public opinion. In addition, events create confidence and pride for the staff in the enterprise, contribute to strengthening the relationship between departments in the enterprise and increase the ability to propagate from the employees in the enterprise.
1.2.3.3. Crisis management
Crisis management is arguably the most difficult aspect of PR. Many companies fail to do this well and it can lead to bankruptcy. Typically, crises fall into three categories:
- Related to the company: The company is accused of bribery, tax evasion, work accidents, environmental pollution...
- Product related: Products harmful to health…
- Related to the board of directors: Embezzlement, violation of law, unethical behavior...
If crisis management is done well and incidents are handled promptly, damage can be minimized, or even warned of potential risks. Or better yet, it will create customer confidence in the business's operations and products as well as its reputation.
1.2.3.4. Government Relation
Government relations are also important to many businesses. The company’s PR department may assign a person to handle government relations (sometimes lobbying) to serve its business operations. For example, companies that deal in sensitive products such as pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and tobacco must have good relations with the government.
1.2.3.5. Reputation Management
It is difficult for a business to gain a reputation, but it is even more difficult to manage and maintain it. Many people think that only large corporations need to maintain and protect their reputation, which is a terrible mistake. Businesses need to know
that even ordinary citizens can affect the prestige of
reputation of the whole country. Therefore, this activity is a very necessary and important task in building and developing the brand .
1.2.3.6. Investor Relations
Relations with investors, for example in the banking sector, it is necessary to have good relations with investors who are shareholders, depositors... How to take care of them, what preferential policies... PR people must make smart choices.
1.2.3.7. Corporate Social Responsibility
The concept of social responsibility has recently been mentioned as a type of charitable activity of enterprises. These activities involve enterprises donating money to do charitable purposes such as "for the poor" and supporting flood victims. Its effect is to make the public remember the image of the organization through useful activities for society without advertising in an obvious way. For example, Foster Beer is not only satisfied with the "Australian style" advertising slogan but also organizes a campaign to sponsor hundreds of millions of VND for Da Nang Hospital, Coca-Cola sponsors 130,000 USD for the "Coca-Cola Scholarship Fund" of the Ministry of Education and the Central Youth Union.
These community activities are very effective in enhancing the brand image in the public mind. The public benefits practically from such PR programs and therefore trusts the brand more.
1.3. The necessity of using PR in the export business activities of Vietnamese enterprises.
1.3.1. The importance of PR as a tool to support export business
PR is an effective tool to help businesses build relationships with partners around the world and increase export volume. Indeed, with diverse and flexible activities, PR activities effectively support
for business activities for Vietnamese enterprises doing export business. The role of PR activities in enterprises doing export business is shown in the following aspects:
1.3.1.1. Brand building and development
If we consider branding as the sum of all interaction points, PR is an indispensable strategic tool in helping businesses fulfill this mission: "A brand launched without hope of winning on the PR battlefield is destined for failure" 6 .
Two-thirds of US marketing directors and brand managers believe that PR plays a more important role than advertising in building and promoting brands 7 .
In the current market context, with a wide variety of goods and services, consumers have difficulty distinguishing and evaluating products. Each business tries to create a style, an image, an impression, and a unique reputation for its products in order to give the product a unique image that is easily perceived by customers, in other words, to bring the brand into the minds of customers.
And according to P.Kotler, "Businesses need to gather activities to create a specific position for the product in the market."
Businesses build and develop their brands using many methods such as advertising, PR, pricing, etc. In which, it can be said that PR activities are activities that have positive effects with action programs that are meticulously and carefully designed and planned to achieve public recognition and inform them about the activities and goals of the business. The main role of PR is to help businesses convey messages to customers and their important public groups. When conveying these messages, PR helps products easily enter the awareness of customers, or specifically
6 : p4, Al Ries & Laura Ries, Advertising Abdicates & PR Takes the Throne, Tre Publishing House
7 : http://www.doanhnhan360.com/Desktop.aspx/Quan-ly-360/Quan-ly/Vai_tro_PR_trong_xay_dung_quang_ba_thuong_hieu/
rather than helping customers easily associate each time they encounter a brand. For example, Unilever launched the program "Donate unused school uniforms to OMO detergent" for female students in remote areas, or recently the program "6 million glasses of milk for poor children" of Vinamilk. These programs are charitable and serve the community, so they have won the sympathy of the public. Moreover, PR messages are less commercial because they use intermediaries or articles in the press, because they contain a variety of information, so they easily create sympathy and are easily accepted by the public.
1.3.1.2. Building and maintaining the company's image and reputation
Building a corporate image is essentially similar to building a product brand but at a higher level.
Currently, promoting the corporate image through PR is considered the most effective and cheapest. Advertising images are what businesses announce about themselves, with general features, only creating an impression of the business for customers but not objective. Meanwhile, PR will help businesses let others talk about the business, that is, the press's multi-dimensional assessment of the business based on information proactively provided by PR. If businesses know how, instead of spending hundreds of millions on advertising on the cover of a newspaper, businesses only need half of this amount, with the professional organization of PR, information about new products, business activities only need to go through a press conference to appear in dozens of newspapers, creating a better impression and trust with consumers.
1.3.1.3. Crisis resolution
Businesses call crisis a nightmare and crisis resolution the most difficult job of PR activities. It is the way to deal with the crisis that shows the professionalism and class of the person doing it.
