SME News Q4 2023/ 32 Established by a former editor at the Daily Mail Group, Richard Stevenson, Quick Brown Fox PR has been operating under his watchful eye since its founding in 2004. Fed up with receiving uninteresting, flat press releases in his previous position, Richard noticed a sizeable gap in the market for a PR firm boasting a compelling streak of editorial content at its core. Best Marketing Communications Agency 2023 - South East England awardee Quick Brown Fox PR is today driven by this wealth of experience, consistently operating with a strategy of doing the right thing for the brand and its goals, rather than merely bragging big numbers to higher-ups. We have the privilege of catching-up with Richard, who provides further insight into the business, his career, and what makes Quick Brown Fox PR positively stand out in an industry that often gets a bad rap. As a journalist and editor, Richard Stevenson would receive thousands of PR pitches every week from so-called ‘traditional’ PR agencies, with these mostly comprising of irrelevant, poorly in-tune, and badly written pieces which simply missed audiences and did not do nearly enough to get through the editorial net. Since many of these agencies and their practitioners stem from a background in the marketing sector, they simply do not possess an understanding of how journalists work, what they look for, and how to deliver stellar releases that succeed in capturing attention. Richard explains that many of these agencies are driven by a marketing mindset, and that journalists frequently read a few words of these pieces before hitting the delete button. Across his time in editorial, Richard saw far too many agencies attempt to make a quick buck by peddling any PR that they could for high-paying clients, providing the wrong media in a desperate attempt to garner some press traction and justify the rates. For Richard, this is the primary reason why PR has a fairly bad name in today’s culture and is oft dismissed as being merely smoke and mirrors. By standing firm with a steadfast commitment to always doing the right thing throughout every element of the business, a B2B PR agency has been crafted whereby proud work with journalists is carried out who know exactly how to engage a relevant audience and deliver the right pitches at the right time. The team work harder than any other UK comms agency to get the articles of its clients in front of the correct sort of media for their business, even if the reach is tiny, as this method is substantially more effective than hitting the big numbers in publications that are no way relevant to a brand. Of course, where the situation calls for it, Quick Brown Fox PR is more than willing to go national, doing so with its consumer brands such as the booking app Booksy or Witt’s pizza ovens, and boasts great relationships with this sort of press. What this ultimately connotes is an unbridled dedication to doing whatever it takes to successfully market a client’s brand, focusing on the tried and tested quality over quantity approach. Some of the client agencies take some convincing to come around to this method, but Richard and the team remain totally committed and refuse to compromise on this promise to do right by clients, journalists and staff. Methods adopted by the company to promote success for clientele are far-reaching, and include bringing brand awareness to consumers, thought leadership positioning in B2B vertical media, or even hooking the brand up with the right influencers. Perhaps uniquely, things do not stop there, with the company also leveraging its gained media coverage for clients and putting this back into their sales channels, whether this be managing social media output, curating online retailer newsletters, or driving this exposure into industry events, awards, and conferences. Richard explains, “it’s about using PR to drive the brand, align with the goals of the company and maximise the actual measurable effectiveness.” Perhaps the key element that causes Quick Brown Fox PR to stand out from the competition is that it is simply a PR agency, and aims to be nothing more, not offering design, website building, the creation of SEO algorithms, and certainly not advertising, unlike many other ‘all-in-one’ solutions that ultimately lack a true area of speciality. Rather, the business places paramount importance in generating “earned media”, as having a respected journalist and editor such as Richard talk highly of a brand’s products or services is infinitely more powerful than quick-fix advertising. Further adding fuel to the fire of the famous PR vs advertising debate is the timelessness of PR in comparison. As Richard eloquently describes it, “a year’s ad campaign will last you a year, a year’s PR will be building your brand for years to come.” After all, editorial pieces, great reviews, and news stories will stick around on Google searches indefinitely. It is a mindset such as this that has resulted in the company garnering some spectacular results in recent years, such as its campaign with Scandinavian vacuum cleaner brand ROIDIMI, which went from totally unknown in 2019 to being the fifth-highest searched for in early 2023 across the UK, as a result of a PR campaign that featured exactly zero advertising. Other notable clients over the past 12 months include Witt pizza ovens and the Turkish brand Vestel, with both of these being afforded likeminded expert treatment to elevate them above their competitors, with the former winning an award from Expert Reviews for being a product of the year, and the latter being supported in the cementing of its position as the UK’s leading supplier in the field of digital displays and interactive screens. Statistics like this enable the company to boast that since its launch in 2019, it is yet to lose a client to another PR agency. Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Competition
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