter 18 and 19 in the book were important , I think the tactics are the most important part of any public relations campaign. These are the tangible materials that you decide to produce because it was the medium you decided best for the objectives. It is always good to go back and look at what other publications or materials might have accomplished your objectives differently. It is also good to remember what you could have done differently or better so you can make those changes for future campaigns. Since we spent a lot of the semester discussing types of tactics and how to produce materials, I think everyone would agree that is a huge part of all PR campaigns that everyone should take tactics seriously.