Hello, it’s Will here again and this blog post is about day three of my work experience at Octopus Public Relations.

Today allowed me to gain an insight into another aspect of the marketing world. For the majority of the day I and Paul brainstormed ideas on how to market a client attending an event. Following this Paul suggested do some research into PR stunts, and from that I discovered some stunts which had great appeal to me personally. Although they are all used with the same intent of publicising a product or company, the manner in which they do this are all very different.

For example, my favourite of the stunts I have read about, is the series of dancing flash mobs organised by, the mobile-phone provider, T-mobile. The technique they employed to create mass appeal for their service is to seemingly bring people together, this creates positive emotions and so alongside corporate branding, people relate these feelings to the company. Running parallel to this, the huge amount of publicity such large events create, provided a network with which to pass on the positive feelings to a wider audience. Therefore a seemingly basic concept for a publicity stunt proves to be far more successful than previously thought.
On the other hand, stunts of more complexity also create public interest. For instance, when the Soviet Mir Space Station crash landed on 23rd March 2003, the American food retailer, Taco-Bell created a “piggyback” publicity stunt by promising a free taco to all 281 million Americans, if debris from the craft hit a 40 foot by 40 foot vinyl target floating ten miles off the coast of Australia. Even though experts in the field of space travel described the chances of anything hitting the target as “slim to none”, thousands of Americans sat for hours watching the craft break up via a live feed on the Taco Bell website. I personally think any company should be happy with such a large amount of publicity.

Overall the research has taught me that, a promotional stunt is not about how great a product or service is, it is about interesting people, breaking the mould that companies sometimes find themselves filling.