Targeting a market in Spain (2)

Picking up from the 03.09.09 post, PR plan was rooted in the client’s marketing strategy (there are confidential aspects that I won‘t go into) but this overview is in the public domain: the world is experiencing an ever-increasing per capita requirement for water while at the same time uncompromised sources get scarcer and scarcer. Water reuse is the key to the puzzle and senior decision makers need reassurance of the efficiency, reliability and cost-effectiveness of the technology.

The big annual water event was coming up in Zaragoza and the client had taken a good stand. I arrived during the build up and walked to halls to find where the media would be. In those terms it was the best attended event I’ve seen for a long time. When the show opened the next day we (the client and I) were immediately in the halls making appointments with editors and journalists.

One by one, over the course of the next two days, we got them all back to the client stand for a briefing. We identified unique angles for each journalist and floated the idea of contributing major articles, doing interviews, commenting etc. We had staff from the local office on hand to translate where necessary - but it rarely was. In a face to face situation English was fine because in each case we graded our language to suit our visitor. And our discussions had context because we had all the exhibits and images on the stand to help us.

Sure, there was a lot of follow-up over the next few months. But there’s no doubt that we really cracked it during those two days in Spain.