Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Always follow the market

We always tell clients “follow the market,” but we recently had a prime example of it.

We are doing the public relations campaign for a hand-washing monitoring company, a company whose service could be used in a number of industries.

The service was invented because 125,000 people die annually from heathcare-associated infections (HAIs), more than 50 percent of which are cause by lack of hand-washing before and after touching patients.

Other markets—such as restaurants and hospitality, grocery and education, even day-care—were included.

In researching the grocery industry, it became apparent that few items in the store actually were touched by anyone. Most items were processed and packaged elsewhere.

For the website and brochure, we used statistics on food recalls that were pertinent to both industries.

Even though it hadn’t been part of our initial plan, once we saw the statistics, we updated our contact list for food processing and packaging trade journals, revised the release to target that industry and sent it to those editors.

Voila! Calls started coming in. As many, at least, as the client was getting from the initial market—even though only 5,000 people die annually from food poisoning.

Thanks to barcodes, though, food-borne illness from grocery items is easy to track while HAIs are much more complex.

Whether this will become a major market for the client remains to be seen, but it is one we will continue to target.

For more information, call us at (916) 455-4790 or visit our website at www.dellrichards.com.