Being a PR professional has some fun perks, but the best perks are probably not what you’re thinking. Yes, you get to work with celebrities and meet the same sports stars you’ve cheered for all your life, and yes, you sometimes get invited to parties where everyone’s waaaaay cooler than you are.
But to me, the two best perks are this: First, you get to learn how all kinds of different industries REALLY work because if you don’t fully understand the ins and outs of your client’s profit model, your PR won’t be aligned to maximize revenue. (In fact, the best advice I can give any business owner is to run away from any “marketing expert” who tells you what you need to do – which is usually, “Pay me money!” – before he bothers to learn your core business strategy.)
The other nice perk? You can never call a PR pro “overrated” because if you do, what you’re really saying is that our reputation is better than our actual performance, which means – guess what – we must be good at PR! (It’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card!)
But if you talk to enough PR pros, you’ll start to notice trends. Among them: Doctors, scientists, and highly technical professionals tend to be difficult clients because their brains are overloaded with an abundance of data. This makes it hard for them to stick to the relevant talking points.
For example, a doctor might know 5,000 different data points, medical studies, and peer-reviewed articles that are deeply relevant when treating a patient, but if the patient is his target audience, the patient might only want to hear that the operation works, it’s safe, and it’s affordable. Patients don’t care about the latest clinical studies or an exciting new surgical technique that saves the medical team 25 minutes in the operating room.
Yet to the doctor, all that stuff is deeply interesting: The latest studies matter! It’s what excites them! But if your PR is singularly focused on driving revenue and ringing registers, you don’t want the doctor to waste his TV segment talking about things that are irrelevant to his audience.
This parallels the Republicans' current problem with Harris: She's just too much of a target-rich environment. The GOP is so overwhelmed with juicy, tempting vulnerabilities – i.e. her liberal record, her unpopularity, her debacle on the border, her far-left rhetoric, her track record of incompetence, her ties to Biden, her unlikeability – that all the voices are drowning each other out. There’s no structure or cohesiveness to the GOP’s messaging.
Compare this to the Democrats, who had all their talking heads marching in lockstep, raiding the (friendly) airwaves to attack JD Vance as “weird.” Because they spoke in unison, the American people clearly heard their message (as silly as it was).
The GOP can’t say the same thing.
With the Republican PR messaging in disarray, the Democrats have done one thing extremely well: They executed their reintroduction of Harris on the national stage about as flawlessly as possible. Especially when you consider her earlier unpopularity (and the anger and dissatisfaction with the Biden administration), the strength of their messaging is why today’s Democrats are energized, moving in the polls, and on the offense.
And they’ll stay on the offense until the GOP gets its PR messaging in order. The Republicans have already lost the first-mover advantage at redefining Harris, which was a major screw-up: The best time to define an opponent is before their reputation solidifies, not weeks or months later.
Paradoxically, this also brings us to one thing the Democrats are botching royally: They’ve taken their eyes off the target, squandering a week’s worth of negative attacks… by going after Vance instead of Trump.
Let me assure you, other than Usha Vance, absolutely nobody is going to vote for OR against Donald Trump because Vance is on the ticket!
Traditionally, the VP nominee has nominal sway over voters anyway, but with a lightning rod like Trump at the helm, it’s a total non-factor. Even if the Dems are amazingly successful at transforming Vance into Sarah Palin Part Two, it just won’t matter on election day. People are going to vote for (or against) Trump because of Trump – not because of his running mate.
So let the Democrats continue to be distracted by Vance. The longer the Harris campaign wastes ammo on Trump’s running mate, the better it is for Trump. It’s tactically off-target for Harris because she doesn’t have unlimited time in an abbreviated presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, the GOP needs to get its act together and settle on its messaging, because it doesn’t have unlimited time either – and if Republicans don’t redefine Harris, the Democrats will be happy to continue doing it for them.
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