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How PR prevented damaging bad news

Limiting the spread of bad news can be more important for brand reputation than generating positive media coverage, and in five years working with Keston Boilers, PRG was called upon to do this.

Keston’s experience is no different to that of many other manufacturers of consumer goods – on rare occasions, it becomes necessary to deal effectively with public criticism or negative media reports. And in this age of the Internet and social media, you have to deal with them quickly.

When an unreasonably one-sided story about Keston broke on the front page of a trade newspaper and appeared at the same time on the publication’s website, alleging that a product failure had led to a fire, it threatened to spread virally across the Internet. PRG brought the story to the attention of its client, held a phone conference hours later with company directors, then contacted the paper’s publishing director to present a carefully constructed argument explaining why the report was unbalanced. It was too late to halt circulation of the newspaper, but by convincing the publisher to remove the story from the website, we prevented it from remaining visible in Internet searches and damaging the brand for years to come.

Positive news was usually the focus of our PR activities, promoting the technical sophistication and easy-installation benefits of boilers. For five years PRG regularly generated positive media coverage for Keston which, when compared to the cost of buying equivalent advertising space, delivered a return on investment of anything from 3:1 to 10:1. These activities were so cost effective that Keston increased its PR budget year-on-year.

If you’d like to achieve more through PR, please call 01323 411044 to have a chat with Account Director Phil Bingham or email phil@prgltd.co.uk.

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CALL: 01323 411 044 EMAIL: info@prgltd.co.uk

How PR prevented damaging bad news