The hardest words 2
Posted on Dec 08 2006 | Tagged as: Words
Today we were visited by Simon Lewis, the Director of Corporate affairs at Vodafone and brother of Telegraph editor William Lewis, here to talk to us about various PR-related things[1].
Actually, most of those “PR-related things” were just about his own career, including a short attempt at promoting Vodafone. While he was talking about their attempt to break into overseas markets (as virtually everyone in Europe owns a mobile phone, whereas only a small percentage of Indians do), Hannah asked about what they would do in the hypothetical scenario of a “saturation point” - the case where everyone in the world has a mobile phone.
The two obvious answers are:
- Try to sell them newer technology, if it exists, and
- Try to ensure that everyone is using their products/services and not anyone else’s
Simon Lewis waffled on for five minutes about how that point, if it happened at all, was a long way away and mentioned the utterly tangential fact that some company or other in China had 300M customers with 50-60,000 signing up every year.
In other words: “I don’t know”.
It is, to me, a shining example of the stereotypical PR executive’s answer.
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[1] If you’re thinking this might not strictly be relevant to a room full of trainee journalists, I’d probably agree with you. But the PR students have dutifully sat and listened to other guest lecturers talk about subjects irrelevant to them, too.
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