How to Avoid a Bad Hair Day in Marketing and PR

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By: Bulldog Reporter

Of all the folks here at Forza, my hair probably changes the most. It’s been a kaleidoscope of colors, from blue to purple to orange and red. When I was hired, it was pink. It’s currently a mix of blue, pink and purple.

What does this have in common with marketing and PR? Actually, quite a lot, when it comes to the client/agency relationship.

Here are three big aspects that fashion hair color and PR and marketing share:

You get what you pay for.
There’s no substitute for experience and education.
If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

For those of us that have tangled with the boxed dyes in the beauty aisle, we learned the first point the hard way back in high school. I remember looking at the results, and then back to the box, then back to the mirror in dismay. Why is it so green?

A good PR and marketing firm should be able to stick to a budget—however, that budget needs to be realistically proportioned to the desired results. A complete rebranding with market research takes many more billable hours than a shorter project. That double process color and cut is going to cost you.

Go ahead, take the shortcut with the cheaper boxed stuff. You’ll probably end up having to pay a professional to fix it later anyway.

In the salon and at an agency, there’s no substitute for experience and knowing how to use the tools of the trade. I know just about enough on hair color to get myself in trouble. Similarly, I have received some pitches—from interns to someone that has the title of vice president at a company—that have been pretty darn awful. Both lacked the experience to know how to pitch properly but decided to give it a go anyway.

When I’m at the salon, I trust my stylist to know what dyes to choose and what bleach to use to get my hair where I’d like it. It’s what she does for a living! I do not try and do it myself. Chemical burns are unpleasant and I trust her to deliver the results that she has the training and experience to do—and that I am paying for as a client. On the agency side, if you find yourself trying to take on client work that you are not competent in, bring in a trusted expert to help before you do some serious damage.

As fashion hair color becomes more popular, I keep seeing pins all over Pinterest of “rainbow hair.” When I’m choosing a new color, I commiserate with my stylist about folks that bring in those examples and expect similar results. Not only are the pictures in question likely photoshopped, they’ll look like garbage in two days after the orange, yellow and green mix together. Picture a bag of melted skittles.

If a PR and marketing firm comes to you with a lot of promises, pretty pictures and no proven results, sustainable plan or strategy, your business could suffer a few weeks out when marketing turns into a sticky, unattractive mess.

On the flip side, if a client comes to a firm with expectations that are unrealistic, it’s that firm’s responsibility to explain how the client is in for a bad hair day and talk the client into a more reasonable and maintainable solution, instead of trying to deliver on something an agency knows will almost certainly end poorly.

In summary: If you put the right amount of resources into a project, trust or bring in professionals to do their job, and have realistic expectations and goals, you’re likely to be happy with the end result. Put that way, it doesn’t sound like rocket science—so why are there so many marketing campaigns running around out there with bad dye jobs?

ORIGINAL POST HERE