PR needs to rethink the meaning of ‘earn’
PR is no longer about press releases and a little black book, explains Poem’s Rob Lowe. And to go further and be better, the industry needs to reimagine how PR defines ‘earn’.
For too long, PR has been seen as the discipline that earns ‘free media’ and we’ve been measured against how much editorial media we can earn. But this needs to change. PR has the opportunity to do more.
Instead, we need to foster the idea that PR is best suited to help brands earn consumer choice. Only by doing this will we give PR a more senior seat at the C suite table.
Consumer PR is no longer about press releases, press conferences and photo calls. It can’t just be about a little black book and media relationships. It’s not a publicity bureau.
Seeing as my previous comment seemed to be too spicy for publication, I’ll tone it down into this:
Whilst this is an interesting enough piece, it illustrates how far PR is behind advertising or brand consulting in terms of strategic thinking. This rehashes concepts that have been pretty basic to the core of marketing strategic thinking for a decade or so.
The PR business model almost never accommodates insight-based comms strategy development or consulting-based brand strategy, despite the fact it is in some ways well positioned to do so.
Some of the big players have been fiddling around the edges – Edelman is a good example. The Trust Barometer study is good PR off the back of some (very basic) research, but is not the basis of compelling proprietary IP on how trust actually works of how to build it – a topic at the top of most board’s to-do list. They consign themselves to commentating on trust, earning column inches and clicks, but not really building it in a very strategic way. The challenge with PR’s strategy offering in a nutshell!
I agree to an extent. Previously PR hasn’t had access to large enough budgets to do big research studies and hasn’t incorporated brand strategy into its thinking. But, the point is, that’s changing, because the media landscape’s changed and PR now has an opportunity to lead bigger earned creative ideas – to do this it needs to be more strategic. So, many PR agencies have invested in snr strategists from the advertising side to ensure that what we do is more effective. We can only do the above if we start thinking of PR as being able to earn consumer choice, as opposed to just earn editorial media.
Using emotional intelligence in PR can only be good. Well done POEM.