Kudler Fine Foods Pr Campaign

PR Campaign: Overview

Kudler Fine Foods is an upscale specialty food store featuring the best domestic and imported foods in three California locations; La Jolla, Del Mar, and Encinitas. Kudler wants to position itself as a leader in embracing diversity in the workplace. Kudler will create a public relations (PR) campaign that will address the following items; PR issues, target audience, ethical implications, market research plan, how the campaign will affect Kudler’s marketing function, and finally analyze the similarities and differences between proactive and reactive PR (Apollo, 2007).

PR Issues

Social, economic and political issues arise when dealing with embracing diversity in the workplace. Kudler is faced with issues of public’s perceptions and opinions as well as the law. Employees represent the company and employees are important publics because they know the ins and outs of the organization which makes them credible to all different publics. The more diverse the workplace, the more publics the organization can reach. Legal reasons are often why companies start having diverse workplaces. “Women and minorities may be a part of an employee public, but additionally, from a broader perspective, they constitute significant publics who can damage an institution’s reputation. Insensitivity to women and minorities in all types of relationships has cost profit and nonprofit groups both money and status,” (Newson, Turk, and Kruckeberg p. 96). Once issues are clearly identified, five steps need to be followed to solve these issues. These steps are sensing the problem, defining the problem, deriving solutions, implementing them and evaluating outcomes (p. 97). Kudler’s PR specialist needs to know everything that is going on inside the organization as well as on the outside. The PR specialist needs to know how the company relates to other publics.

Some people think that diversity in the workplace creates problems and challenges but it has good benefits to a company. When Kudler educates its staff and managers on how to work with a diverse environment, this education with also help prevent discrimination. If a diverse workforce is managed well, staff will stay put longer and be more productive.

Target Audience

The primary and target audience is Kudler employees. The secondary audience is new hires, the public, and community members who shop in Kudler stores, including vendors and suppliers of Kudler’s three locations. In order for Kudler successfully to position itself as a leader in embracing diversity in the workplace, management must first gather information from the employees, vendors, suppliers, and customers on the attitudes, opinions, and behaviors of each in regard to diversity issues. Once the information is collected, the data can be analyzed and assessed allowing management to identify employees’ appeals or points of interest and lifestyles. This data will help management identify problems and opportunities that can be used in conjunction with whichever appeals or approaches might work best. Once management has the problems and opportunities identified, prioritizing them by importance to employees will save time and allow more important items to be addressed first. Narrowing down the prioritized list into a problem statement should be done next, allowing Kudler to recognize any special requirements that will be necessary to influence the audience (Lattimore, Baskin, Heiman, Toth, and VanLeuven, 2004, p. 120).

Ethical Implications

Ethical implications for Kudler would include the public’s perception and opinion of how diverse Kudler’s workforce is and if more women and minorities are needed to even out the workforce. Kudler could also put together a company code of conduct that all employees would need to read and sign to help address any ethical or diversity issues that might arise within the company. Kudler also needs to post on its intranet the employee demographics for all stores the same as they did for the HR group. This would help give them a positive image with the employees and the public to be able to see the workforce mix. Kudler employees who are promoted to supervisory positions get training in motivating workers, Equal Employment Opportunity claims, and sexual harassment. Kudler currently encourages employees to ask management about any type of discrimination without any fear of discipline. Kudler should add diversity training to this mix of training. Kudler should also add a diversity council which would consist of employees from all three stores including employees from entry level up to executives in an effort to embrace diversity in the workplace. This council would help educate employees about different cultures, celebrations,