ImPRessions

advertising, communications, Crenshaw Communications, ImPRessions • May 21, 2020

Post-COVID, Brands Start To Open Up

The past two months have been extraordinarily challenging for brand communications and PR people. In the initial weeks of the COVID-19 shutdown, brands struggled to find the right response. Early efforts were tentative, pretentious, or shallow. As the pandemic progressed and the news grew worse, many stepped up with substantive offers of help, workforce tributes, […]

Crenshaw Communications, ImPRessions • April 24, 2020

Brands Bring Substance To COVID-19 Response

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended marketing and PR for nearly every major brand. Now, five weeks into the lockdown that has decimated many business sectors, most companies have settled into a new normal. Many have learned from early mistakes or half-measures and have scrapped old campaigns for new ones that make a positive impact for […]

Crenshaw Communications, ImPRessions, public relations • March 24, 2020

Leadership Lessons Of COVID-19

A crisis can bring out the best and worst in us — and in our leaders. In the weeks since the Coronavirus shutdown, Americans have experienced a crazy-quilt of messages from leadership at federal, state, and local levels. There are communications lessons about crisis leadership crisis in nearly every example. So far, Congress has been […]

Crenshaw Communications, ImPRessions, public relations • March 12, 2020

PR In The Time Of Coronavirus

It’s a tough time for business leaders. The rapid rise of public health warnings about COVID-19 and the ripple effects of the pandemic and our coping strategies pose a particular challenge for any organization, especially its communicators. The news cycle is dominated by the spread of the coronavirus and its repercussions. The effect on employee […]

Crenshaw Communications, ImPRessions, public relations • February 19, 2020

Corporate Reputation And The Whistleblower Culture

As a PR person, I’ve always been fascinated by the complicated psychology of whistleblowing. Lately it seems particularly relevant. Tom Mueller, who interviewed over 200 corporate whistleblowers for his book Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, proclaims this “the age of the whistleblower.” Look at Theranos – the health tech unicorn that […]

Crenshaw Communications, ImPRessions • February 5, 2020

Crisis PR Lessons From The Iowa Caucus

As every politics fan knows, the Iowa caucuses mark the official start of voting in a given election year. Because of its first-in-the-nation status and a quaint, complicated caucus system (or maybe in spite of it), Iowa has an outsize impact on news and social media coverage. Newspapers camp out there, journalists embed with campaigns, […]

Crenshaw Communications, ImPRessions, public relations • January 28, 2020

10 Rules For Keeping (PR Agency) Clients

For a PR agency, what’s better than winning a new client? Keeping the ones you have. Naturally, any good PR firm wants to do both. But it costs a lot more to find a new client than to keep (and grow) current ones. Research by Bain & Company shows that boosting customer retention rates by […]

Crenshaw Communications, crisis management, ImPRessions, public relations • December 31, 2019

The PR Winners Of 2019

For most experts in public relations, it’s easy to identify episodes where companies or individuals made mistakes, often making a bad situation worse. But what about the successes? Those are harder to assess. They may be about the brand that punches above its weight, one that makes a comeback against the odds, or even the […]

Crenshaw Communications, crisis management, ImPRessions, public relations • December 26, 2019

The PR Losers Of 2019

Who had the worst PR of 2019? Yes, it’s that time of year when we evaluate the mistakes, stumbles and train wrecks of public reputation over the past 12 months. There’s lots to choose from, including fresh blunders by the usual suspects like Uber and Facebook. But for this post we’re focusing on truly terrible […]