| Financial/Corporate Services
From Wall Street to Main Street, our team of communications specialists has positioned, created recognition for and brand-built some of the nation’s biggest financial and corporate powerhouses, setting many of them well on their way to household name stature. How?
By not thinking like public relations people. At least not until we fully understand our clients in a business context – theirs, their competitors’ and their industry’s. We’re intellectually curious. We ask our clients a lot of questions, challenge their thinking, turn conventional wisdom on its head, and then use our public relations proficiency to deliver a deeply thoughtful strategic roadmap with tactical executions that make the ordinary obsolete.
We understand that many financial services products are on a path to commoditization. From 30,000 feet, and increasingly from sea-level, it’s becoming more difficult for financial advisors, pension consultants, other key intermediaries, and consumers, to distinguish one product or service from the next.
That’s where we come in.
At the outset, our proprietary BrandSense© positioning analysis helps us and our clients understand how their brand and their products are viewed by key influencers, both in the absolute and in relation to their peers. Using that as just one key metric, we strip away the most commoditized characteristics of the product mix to isolate those attributes which provide the broadest, most sustainable competitive advantages. That practice, often employed many times in the evolution of a single client, begins the process of product positioning.
Logically, clients come to us for more than branding and positioning. They come to us because our critical thinking helps solve business problems, which we achieve through competencies like:
Media Relations
The scope and depth of our journalist relationships can be matched by few firms; the same could be said for the quality and on-target messaging of our print and broadcast media results. After all, we understand that this is a business contingent on mutual respect and collaboration. Since we’ve spent decades honing our media relations skills, journalists have come to respect us as professionals who understand the need to balance our clients’ agendas with the journalist’s requirement for news, credible story ideas, and exclusive information.
But traditional print and broadcast media relations is only half of the success story. Our pioneering role in leveraging the Internet as an integral communications tool positions us at the forefront of the latest techniques in information dissemination. From blogs to podcasts to VidPitches© and social media, our specialists are skilled at understanding and using every conceivable conduit to motivating our clients’ customers.
Managing Intellectual Capital
Management consulting, law, accounting, executive compensation, and actuarial firms, among others, use their intellectual capital as a way of creating a competitive advantage. Working with these firms requires particular sensitivity to time management since client-facing spokespeople usually have limited time for long story development meetings or drawn-out interviews. What that necessitates is a public relations agency skilled in the management of intellectual capital. In essence, we serve as a “broker” between our clients and the media, extracting the information we require from our clients in as little time as possible, then translating this information into the “currency” in which journalists deal – story ideas.
Proxy Fights
Companies often turn to us because of our strong record of results helping clients either fend off hostile take over bids or launch proxy fights. We are especially adept at representing activist investment managers looking for board seats as a means of making a company more accountable to its shareholders.
Long-term success can depend on the ability to navigate a crisis successfully. Our crisis communications experts have decades of experience effectively managing potentially catastrophic situations, including SEC examinations and fines, criminal prosecution, fraud, major technology malfunctions, work stoppages, financial misstatements, insider trading, market timing, acts of violence, corporate governance failures and C-suite misconduct.
Investor Relations
Our investor relations specialists are adept at advising companies on building their capital markets footprint. We help corporations of all market capitalizations, establish objectives and strategies, then achieve them through targeted communications to current and potential investors, and to the analyst community. We leverage our research capabilities to conduct investor audits, perception studies and shareholder analyses to further build shareholder value for our clients.
