It’s hard to step back and look at your own brand story when you’re busy working in your own business. I realised recently that we spend so much time telling the stories of our clients that we don’t always focus on our own. So here we go!
We founded Sound Bite PR back in 2018. And by we, I mean Jessica Sneddon and me, Martha Bryce.
We wanted to create a sound business with an honest approach and none of the smoke and mirrors that PR is sometimes associated with.
And we wanted to focus on clear sectors, developing deeper knowledge and skills for our team and us.
We’d both spent our whole careers working in PR, particularly in hospitality and food & drink. While Jessica had started her career at Rocco Forte, I’d cut my teeth in my family’s food business before going onto work at VisitScotland. Sound Bite PR is an accumulation of all our shared passion and expertise. These are the sectors that make our hearts sing.
And what brilliant sectors to work in! It’s given us access to truly incredible food, world class drinks and allowed us to visit some really wonderful places. But my favourite part of our work is undoubtedly drawing out the stories from the people and businesses we work with. Being able to share those stories more widely is a huge privilege.
Our roots are in media relations, but we have relished adapting to a changing business landscape. This has resulted in a more integrated approach, building up a specialist digital team. We now have in-house content creation, social media and digital strategy and management and our work with influencers has increased exponentially.
While we’re now lucky to be part of the creative Custom Lane team at Lamb’s House in Edinburgh, our first office was in Dalgety Bay. My abiding memory of that is us all enthusiastically starting out on the Fife Coastal Path. After me falling face first into a muddy puddle, our ‘Wellness Wednesdays’ came abruptly to an end.
We’ve since grown to a team of ten with each member bringing different skills, knowledge and passion.
We’ve managed amazing restaurant, hotel and product launches across the UK: from seaweed foraging stunts to events at the Chelsea Flower Shower. I can’t begin to imagine how many media we’ve hosted on press trips or how many drinks samples we’ve sent out to reviewers. (Sometimes our office is a bit like Santa’s grotto with a wealth of parcels waiting to be posted!) We’ve managed unexpected crisis communications situations and we’ve celebrated award wins. But we’ve also done an awful lot of good old-fashioned marketing designed to get bums on seats and drive sales.
At the end of the day, no matter the changing techniques, what we do is share stories. And that’s the best bit of all.