For your company to succeed in today’s highly competitive marketplace, your challenge isn’t only to get customers to recognize your company’s brand and buy your products. It’s also getting customers to live and relate to your brand.

With the power to influence public opinion, the news media play a major role in shaping your company’s brand. Consumers base their perceptions of your company and even make buying decisions because of stories they read in newspapers, watch on television and hear on radio.

Media relations is a vital component of a successful branding campaign.

According to data from Wirthlin Group, 28 percent of Americans say news articles impact their buying decision, while only 8 percent say ads do so.

Here are some media-relations tips for company executives:

In Jack Trout’s recent book, Big Brands Big Trouble, he explores some of the biggest branding successes and failures.

“The bigger the company, the more likely it is that the chief executive has lost touch with the front lines. This might be the single most important factor limiting the growth of a corporation.”

“What makes a company strong is not the product or the service. It’s the position it owns in the mind. The strength of Hertz is in its leadership position, not the quality of its rent-a-car service.”

Thorp & Company recently worked with McKenna & Associates, a healthcare reinsurance brokerage firm, to develop its brand and to later transfer its brand equity to Aon Healthcare Insurance Services, a new subsidiary of Aon Corporation, which acquired McKenna & Associates.

“Branding is the heart of a business because it’s about who you are and how you’re recognized,” said Robert Trinka, vice president of Aon Healthcare Insurance Services. “Few companies succeed at branding because executives try to brand their company’s name as opposed to branding their company’s identity. Many companies fail to get to the first step, which is defining their true identity, so they don’t really know what to brand.”

When Aon, a Fortune 500 company with a wide footprint in the insurance industry, was poised to acquire McKenna & Associates, the challenge was to transfer McKenna & Associates’ brand equity to Aon without losing what had taken years to build.

“We had a strong, well-respected reputation, and we didn’t want to see our ‘McKenna & Associates’ identity get totally lost in the marketplace because of the Aon acquisition,” Trinka said.

Thorp & Company knew the reinsurance market inside and out, having created successful public-relations programs for McKenna & Associates and John Alden’s reinsurance division. The firm worked with national and healthcare media on a daily basis and had made a household name of McKenna & Associates in the healthcare reinsurance category. Thorp & Company also had generated more than $30 million in qualified leads for John Alden.

For Aon, Thorp & Company implemented a top-to-bottom program that touched most points on the marketing spectrum. At the heart of the effort was a national re-branding campaign that showcased the firm’s varied skills, including the writing and production of collateral materials, the design of a new tradeshow booth, the coordination of speaking opportunities for key executives, and work with healthcare media to increase awareness of Aon and its healthcare product offerings.

“Thorp & Company did an outstanding job of shifting the McKenna loyalty and recognition to Aon,” Trinka said. “We created a lot of buzz in the marketplace, and Thorp & Company’s efforts helped to establish the new Aon subsidiary, Aon Healthcare Insurance Services, as a national leader in healthcare brokerage services as well as generated numerous sales leads. Thorp & Company’s work was the centerpiece of our branding strategy.”

Trinka offers company executives the following tips about branding:

Many business executives understand the concept of branding, but few are able to properly execute a branding campaign.

Companies like Coca-Cola, Prudential and Johnson & Johnson have succeeded because their executives recognize that branding isn’t only about developing strategic marketing plans and focus groups, or about getting customers to recognize a company’s name and buy its products. Branding is a highly intimate process that dwells within the hearts and minds of customers and represents their experiences and perceptions of a company.

“All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of customers or prospects,” writes Jack Trout in his popular new book Big Brands Big Trouble. “The perception is the reality. Everything else is an illusion...The mind of the customer is where you win and lose.”

Many executives confuse positioning with branding. Positioning is getting customers to buy a product. Branding is about evoking the emotions that create preferences for a particular product.

For example, in the minds of customers, Kleenex represents more than a brand name. It’s the tissue itself. Nobody says: “What’s a Kleenex?” Similarly, when people are thirsty, they crave a Coke; when they want to get rid of laundry stains, they buy Clorox – even though competing products have almost identical compositions.

Effective branding campaigns combine the right mix of advertising, marketing and public-relations components. While advertising and marketing provide brand support, public relations is used for positioning and creating messages. More and more companies are placing greater emphasis on public relations.

“Brands that succeed today do so by relying on publicity rather than advertising,” said Laura Ries, president of marketing firm Ries & Ries, in the Harvard Management Update. “The value of mentions in newspaper or magazine articles can’t be emphasized enough.”

The first step to planning a successful public-relations program is to conduct market research, which may include everything from audits of media coverage to interviews with company executives, sales teams and customers.

Based upon this research, communications strategists should work with company executives to develop messages that effectively convey a value proposition. They should integrate these messages throughout all internal and external communications materials, including advertising, collateral pieces, Web sites and media kits.

Furthermore, communications experts should review a company’s positioning to make sure it properly tells the company’s story and is in sync with the company’s brand.

“If the brand and the positioning being used to support it are out of alignment, it will have a negative impact on the brand,” Clare Price, chief executive officer of Verstand, a San Francisco-based provider of brand-value management software, said in a recent PRWeek article.

Communications experts should evaluate whether a company has an adequate definition of its product.

“Companies, large and small, often have a tough time describing their product, especially if it’s a new category and a new technology,” Jack Trout said. “The positioning of a product in the mind must begin with what the product is… If you present a prospect with a confusing category, your chances of getting into his or her mind are slim to none.”

After communications strategists have completed the research, a company should begin an aggressive campaign that focuses on the media outlets that reach its target audiences. Often, companies waste valuable resources because they haven’t properly identified the right media targets.

Additionally, company executives should participate in media-training sessions to perfect their interview skills. The goal during interviews should not simply be to answer a reporter’s questions but to go further and communicate a company’s brand messages.