How honest should you be about your successes and failures? A friend of mine recently launched a luxury PR business. Whilst the creation of the website and the branding has gone brilliantly, finding paying clients has been harder.
How should she spin it? Should she spin it?
No-one likes a sob story, but equally fakeness is off putting. And if colleagues and industry friends don’t know the truth, they can’t help.
For journalists, it’s also a conundrum. As a freelancer should you admit to a quiet month? As a salaried staffer, is it wise to acknowledge circulation is going down?
And what about for you? If you have some brands that are, well, hard to get excited about, should you admit that to your media contacts?
Again it’s about balance.
I like a degree of honesty. No point trying to pretend the brand is going to make a journo hot under their Sezane collar if it just isn’t (this will make you look clueless). But equally it feels counter-intuitive to slag the brand off.
I guess the best action is to try and find the brand’s interesting angle or reinforce their credibility.
In an ideal world you’ll have a (maybe less profitable) brand to bring to the table that makes a hack’s eyes light up and thus makes the meeting more worthwhile to them.
The takeaway for us all?
Positivity is good, BS less so.