PR profession
In today's hot and competitive market, it is difficult for any business or organization to be confident that it will never be involved in a crisis. Because any incident such as a drug causing side effects, soft drink poisoning, work accident, wastewater causing environmental pollution... can be the "trigger" for a terrible crisis, once the press "jumps in" and information spreads uncontrollably. When there are unusual phenomena, journalists often appear very quickly and approach all subjects related to the incident. In such a situation, deliberately covering up, covering up the incident, or providing inconsistent information, having no official spokesperson, and confusing internal staff. That is like adding fuel to the fire. Crises always follow a certain curve, and must reach a peak before they can go down. Therefore, being hasty and wanting to immediately extinguish the crisis by all means is a mistake and will have bad consequences. Turning a crisis into a new opportunity is the ideal outcome and demonstrates the role of PR.
The crisis management solutions that businesses can use are: Building a crisis management manual and process: consider all potential risks that can cause a crisis; prepare and practice the crisis management process; determine the responsibilities of the crisis management department. When a bad situation occurs, the most important thing is to stay calm and activate the crisis management department. Synthesize and analyze information, develop strategies and methods for crisis management. Businesses must absolutely respect the official speaking rules, quickly synchronize and establish information channels with the press and related parties: management agencies, customers, etc. When deciding to act, businesses must accept temporary losses, value reputation and long-term effectiveness, and then plan to rebuild reputation in the "post-crisis" period.
1.3.1.4. Product marketing
It can be said that PR is another P in the marketing mix after Product, Place, Price, Promotion, etc., representing
Perception. Businesses combine marketing activities with PR to create the strongest impact. PR brings information about the company and products to consumers. Usually, when businesses launch a new product on the market, they often let PR go first to create a new awareness in the community, awaken a certain need of the community through press articles, followed by television footage or a series of newspaper advertisements, increasing awareness of the brand product for target customers. PR has done what most marketers of businesses consider their goal: specific information about the message of the business and products to customers. Through PR, messages are conveyed to target customers in a more specific way than advertising. In addition, it is easy to encounter risks if PR is not used in addition to marketing, such as: how can the community accept a product when society does not have a good perception of it. Moreover, without PR, the remaining marketing tools (advertising, promotion, etc.) cannot handle the crisis when there is a market incident. Therefore, a marketing campaign when combined with PR activities will be more valuable than the sum of the effects of each separate activity.
Table 1.3: Some ways to support marketing goals with PR
Marketing objectives
Support PR activities | |
- Building lasting relationships more stable and long-term with customers | - Organize events to entertain customers - Build quarterly newsletters to send to customers |
- Raise public awareness them about the company | - Ensure positive communication levels - Let customers visit the company |
- Promote new products more widely | - Try to get your article published in professional and consumer press. - Let try new products |
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1.3.2. PR application trends of businesses around the world in export business
Researcher Al Ries in his famous research and book “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR” called the 21st century the era of PR. He believes that PR plays an extremely important role in the long-term success of a business, as well as its brand, to the point that business executives (CEOs) will have to invest a lot of their time in PR. Al Ries asserts that in the future, PR will play a strategic role in brand building. This will be the prominent trend of PR development in the coming time 8 .
PR has a great influence on the success of a brand, which in turn leads to the success of the business and the economy. For example, the success of Korea when entering the Vietnamese market. First are the movies with attractive content for viewers, from those movies, through beautiful actors, Korean goods and products quickly penetrated the Vietnamese market and were not only accepted but also very popular with Vietnamese consumers.
According to American experts, PR is developing today as a strategic business tool for businesses, including businesses conducting export business activities, and is an extremely important factor in every marketing campaign, especially in today's era when economic activities play an important role and everything is becoming a brand, from a product brand to a country name that can be exploited and bring huge economic benefits.
Besides branding, PR activities are also used to influence public opinion, thereby leading to policy changes through activities.
8: p9, Al Ries & Laura Ries, Advertising Abdicates & PR Takes Over, Tre Publishing House
lobbying. It is a trend that is becoming more and more popular in the process of development and democratization of society. The concept of policy here is not only at the scope of one country but many countries, or it can be international policy.
In Australia, it is estimated that about 250 million dollars are spent on PR each year. Large corporations and groups in the world such as Microsoft, Intel, The Body Shop… are known as typical successes of PR activities.
Australian PR experts assess that in the 21st century, the PR industry will create values that are capable of creating and maintaining good relationships with all customers, employees, suppliers and related partners; must demonstrate consistency in words, actions, action plans, and do this in a transparent manner. This contributes to building a sustainable future, creating conditions to promote financial improvement and social progress.
In short, the development trend of PR in the world is affected by socio-economic factors, issues such as the globalization of the economy, the development of science and technology, increased social dynamism, decreased job stability... and PR is and will become a powerful tool of the economy in general and of export business activities in particular.
1.3.3. Objective prospects for applying PR activities to export business of Vietnamese enterprises in the context of Vietnam being a member of WTO
1.3.3.1. The competitiveness of brands, especially in the context of Vietnam being a member of the WTO, contributes to increasing the need for PR.
In the context of globalization, according to the soft border theory, the borders of nations are goods and culture; the borders of nations are expanded to the extent that goods and culture of nations are expanded. It can be seen that brands are no longer simply to identify a product or service.
not only is it a way to assert a country's position, but it is also a way to compete on the world stage.