The Public Relations Plan Objectives
One of the main goals of the Public Relations (PR) plan will be to provide and promote information about the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to be undertaken by the company. The company’s aim is to participate in CSR projects that actively interact and engage the consumers which will help to restore brand loyalty. According to Salmon, Poorisat and Kim (2019), when a company involves itself in CSR events, it seeks to form a close relationship with consumers and thus eliciting loyalty to the brand. The PR plan will also target to advance brand awareness and popularity. In this case, the PR strategy will be structured to reach a wide range of target audiences. The objective is to spread a positive image to many consumers which will trigger an increase in brand familiarity and awareness. Navarro et al. (2020) state that the use of communication media, such as social and mass media, helps to attain a large base of consumers relationship. Interaction with the consumers leads to the growth of brand awareness and familiarity.
Implementation of the PR Strategies
Employees and consumers are the most important stakeholders for Palm Oil. Based on the Theory-led analysis of stakeholders, the latent stakeholders, who are the consumers in this case, should be kept satisfied. The promoters stakeholders who are the employees in this case should be managed closely (Thurlow, 2017). There is a need to ensure that the two stakeholders are effectively engaged in the PR plan and CSR projects. For employees to participate successfully in any PR campaign in an organization, Thurlow (2017) argues that employees must understand the aim of the campaign and the strategy to be used. In this case, Palm Oil will invest in training the employees on how to execute the CSR projects. For example, the workers will be taken through a workshop campaign to train how to conduct the social media and mass media PR projects.
The goal of the training will be to ensure the team develops the confidence to sell the brand to the consumers. In addition, the coaching and training will act as a motivating factor for the consumers to boost their morale. This is illustrated by the work of Thurlow (2017) who states that training is an effective tool that boosts the confidence of employees, especially when undertaking a PR activity in an organization. Moreover, the company will take part in community-based projects such as tree planting where the employees will work with society. Working with the community will create a positive image of the company among the consumers which will then boost brand awareness and loyalty. Moreover, integration with the people will restore the lost glory of the company through negative publicity in the media.
The other vital stakeholder is the consumers who play an essential role in promoting the popularity of the brand. To influence the consumers, Palm Oil will use PR strategies that are quick in the distribution of information regarding the CSR activities of the company. Palm Oil intends to apply the sponsorship tool as its CSR strategy to reach consumers. For example, the company will donate 20% of each sale made to charitable events in African countries. African countries with issues such as drought will be identified. Donations will be sent to the noted countries via the company’s representatives for distribution.
To run this campaign, Palm Oil will rely on social media to persuade many consumers to buy products so that they can contribute to the charity event. This will map the brand name to many consumers consequently raising brand awareness. Lee, Yip and Chan (2018) explain that social media is an effective and affordable tool in PR as it quickly promotes a brand name to many consumers, unlike other traditional methods. This is because social media has many users. Apps such as Facebook and Twitter have a wide range of consumers. Palm Oil will develop a hashtag message about eradicating drought and hunger in Africa. The posters utilized social media about the CSR activity will be shared widely and constantly across all the platforms to extend to a wide consumer base. The biggest benefit of the application of the social media is that it is an affordable mode of communication and yet able to spread the intended message to a wide range of consumers.
Apart from social media, Palm Oil will also utilise mass media. Lee, Yip and Chan (2018) note that the mass media entails the use of TV advertising. While the social media focuses on reaching to a younger target audience, the mass media will target the older generation. The advertisement placed on TV will be designed to woo clients to purchase the company’s items as their purchase will make them take part in the planned charity activities in Africa. The intention is to not only promote the products of the company, but also to ensure that the audience feels involved and engaged in the philanthropy activities. As a result, a positive image about the company to the target audience will be developed.
Furthermore, it will also initiate brand presence among the viewers which leads to an increase in brand awareness and loyalty. Thurlow (2017) states that one of the oldest yet effective strategies of PR is mass media which helps in growing the popularity of brand. A possible challenge is that mass media advertisements are expensive and have limited time for air.
The other vital strategy that will be used for PR is the creation of links to show the events that the company will sponsor on its website. The website posters about the CSR activities in Africa, will be written in the news section of the website. Subscribers will receive the monthly newsletter detailed with information about the philanthropy activities. The website will then be linked to the Nestle social media sites to attract more visitors. This will be effective as it will lead to increased brand awareness when the consumers visit the website from the Nestle social media networks.
Evaluation of the PR Strategies
The PR strategy must be evaluated to determine if an organisation was able to achieve the set objectives of the campaign. Thurlow (2017) indicates that, it is always important to measure the effectiveness of the PR strategies used by a company to find out the possible weak points to correct. The results of each campaign will be assessed to deduce if they achieved the set goals. The social media campaign will have a target which is to reach over 15000 consumers daily. This will be quantified by the number of shares, likes and comments and analytics of the performances of the campaign posters put the networking platforms. The mass media will have a purchase code that the consumers will key in while making purchases. The number of purchases made using the code will be measured against the targeted 5000 daily purchases. Based on the performance of the campaign a decision is made on whether to keep running the campaign or end it.
The Proposed Budget
Risk Plan
There are possible risks that the PR plan may encounter if the planning is not well outlined. According to Salmon, Poorisat and Kim (2019), it is essential that before conducting a PR campaign, a comprehensive research on the possible risks is carried out to evaluate their impact on the proposed CSR. Risks should be managed as they occur but most importantly risk analysis is crucial at the planning stage. Another reason for the risk analysis is to establish the feasibility of the plan. The feasibility plan helps assess the long-term financial benefit of the PR project on the company (Salmon, Poorisat and Kim, 2019). The benefits of the plan must be analysed as well as the disadvantages. This will help determine if the plan is profitable for the company.
One of the possible risks that could affect the PR plan is that the company’s sponsorship program would have bad results. This means that the intended message would not be warmly received by the target consumers. Practical causes would be negative reception by consumers and poor management of posters on the social media. Moreover, funds may be mismanaged making the initiative fail and thus drawing a negative reputation about the company. To manage the feasible risks the company will ensure to have a monitoring and evaluation team whose main role will be to assess the performance of the campaigns every week.
Another possible risk is that the company is likely to face negative comments about the sponsorship of the charity events following its past negative image. In order to averse this risk, the company will ensure to engage the public openly on the social media and address any negative image that may face the company as early as it is detected. This is will prevent the spreading of a negative image.
The above is the proposed plan of activities of the PR plan.
References
Lee, L.W., Yip, L.S. and Chan, K. (2018) ‘An exploratory study to conceptualize press engagement behavior with public relations practitioners’, Public Relations Review, 44(4), pp. 490-500.
Navarro, C. et al. (2020) ‘Challenge of new gatekeepers for public relations. A comparative analysis of the role of social media influencers for European and Latin American professionals,’ Public Relations Review, 46(2), p. 881.
Salmon, C.T., Poorisat, T. and Kim, S.H. (2019) ‘Third-person effect in the context ofpublic relations and corporate communication’, Public Relations Review, 45(4), p.823.
Thurlow, A. (2017) ‘Evaluating excellence: a model of evaluation for public relations practice in organizational culture and context,’ Public Relations Review, 43(1), pp.71-79.