8 minute read
Value reset
With hard times looming and budgets threatened, is it time to re-evaluate the value public relations brings to the table?
BY SAM BURNE JAMES
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PR and comms: a strategic discipline never more valuable than in this year of uncertainty? Or a peripheral function whose quaint, superfluous outputs make it ripe for redundancies? As the world enters a new phase of Covid-fueled economic turmoil, it’s a multi-million-dollar question.
The crisis’ emergence certainly gave PR a chance to shine. “A few months after we went into lockdown, a lot of comms people were basically saying they’d ‘had a good crisis’; they were feeling the benefits of having to deal with this,” says Amy Lawson, Global Head of Comms at financial software firm Sage. “As time has gone on, it has become a bit more nuanced. Businesses are coming to terms with what this all really means. ‘Empty the office, it has to be done in 48 hours, go’ is a very different ask to totally rethinking your business.”
“The pandemic has reminded everyone of how valuable good communication is at times of crisis and change,” agrees Armand David, a director at Brands2Life. “But my honest assessment is that most organisations have been too busy engaging with the practical implications of the pandemic, and Brexit, to step back and think philosophically about comms, its role and its purpose. We’re heads down, doing. The time for reflection will come.”
David believes comms’ core capabilities — “listening, interpreting, translating and communicating the stories necessary for our stakeholders” — haven’t changed fundamentally. But certain skills have become more relevant, such as supporting “good leadership comms, both internally and externally”. Budget cuts mean that resourcefulness — having to “do more with less” — is also coming to the fore, he adds.
KNOWING VALUE
Couldn’t PR ward off some of those cuts? Not without better measurement, according to Richard Bagnall, chair of evaluation body AMEC. “If you’re a business making budget cuts and you can’t understand the value PR brings, then it’s just a cost, and it’ll get cut. It may be that the work has some value, but if you can’t measure it, you will be fired. It is that simple,” he says. Bagnall and AMEC’s longstanding cry that PRs must ditch comfy “transactional, activity-based measurement” has never been more relevant. “All those charts look pretty, but the business you work for doesn’t care,” he warns.
It’s not just measuring, but planning, in which PR must up its game, according to James Frayne, founding partner at Public First, which was recently given a significant contract by the Cabinet Office. He argues that PR has been slow to “catch on to the power of opinion research”, adding: “Only recently are they learning that those with the numbers dictate the strategy. Increasingly, CEOs and boards demand data-driven strategies. If you can’t deliver them, you’re not in the room when decisions are made.”
It’s not just PR, argues Charlie Carpenter of Creativebrief. “Marketing teams in many brands are so lean and so stretched. Some organisations are going backwards in terms of generating real cultures of effectiveness in marketing teams,” Carpenter says. “It’s something that the whole industry should refocus on — I don’t think PR agencies should be uniquely worried.”
CORPORATE AFFAIRS OF THE HEART
Tom Rouse, a director at the agency Don’t Cry Wolf, agrees. “It’s not just PR — every comms discipline likes to talk those huge numbers,” he says. But Rouse acknowledges that measuring PR’s effectiveness can be uniquely challenging. “With consumer PR, it is relatively straightforward. But on corporate affairs and so on, it’s a lot more difficult. You can’t measure reputation as just one thing. I think we need to be specific — rather than say we can do everything, with every client pick one area where you can add value.”
One such area, he says, is “helping clients walk the walk as well as talk the talk” around sustainability or corporate responsibility. More sales-driven disciplines struggle with authenticity here — hence recent examples of tone-deaf purpose-washing. Corporates are willing to invest in this area — and PR teams can make this work. A recent campaign Rouse and Don’t Cry Wolf ran for peanut butter purveyor Meridian Foods, highlighting palm oil’s environmental footprint, is a case in point. Sue McIntosh, Meridian’s head of marketing, comments: “Marketing campaigns shouldn’t always be about generating short term value; at Meridian we’re playing the long game. We want to invest in the causes that matter now so that our customers stay with us in the future.”
