Public Relations....

In the events industry mass media and methods are often too expensive, and so use public relations as a way of communication between an organisation and the public. Public relations can help an individual or organisation to grow the public opinion of them by what the organisation do, say, and what others think of the organisation. Most forms of PR are free and if done correctly can have great results.

Public relations is all about raising awareness of your brand, without it no one will know about you. PR puts your brand in front of people that you want to know about you.

The uses of PR can be categorised as the following:

Customer Retention: using PR activity such as events, launches and media liaison to support marketing push to retain customers, grow sales and market share.
Investment: using PR activities such as corporate hospitaltiy to encourage new and further investment via the development of investor relations.
Barganing Status: using PR to build brands in order to achieve better relationships with suppliers and customers.
Staff Relations: Using PR to portray a healthy organisation in order to attract and maintain a desired quality of staff.
Business Development: Initiating and building new businesses through PR activitiy such as events, corporate hospitality and business- to- business communications in order to develop business from new or existing customers.
(G. Masterman & E. Wood, 2006)

It may not increase sales immediately as it is a long term strategy. It is all about building relationships and informing people of the organisations or individuals background so that if somebody wants to go to the event or wants to know more they will remember you. A combination of public relations and social media can help position you in the market, connect with your target audience and build trust.

Crufts and Maverick Sabre will be using different kinds of public relations to make them more successful, here is what they will be doing:

Advertorials
Feature Articles
Advance Articles
Spokespeople and expertise
listings
Reader offers & competitions
Created news

Both of the events want to get their objectives out to the publics to promote Crufts and Maverick Sabre Tour. They want to create awareness and knowledge, ensuring that everybody has an idea of what they are about and to make sure people know when the events are and the purpose of them, plus, where to go for more information. They want to raise awareness to the local communities of how the event will benefit being in the area and to let stakeholders know of the perks of being involved with the events.

Crufts has been around for a long time and so already has the trust and connection with the people that already go there, so using PR means that they are getting a wider audience and to also getting people to talk about the event again as it is a year since the last one you need to put it in front of people faces so they remember. Maverick Sabre will be touring around 8 different places and so all public relations will be used in all of these areas to generate talk of the event and to get people to come to the event. It may also increase reputation for the places that he will be performing at, and loyal fans that follow Maverick Sabre throughout the whole of his tour may want to go back and visit a place again which generates tourism.