Combining innovative approaches, A-list media-relations services and a talented staff of travel PR veterans, Hawkins International Public Relations (HIPR) is a boutique PR agency dedicated to global luxury brands, travel/tourism, spa/wellness and lifestyle clients.
We’re a New York PR agency headquartered in the heart of Manhattan, yet our reach is global. Our expertise comes from years of developing creative and strategic multi-platform brand and travel public relations campaigns that differentiate our clients—nationally and internationally.
Take a closer look at our team, and you’ll find that we’re an international PR firm uniquely qualified to deliver results-oriented lifestyle, luxury, travel, resorts, and spa PR campaigns. In the words of our clients, our staff members wear many hats:
How do you become a top New York and international PR firm? By becoming thoroughly versed in the vocabulary, players, motivations and priorities of high-end brands.
We personally know (and influence) a diverse network of lifestyle, luxury brand, and travel PR contacts who write for and edit the key publications. What’s more, we’re constantly on the lookout for the latest and upcoming trends to incorporate into our travel, lifestyle, and luxury brand PR efforts. Once identified, we pitch them from myriad angles: travel, spa, food, adventure, golf, trade, business, design, or any other perspective that advances the brand.
By designing a targeted and customized lifestyle and luxury PR plan for our clients in a timeline format, we are able to successfully reflect the marketing and sales goals of the brand. We develop region-specific tactics to maximize the launch of a new brand, as well as strategies to enhance existing luxury, lifestyle, or resorts hotel PR plans.
We carefully chose our lifestyle, luxury brand, and travel PR teams to suit the needs and demands of each particular account. Every team offers clients and the press around-the-clock responsiveness—whether it’s in service of a luxury brand, a spa, or a multimillion-dollar travel PR campaign. Just the kind of service you would expect from a boutique PR agency.
Like any public relations firm worth its salt, we strive to please our brand, lifestyle, travel, and hotel PR clients as much as the journalists who cover their products and services. With this goal in mind, we always do our very best to meet deadlines, exceed expectations, and respond to journalists’ inquiries in a timely fashion.
Not every PR agency can do resort and luxury brand PR. Our media-relations database contains more than 5,000 lifestyle, brand, and travel PR contacts across the United States. These are significant, long-standing relationships we employ selectively based on subject matter.
Although we’re an international PR firm based in New York, our database continues to grow with the help of our partner PR agencies nationwide and internationally.
Thanks to our reputation and specialty at the high end of the industry, journalists frequently call upon us for assistance with their stories. They also look to us for material to help fill their pages. In addition to targeting magazines and newspapers for national reach, we also strategically target key niche magazines and/or regional publications from Palm Beach to Palm Springs, Boston to Dallas, Washington DC to Aspen.
Answered by Jennifer Hawkins, President
If you were to give a prospective luxury brand PR client one piece of advice about working in the US media marketplace, what would it be?
Hire a specialized lifestyle and luxury brand PR agency that will pitch, think and write creatively. It’s vitally important for a luxury property to encourage creative and strategic thinking that makes the most of interesting, timely and “newsworthy” information.
How does HIPR turn creative strategies into breakthrough luxury hotel PR ideas?
Sound hotel PR strategy involves the right mix of timing, relationships with media, knowing how to pitch seasonal packages — and sometimes the tactful placement of an exclusive framed as “news.” This was the travel public relations strategy HIPR employed recently with Architectural Digest. One of our luxury hotel clients opened a new hotel recently in a former Fiat factory. Renowned architect Renzo Piano redesigned the factory into a fabulous five-star hotel, a story that was begging for just the right hotel public relations plan.
We offered Architectural Digest an exclusive story, which paid off in a four-page feature in the magazine. This was a big coup in the world of luxury hotel PR. Once we received confirmation that the issue was headed for newsstands, our media-relations specialists went wide to the travel, design and trade media to add to the buzz with expanded hotel PR coverage.
Can you describe how HIPR develops creative lifestyle and luxury brand PR ideas?
We conduct weekly internal brainstorming sessions that often result in a strategic pitch. These often include several of our clients. In some cases the pitch may be focused on a trend we have noticed, or it could be aimed at a holiday package release that’s seasonally relevant.
Here’s an example: When several of our clients came up with a Valentine’s Day package, we were given the challenge of communicating six to eight different versions of the same package theme. We responded by compiling the information into a creative, entertaining and highly readable round-up release—including vibrant photography—that went well beyond the traditional “flowers and chocolate” pitches journalists are all but inundated with. The release got tremendous coverage and was even picked up in its entirety by some newspapers and regional publications.
How important is creative writing to lifestyle and luxury brand PR?
A full-time staff writer helps us stand apart with original, clever press releases, pitch letters and newsletters. In addition, our resort clients frequently give us information about their resort that is quirky and fun, but not worthy of an entire press release. HIPR parlays this information into a successful newsletter distributed to the media entitled, “Not Another Press Release (Really!).”
We continually receive extremely positive feedback from writers and editors who appreciate our inventive style and imagination and often use the “tidbits” to fill spaces in their front-of-book sections in television coverage. (We can provide samples of this upon request.)
Contact us here to learn more about our capabilities in the areas of lifestyle and luxury brand PR.
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