I had one of those moments recently when the penny dropped.
Not so much for me but for the chap who popped over to my stand to ask me about PR.
He didn’t quite GET it.
“Is it advertising?”
“Marketing?”
“Where does it fit in?”
Now, as luck would have it, we’d both just seen the advertising legend, Rory Sutherland, on stage in the morning session of the National Entrepreneurs Convention.
During his highly amusing talk, Rory told a story about a fella I’d never heard of, “Bet A Million Gates”.
Back in the 1800’s, Gates was flogging a new-fanged piece of kit, barbed-wire, aka The Devil’s Rope” apparently.
Charming.
Anyway, old Gates knew there was reticence about his product, however much he advertised it and extolled it’s benefits, features and costs (marketing) and he came up with a plan.
Or rather, a stunt.
He built a wire-fence pen in the middle of San Antonio and bunged in (technical cowboy term there folks) some of the toughest and wildest longhorns in all of Texas.
Then, Gates took bets from the excited masses gathered around as to whether the powerful beasts could break through the fragile-seeming wire.
Spoiler alert…
They couldn’t.
The orders rolled in.
Legend says Gates described it as: “lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust”.
Now it’s simply called barbed wire.
Now it’s simply called barbed wire.
I call it PR.
GS.