The canary yellow J Crew ensemble Michelle Obama wore and talked about this month on the Tonight Show might not be for everybody but it created a public relations boom for J Crew, who quickly capitalized on the comments.
After learning about Mrs. Obama’s appearance and their name-drop, J Crew purchased the “Michelle Obama” keywords on pages like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, built a special page on its site to detail exactly what Mrs. Obama was wearing and instructed their call-center staff about how to help callers who wanted details about the outfit. (See more in today’s New York Times).
Regardless of the number of dollars the buzzy campaign may have showered J Crew – and they’re not talking about sales figures – its actions shows a shrewd marketing and public relations sense that helped them take advantage of the unexpected publicity:
1. Moving quickly - As soon as the company started to hear about the mention via teaser ads on the NBC network the day of the appearance, it started the gears in motion to buy the keywords and place ads on likely search engines to direct traffic. If your organization’s PR, sales or marketing departments are bogged down by layers upon layers of approvals or a “that’s the way we’ve always done it” mentality, you will never be able to capitalize on these types of trends. In the 24-hour news cycle, speed is everything.
2. Providing desired information to consumers up front - Instead of trying to get customers to slog through its catalog online, J Crew built a page that gave consumers the information they wanted. Again, they could have gone for the “let’s make the consumer see all of our inventory instead of just what Mrs. Obama was wearing” tactic but instead recognized the consumer’s desire for specific information. This reflects a consumer-first mentality that many large retailers have been slow to adopt.
3. Informing their internal audience – Training the call-center staff was particularly astute. There is no reason to build a mini site and buy ads online and then not tell your staff. These are the folks answering the calls, so they should know about it almost as soon as the CEO signs off on something. Employees are some of your most important brand ambassadors – don’t ever forget them when promoting your business.
Move fast, give ‘em what they want and don’t forget to tell your people – can your business could handle these things if you happen to hit a PR gold mine? If not, see how you can help make it so you can.
