New Studies Reveal…

Those three words can, for a journalist, be a life-saver as statistics or trends make for a great start to a feature. There’s either an affirmation of something the reader recognises in themself or a ‘ooh I didn’t know that’ moment.

But there seems to have been a sudden awakening among a lot of public relations and marketing people that putting ‘new studies reveal’ in the subject field of a press release can get them attention.

However, a brand commissioning its own (small scale) research or analysis into a niche subject and then promoting the results as a major survey can be a bit cheeky – a closer look at the figures might be interesting but they’re too thin to hang a big feature on.

So my advice to PRs considering this approach is to be judicious with your use of this technique. You don’t want a genuinely impactful piece of research to get lost in the noise of other bits and bobs of random numbers and graphs. 

I was tempted to conduct a small survey among my deskmates to back me up on this story, but seven out of ten of them were busy getting a coffee.