Trust Design 9

Brand  |  Elevate  |  Connect

Public relations, run on nine pillars.

We hold the accounts, build the message, and keep it going month after month. The nine pillars decide what gets made, who it goes to, and how we know it worked.

The common failure

Most campaigns stop.

The usual arrangement looks like this. A company hires an agency. The agency sells a package, connects the accounts, puts out a run of posts, and then bills every month while the pages sit still. Attention moves to the next client. Six months later the feed shows a gap, and the audience reads that gap correctly.

Consistency is the pillar that carries the other eight, and it is the one that gets dropped, because it costs the most and shows the least in the first quarter. A modest campaign run for three years will beat an excellent campaign run for three months.

We start by writing your nine pillars down. Those become the standing brief, and every piece of work after that has to answer to them.

Why it pays

Sales marketing drives the month. Public relations decides the decade.

Coca-Cola selling to stores is a sales operation. Being part of an American childhood is public relations.

Sales marketing brings customers to the door, and a business has to do it to eat. Public relations builds the ground the sales stand on. It moves slowly at the start and compounds, and after a few years it is the reason a cold call gets answered and a new location opens to a town that already accepts it.

Coke shipped bottles to soldiers overseas and photographed it. It wrote slogans that carried a feeling rather than a product claim. It put its mark on lunch boxes, coolers and signs until people paid money to own them. None of that sold a case of soda on the day it ran. All of it is the reason the brand is treated as heritage now.

Every social account you own is public relations, whichever way you treat it. The question is whether it is run to a plan.

What we run

The accounts, the campaigns, and the mail

We take the work rather than the retainer. Everything below is produced in house and reported on monthly.

Social accounts

Owned, scheduled, answered.

We hold the accounts, plan the calendar against the objective, produce the posts, and answer what comes back. Every account we open is an account somebody is watching, including the messages nobody else reads.

Campaigns

Nine pillars, start to finish.

A campaign begins with the objective and the audience map and ends with a measured result. Between those we build the message three ways for the three rings that matter, choose channels off the map, and run it long enough for consistency to do its work.

Email

The list, the sends, the replies.

Direct email is the one channel you own outright. We set up the sending domain properly, write and send the letters, keep the list clean, and handle what comes back. Deliverability is an engineering problem and we treat it as one.

Public image

What is said about you when you are not in the room.

Press and community work, the material a reporter or a town board reads before they meet you, the language everyone in the company uses to describe what it does. This is the slow work that decides how a new location is received before it opens.

Brand and production

The things people actually see.

Marks, color, type, photography, video, print, signage, and the web pages that carry them. A public image needs something to be made of, and the making stays in house so it holds together across every channel.

Measurement

Reported monthly, in numbers.

A baseline before the first post goes out, a running read while the campaign is live, and a monthly report that says what moved and what did not. It ties to the objective rather than to whichever number looks best that month.

Start here

First we write your nine. Then we run them.

The opening work is a written set of pillars for your business: the objective, the audience map, the focus, the channels, and the numbers we will measure against. You keep that document whatever happens next.