The Sandwich That Bit Back

A man walked into a Which Wich and ordered the double-meat Wicked. He opened his mouth, took aim at the sandwich and dislocated his jaw. This is not the kind of customer story that appears in a brand book. It is the kind that arrives without an appointment, accompanied by a queasy executive and the suspicion that the internet is about to have a field day.

The Power Group, the Dallas public relations firm led by Amy Power, saw a different problem. A mishap this strange would be discussed whether the sandwich chain participated or not. The useful question was whether the company could respond with speed, decency and enough wit to keep the event from hardening into a symbol of corporate indifference. The agency helped turn the incident into positive national coverage - CNBC, Jay Leno and AOL News were among the outlets cited by the client - then supported a social promotion to rename the oversized sandwich.

The interesting unit of public relations is not the press release. It is the detail another person cannot resist repeating.The Power Group's case work, in one sentence

That episode explains the firm more clearly than its service list does. The Power Group sells media relations, crisis and reputation management, social strategy, influencer campaigns, events, media training, copywriting, analytics and grant writing. But the thing beneath those things is pattern recognition: locate the odd, useful or emotionally legible detail, then arrange the surrounding facts so the detail can travel.

The founder who liked the press release

Power discovered PR in college, when a professor who had worked in the field assigned her first press release. The combination of curiosity and writing clicked. She interned at Ketchum in Atlanta, moved to Dallas after graduating in 1990, and learned agency work at Tracy-Locke/Pharr PR and HadelerWhitePR. In 1999 she opened her own one-woman venture. The legal entity is Power Public Relations, LLC; the public-facing name is better: The Power Group.

Its evolution is a small history of modern PR. It began with earned media and relationships, then followed clients into social content, influencers, analytics, crisis systems and integrated digital work. The firm now describes itself as Dallas-based with national capabilities. Its public portfolio is crowded with food and beverage brands - Borden Dairy, Cotton Patch Cafe, Golden Chick, McDonald's, Pollo Campero, Red Bull and Which Wich - alongside Hyatt, Orangetheory Fitness, nonprofits, technology firms, energy companies and commercial-real-estate businesses.

Three campaigns, three things to count

Agency case studies have a notorious fondness for the word “awareness,” a noun that can mean everything and invoice beautifully. The Power Group's better examples attach numbers to behavior. For Cotton Patch Cafe, it pursued ownership of Texas Chicken Fried Steak Day. The team pitched live cooking segments that let restaurant representatives demonstrate both technique and the chain's “Chicken Fried Pride” training. Four live broadcasts were syndicated into 15 more markets. Broadcast reach approached half a million. Same-day in-store sales rose 28 percent, including in markets the client considered troublesome.

For Promised Land, the prop did much of the talking: a restored vintage Borden milk truck touring Dallas, San Antonio, Houston and Austin. Visitors tasted flights of flavored milk and joined the “Moo Crew” on iPads; reporters and influencers received invitations to experience it rather than merely read about it. Outreach generated a reported 3,894,292 impressions. For LALA Greek smoothies, the firm recruited parenting bloggers to show where they carried the drink, reinforced the work with a Facebook contest, and reported more than 120,000 targeted influencer impressions plus 79,215 people reached on Facebook.

The pattern is copyable: begin with an observable act. Cook the steak on television. Park the milk truck where people can climb aboard. Ask a parent to photograph the bottle in the wild. Coverage becomes more plausible when the journalist, customer and influencer have something to do.

What failed first was the sentence

The firm's most instructive business-to-business project started without a crisis or a mascot. TSP, a middle-market technology services company, was organized into three silos. Ask employees what the company did and the answers diverged. Outsiders sometimes mistook it for a temp agency. Some employees identified more with the customers where they worked than with TSP itself. The first broken thing was the corporate sentence.

The Power Group ran its proprietary 20-step BrandPower process twice - once with leaders and employees, then with executives. The repetition mattered. Leadership language alone would have produced a polished fiction; employee language alone might never have resolved the strategic argument. The final work included core values, vision, mission, elevator speech and tagline, then carried that language into the website, social channels, marketing collateral and onboarding. Later, employees could repeat the ideas naturally in a recruiting video. That is a modest but demanding definition of brand success: the people doing the work recognize the words.

The calm part of crisis

For Stream, a direct-selling business, the agency used a simpler three-stage system called CrisisPower. It audited likely trouble, named a crisis committee, assembled background material, drafted message templates, gained executive approval and trained directors before the next event. Nothing about this is cinematic. That is precisely why it works. During a crisis, originality is overrated; a known decision-maker and a pre-agreed first sentence are far more valuable.

In 2026, Power began describing a newer condition as the “Un-Crisis Crisis” - the fatigue produced when organizations live in permanent response mode. A customer conflict, leaked email, regulatory question or synthetic clip can pull leaders back to the redline before the last incident has cooled. Her argument is operational as much as reputational: if every week is treated as an emergency, the staff becomes the engine that burns out.

What it costs - and what it cannot buy

The Power Group offers three levels of monthly retainers and project-based, à la carte engagements. It does not turn the work into a public numerical menu. The bill follows the scope: ongoing media and social work belongs in a retainer; a launch, training session, brand-definition exercise or crisis plan can be bounded as a project. In 2016, the firm was already describing its approach as value-based rather than hourly - a bet that clients care more about an outcome than a timesheet.

There is a useful limit. The agency's own educational material says PR is a snowball, not an instant result, and that coverage cannot be guaranteed because the journalist decides. The approach is weakest when the business has no real news, no available spokesperson, no evidence behind its claim, or no patience for repetition. A relationship can open an email. It cannot make a dull fact interesting or a bad operation trustworthy.

The firm has accumulated the expected plaques: an Inc. 5000 ranking in 2022, an Inc. Best Workplace recognition that year, crisis-management honors and a Most Admired CEO designation for Power. Its culture language is unusually brisk - do the right thing, win together, create happiness and fun - and its careers material promises coaching, leadership courses, volunteering and the occasional Thirsty Thursday.

But the more revealing achievement is continuity. A one-woman shop founded when faxed press releases were still ordinary has kept its traditional instinct for relationships while adding the channels clients demanded. It remains local enough to know which Dallas reporter might care about chicken-fried steak and broad enough to help a multi-market brand turn that segment into a larger campaign. The tools changed. The recurring question did not: what, exactly, will someone tell another person at lunch?