Hi Everybody!
I’m Professor Arien Rozelle.
I teach public relations courses in the Department of Media and Communication.
In addition to teaching and research, I also am a practitioner.
I handle media relations for clients, and have done so for over 10 years now.
One of my clients is Black Button Distilling, located in Rochester, New York.
I thought I would talk to you a little bit about Black Button’s ability to pivot during
the COVID-19 crisis.
First, Black Button was founded in 2012 by third-generation entrepreneur Jason Barrett
when he was just 24 years old.
It's the first grain to glass craft distillery in Rochester since Prohibition.
Black Button Distilling has gone on to win multiple awards from industry leaders, tasting
experts, and consumers.
But, like a lot of business owners, Jason wasn’t prepared for a global pandemic when
he first developed his business plan.
So, when the Governor called on the state’s businesses to voluntarily close
to stop the spread of the coronavirus, Black Button Distilling was complying and began
to shut down its manufacturing plant.
Internally, discussions took place about how they could shift the company’s operations
from making spirits to making hand sanitizer.
And, within 48 hours, the hand sanitizer ingredients had been sourced, as did the packaging, the
building of systems was ready to go, and ordering and shipping were planned out and they had
made a test batch of hand sanitizer.
That’s 48 hours.
That’s unbelievably fast.
And then, within a week, Black Button went from bottling a thousand bottles of their spirits
to making more than 30,000 bottles of hand sanitizer.
In one week.
So, I have handled their media relations since 2014, a couple of years after they began.
I know a good story when I see one.
And I knew this was a good news story in the midst of a lot of really bad news because
of the pandemic.
So, Black Button was the first distillery in the state to produce hand sanitizer,
which made this an interesting story for the news and it really stood out.
We crafted a press release that went out to local, regional, and national as well as spirits
industry publications about the fact that Black Button was pivoting and creating hand
sanitizer.
And it was going to be for Rochester area hospitals and at-risk community groups.
As soon as the press release went out, the media calls began rolling in.
But, because of this new coronavirus environment we were living in, the speed and the volume
of incoming requests with social distancing and mandatory work from home orders presented
some challenges that we had to deal with.
Email was really slow as a channel of communication, so we sped up our ability to respond to the
media and to communicate internally with each other by using text messages, and of course,
all television interviews were conducted via zoom or if they were on camera they were done
with the reporters six feet away.
All of this was nothing we had ever done before, not just Black Button, but generally, it wasn't
was going on before.
The nature of the coronavirus outbreak and Black Button’s quick introduction of an
entirely new product also meant that information was ever-evolving, both about the coronavirus
and hand sanitizer that was being created.
So we had to constantly communicate with each other in order to provide the media with emerging
details about the availability of the hand sanitizer, its manufacturing process, the
ingredients, the cost, and ordering information.
So, we had lots of coverage, all major Rochester-based television stations, local newspapers, and
radio stations covered the story, and many, if not most of them, covered it more than
once.
News outlets in surrounding markets also picked up the story, and so did national business
and spirits industry publications.
We also had op-ads placed and even a celebrity endorsement.
All in all, if we were to have measured the impact of this media based on ad value, it
would have been about 1.6 million dollars in advertisements.
Our earned media coverage strategy proved successful.
At this point, Black Button Distilling is the largest manufacturer of hand sanitizer
in the State of New York.
So, this opportunity was one that I will be sharing with my students, and I look forward to telling
them more about what went on behind the scenes in terms of media outreach and public relations
for a local business that has really done good during the coronavirus.
If you want to learn more, take some of my public relations classes.