Publicity stunts

Although they should be approached with great care, a publicity stunt can be a great way of drawing attention to your business. Forget the idea of doing something outrageous just to attract attention. Instead your publicity stunt should be a carefully planned and well thought out event.

It can be any event you do that is different and likely to attract attention (especially from the media). They key is standing out and being different.

For example, if your furniture store is the most modern and fashionable in town, have a massive bonfire of a load of old chintzy sofas. Or borrow a tank and drive over them (not as hard as you think – as with most things in life, if you don’t ask, you don’t get!)

Encourage sampling at your restaurant with Charity Wednesdays, where every Wednesday night all the profits go to a different charity each week. Plan it well in advance and each charity will make sure you’re full that night, to make the most of their opportunity!

Promote your plumbing business, by making art out of pipes and displaying them in the town centre! Draw attention to your car dealers by borrowing some famous movie cars and doing a rally through town, leading to your garage (where you just happen to have a sale on).

The Publicity Heaven team once went to a new cinema opening, where they hired a helicopter and a stunt team to pretend to be terrorists taking over the cinema. Then James Bond showed up, took out the terrorists, and saved the opening night! It was several years ago, but the most impressive cinema opening ever – and the amount of media coverage they got from it was huge!

Here are a few idea kickstarters:

• Attempt a world record
• Make a fantasy into real life (James Bond at the cinema)
• Do something people would love to do, but wouldn’t dare
• Do something people wouldn’t expect you to do
• Tie it into a current news story
• Ask yourself if it’s so different that it will make people tell their colleagues about it at work (word of mouth is publicity after all)

Make sure your stunt doesn’t have too much of a commercial message included. It’s OK to give away free product, or host stuff at your website – but if it’s too commercial, the media won’t touch it.

As part of your stunt planning, factor in how much you must tell the media about what you are doing. There’s no point going to all that trouble, and hoping they will guess it will be something spectacular and worth covering. Summarise in a press release what you will be doing, so editors can see it will be worth covering.

PUBLICITY HEALTH WARNING: Be wary of publicity stunts that go wrong or get out of control, exposing your business to risk. Challenging kids to eat as many free burgers as they can in 10 minutes to promote your takeaway might seem like a good idea, until the kids start looking green in front of the cameras!

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