MAKE THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE
PR professionals must hope that clients continue to have an appetite for work dealing in non-immediate monetary value and “the long game” — not least because the prospect of PR becoming entirely commoditised would do it a disservice. “We have to accept and arguably champion the fact that there will always be a part of our discipline which is that intangible, impossible to measure value of judgment. There is no point trying to pretend that you can get down to measuring every single activity,” says Lawson from Sage.
But when so many comms teams and agencies are London-based, data and research is an important adjunct to that, argues Frayne. “Comms is always going to be a London-centric game. This is why comms need to obsess about opinion research — particularly qual[itative] research — which forces them to confront the realities of public opinion,” he says.
That combination improves campaign effectiveness, argues former Dutch military intelligence officer Meike Wolf, now Edelman’s head of insights and impact in Amsterdam. She argues that the pandemic has “proven that shortterm nudging techniques don’t drive long-term behaviour change — for example, people going to the beach on a sunny day, or [not] remembering to wash their hands when life feels more normal”. Rather, campaigns need to begin “unleashing predictive modelling — or moving from situational awareness to situational understanding, as they call it in the military”.
IF YOU TALK THE TALK, YOU NEED TO WALK THE WALK TOO
This approach will also help PRs win clients’ trust. “Incorporating us boffins before you build a marcomms strategy means you speak the language of increasingly data-focused clients and help them escalate issues which require critical investment in comms to the top table,” she says.
Traditionally, PR has struggled to win round CMOs to the value of PR. CMOs, we hear time and again, just don’t ‘get’ PR. Is that still true? “Historically yes,” says John Rudaizky, global brand and marketing leader at advisory firm EY. “But today I would argue no: I don’t know a CMO today who doesn’t understand PR as a critical part of the mix.”
Rudaizky feels 2020 has only heightened this. “I think this pandemic has been net positive for PR,” he says. “Companies have been managing these major crises and have had to look at it from a reputation and a people point of view — much of what PR is about is inspiring your own people.”
IMPACT NOT ENGAGEMENT
That said, Rudaizky challenges PR practitioners to do two things better to cement their value. The first is our old friend measurement, specifically “moving beyond engagement measurements to impact measurements”. The second, which he says applies to all marketing disciplines, is confidence in your particular specialism. “As a CMO you are buying confidence, so make sure you are playing in an area where you’re good enough, pitching based on your strength, and be able to evidence the impact that you are able to create,” he says.
Creativebrief’s Carpenter agrees that the pandemic has been, at least to some extent, a boon for PR. Since it began, brands have been “cutting back significantly on media spend” and in turn recognising that PR offers “more bang for their buck”. Roughly 25% more of his conversations this year compared to last have involved brands seeking PR or earned media capabilities — including brands needing support around “purpose, social mission and in particular sustainability… and how brands can close the gap between what they say and how they act — because consumers are getting wise to this”.
If PR is better understood by CMOs than we thought, what about the final frontier; CEOs? Irina Surdu, an associate professor at Warwick Business School, who specialises in reputation and communications, says that modules on many MBA courses today “were developed in the 70s or 80s, and do not contain PR”, adding: “If you’re doing a broad management degree, the likelihood is you won’t study PR. If you look at broad models of management, it is not even there.” This makes bosses of today and tomorrow unlikely to see PR as critical tools.
Surdu suggests two remedies. The first would be to engage the CEOs of tomorrow — her colleagues specialising in HR, entrepreneurship, strategy and so forth have practitioners aplenty willing to come in as guest lecturers. But PR practitioners? Rarely, says Surdu. The discipline’s prestige and relevance suffers as a result.
As for the CEOs of today, her advice is simplicity. PRs must get better at explaining their work in easily-digested methods to time-starved executives. “I don’t mean extremely detailed financial analysis, but highlighting the effect of your work — if you’re not able in a quick model or a quick diagram to explain, they’re not going to value you,” she explains. “That’s what the finance and legal people do.”
