Client

S&D Coffee has been a privately owned company by the Davis Family since its founding in 1927. S&D Coffee has grown from a small company to one of the largest coffee manufacturers and roasters in the United States. The company provides coffee, tea and juice to more than 70,000 commercial customers throughout the country through an extensive national network of approved distributors and a traditional route delivery network. The firm is dedicated to quality and is ISO 9001:2000 certified.

Challenge

Many S&D executives had little or no experience dealing with the media and it was important for them to learn how to speak appropriately, respond to frequently asked questions and respond to questions that were sensitive in nature.

Strategy

Multiple training sessions, led by Walker PR, were held with S&D executives. During these sessions, Walker worked with S&D to determine a spokesperson according to the messages being delivered.

Once the spokespeople for the company were established, Walker met with them and established the key industry issues, trends and topics that S&D wanted to promote. This included new products, research statistics and facility changes. From these discussions, the information was transformed into key messages for the company and a Q&A document. These two items served as aids to script and guide discussions with reporters.

Following the development of the key messages and Q&A, Walker held a half-day media training session for the selected spokespeople. During this training, S&D executives were educated on how to effectively communicate key messages, how to handle questions that are sensitive in nature that may arise, how to hold a reporter’s attention and how to speak in “sound bytes”.

Results

It was our goal to help each individual develop the skills necessary to speak with the media and feel comfortable doing so—whether it was for a feature article in a trade publication or a local news channel in reference to a current event. In the months and years after the media training, S&D executives have spoken with reporters and writers from a variety of different media outlets. Their interviews have gone smoothly and writers get the information that they are seeking. Meanwhile, each spokesperson is disseminating the same information about the company with the same tone.