VANTAGE PARTNERS
Creating an Alliance between the Goals of a Company and the Interest of the Media

Vantage Partners, a consultancy formed by individuals who helped create the Harvard Negotiation Project, is dedicated to ensuring the success of alliances forged by the top 1,000 U.S. corporations. Although Vantage Partners enjoyed intermittent, short-term relationships with the business media, the complexity of the company's work thwarted efforts to convey its theories in concise, understandable points that could be readily used in news stories.

When the company completed an academic study explaining the reasons behind the high failure rate for alliances between Fortune 500 corporations, a two-pronged media relations strategy was implemented, wherein exclusive print and broadcast coverage was secured while strategic news pitches built the company's credibility among a wide range of high-level business media. Then feature stories were developed, focusing on the ways Vantage Partners helps companies achieve alliance success.

This "tailored blitz" strategy attracted a business-page cover story in The Boston Globe, as well as interviews with CNBC and CNN and feature stories on Dow Jones News Service and Bloomberg. The initial news coverage successfully intrigued longer-lead publications and generated features in targeted, national business publications, including Financial Executive, The Daily Deal and Global Finance News.

The study remained in the news for six months, an unprecedented event for Vantage Partners. Thanks to this extensive and high-quality media coverage, the company received more than 60 requests for the study, with 50 percent of the requests coming from Fortune 500 companies, thus providing Vantage Partners with solid prospects to add to its business development efforts.