UK Businesses believe PR and Marketing is worth investing in

There is a common belief in some business circles that when the economy gets tough PR and Marketing are the first services to find their budgets cut. Conversely, many business leaders realise that when the market gets tough it is prudent to push your products and services even harder to potential customers who are very likely to be looking more closely than ever at what they buy. We were interested to see a BBC News article this week, referring to a survey by research group Mindmetre that suggests a significant percentage of polled businesses are looking to raise their marketing budgets in 2012. This is juxtaposed by figures in the same survey that suggest a third of UK company directors believe the country may fall back into recession this year, suggesting the belief in PR continues to grow.

We have seen this renewed interest in PR on a personal level this week with two new MCC International clients. Whilst it’s always a pleasure to win new business, we are particularly inspired by working with clients who have a renewed enthusiasm for good PR and recognise that speaking to your potential clients on a number of levels (be it print press, online press or social media) gives the market greater confidence in the ability to deliver on promises.

Finding the right voice for your audience is always a hotly debated subject in PR and Marketing circles, so a story that really caught our eye this week was in the Independent regarding advertising that claims to only display to a female audience. Installed at a bus stop in London’s busy Oxford Street, the advert aims to highlight the plight of the world's poorest girls by showing a video to female pedestrians as they pass by using facial recognition. The jury is out as to whether facial recognition technology can successfully determine a female from a male face, but the publicity it has generated by its novelty factor alone has to be admired as a clever piece of marketing.

Having produced an article looking at the falling popularity of email in our lives (on behalf of a client this week), we were interested to see the results of a survey by Ovum which suggests mobile network operators lost £8.8m in lost SMS revenue last year due to the popularity of social messaging applications. Naturally the younger members of the MCC International team weren’t surprised, at least once we had prised them away from using WhatsApp on their iPhones!