Services

Public Relations

From your receptionist to your CEO, everyone carries a message that impacts your reputation. Further, the speed of communications has enabled a level of transparency today which exposes a company, creating greater risk than ever before. Public relations creates awareness and support among an organization's constituents for its products, services, management views, intellectual capital and its distinct approach to doing business. In the process, it helps build credibility, manage risk, establish reputation and drive sales.

As we practice it, public relations employs multiple marketing techniques: media relations, printed materials, speeches and seminars, presentations, surveys, Internet-based strategies, digital media, direct response and special events. We also integrate ROI feedback and measurement techniques into programs.

Investor Relations

The Makovsky Investor Relations practice assists companies in achieving the highest sustainable value for their securities, which reduces the cost of capital, facilitates acquisitions, incentivizes management and enhances shareholder value.

Throughout the years, we have helped clients — from large to microcap companies and from the establishment firm to the pre-IPO and the newly public — achieve valuations commensurate with their prospects. The key to maximizing valuations is relationship-building with the investment community, visibility in the financial media, and communicating an investment rationale that is the essence of a company's message.

Crisis Management

Crises can be defining moments for an organization's reputation and often strike when a company seems least prepared. However, most crises can be anticipated, so we work with clients to plan response strategies before management finds itself in the whirlwind.

Our experience spans business-to-business, investor and consumer crises, such as product recalls, attacks on product integrity, litigation, labor action, mergers and acquisitions, earnings surprises and management changes. We strategically manage client crises to resolution, communicating as appropriate with both internal and external audiences.

Corporate Strategy: Aligning Communications with Business Objectives

The corporate turmoil of the past few years has made it clear that loss of credibility – and loss of trust – equals loss of value. Engineering the communications strategies that enhance credibility has become a critical board-level function.

Put simply, Makovsky’s Corporate Strategy practice aligns corporate communications strategies with business objectives, through in-depth assessment of communications programs, CEO/board communications counsel and implementation, crisis assignments, integrated communications and, when appropriate, editorial services such as op-ed writing for top-tier media.

Integrated Communications

Whether they are consumer or business-to-business, private sector or public, today’s target audiences are sophisticated and highly individuated. One marketing venue alone is rarely sufficient to reach them with the messages that matter. Makovsky + Company focuses on providing clients with powerful, fully integrated solutions that draw upon the full range of marketing disciplines.

We will work with you to build a coordinated, synchronized, multi-channel communications strategy that reaches every market segment, every critical constituency, with coordinated and powerful messages, using the right media and the most appropriate venues. The result? More cost-efficient, higher impact campaigns that build brands and maximize customer loyalty and profitability.

Online Fluency

Makovsky's Online Fluency practice helps clients navigate the important new communications channel of consumer-generated, or social, media. We penetrate new communities and extend the range of interest in our clients' programs through a wide range of techniques – including online strategy, multimedia relations, online issues and crisis management, monitoring and blog planning – with the goal of building our clients' sphere of influence, helping to shape their brands and communicate more effectively and efficiently with customers, shareholders, employees and other stakeholders.

Branding

The Branding + Interactive practice employs a unique, systematic approach to articulating, symbolizing and communicating your brand. Combining traditional methods of corporate identity with the emerging techniques of interactive media, we can create a complete visual and verbal branding system for your company:

• Brand Architecture: competitive audits, positioning research
• Corporate Identity: logo design, signage, document graphics
• Online Environments: website design, content management
• Internal Communications: newsletters, presentation templates
• Marketing Communications: brochures, collateral, advertising

Litigation PR

When a high-profile case is in litigation, managing public advocacy in the media is critical to the final outcome. Litigation public relations can help to diminish and/or eliminate the business disruption caused by current or threatened legal actions, as well as influence the legal outcome in the company's best interests.

Our experience includes European Union cross-border suits, CEO/senior management indictments, violation of EPA laws and FDA actions against pharmaceutical companies. We work with our clients to develop the most appropriate communications strategy, whether that may involve engaging the media or staying out of the press. Carefully coordinating a company's legal strategy with all its verbal and written communications is critical to achieving the best results when a legal action is brought.

Customized Metrics

We believe that clients have the right to expect the same kind of revealing qualitative and quantitative measures of return on investment for their public relations and investor relations campaigns as they do for their marketing, advertising and direct response initiatives.

Each set of tools is unique to every client. Some clients want elaborate benchmark studies to assess changes in attitude, awareness and usage among key constituencies. Others want revealing — but simple and inexpensive — assessments of media-generating activities, such as the total volume of coverage, the number of impressions generated and equivalency value of advertising.