Media Training Fundamentals: Don't Name the Competition
Don't Give Your Competitor the Valuable Publicity You Earned. Keep It for Yourself! When we conduct mock interviews during a media training session, we often ask interview subjects to name two or three competitors who they admire. There are numerous iterations of essentially the same question. It can be naming the competitors who are keeping them up at night. Or perhaps it can be a question about the competitors who pose the greatest challenge over the next three to five years. It’s all a trick to see if the spokesperson being trained can be lured into naming competitors at all. We have found that it is common for an untrained spokesperson to fall for this simple trick and start rattling off names. Sometimes they speak more naturally and glowingly about the competition than they do about their own products and …