THE STANDING OF PR | PrMC

So diverse is the field of PR that it defies a single label. Indeed the phrase ?Public Relations? itself is a misleading and somewhat hackneyed description which began to run out of credibility during the 1980s. At that time the vision of PR which many people harboured ? and which some may still have ? was of the smarmy fixer glued to a gin and tonic, a Sloane whose need for work was debatable and who thought it would be fun to go into PR. The fact that the Royal Family have married into two PR-related partners hasn?t necessarily helped matters much. Some PR people were pseudo hacks not talented enough to be a proper journalist ? or even, more likely, an improper one.

PR has undoubtedly suffered because of the apparent lightweight nature of its business. Perhaps it had also suffered because a number of less than ethical elements have been attracted to the fast buck which could be made, especially consultancies ? but this is not an occurrence unique to PR.

The depth of suspicion about the PR label is still manifest. One consultant chemical pathologist involved with a PR consultant in preparing a paper for an international conference of highly eminent medics once said ?You know, I never used to think much of PR people?; this was after his slides and script had been uncomplainingly re-written for the umpteenth time overnight. It is still to common an outlook and one to which very little difference has been made over the past couple of decades.

As with most professions, PR has its governing bodies, (the Public Relations Consultants Association ? PRCA, the International Association of Business Communicators ? IABC and the Institute of Public Relations ? IPR) although few of them wield over their members a fraction of the influence developed over the years by, say, the Law Society. However, some can provide support services in laying down codes of conduct and practice for their members.

The guises under which PR operates

Partly as a result of the backlash against the PR label and partly for a complex variety of reasons, there has arisen a proliferation of names for in-house employees who carry out work of a PR nature. This has led to a confusing number of titles for thousands of people doing similar work.

The public sector, for example, perceived the need for some form of PR service during the 1970s, although a few areas, notably in government and nationalised industry, had been using the facility for a long time. What especially gave impetus to the rapid acquisition of PR skills was the greater openness and accountability of the public sector ? perhaps one of the most practical and enduring outcomes of the 1960s protest movement ? together with far reaching changes to local government first emerging around 1974.

In this, relatively socialist, climate of opinion in the late 1960s and early 1970s ? perhaps the only time when there ever has been a socialist period in the UK ? any practice which smacked of capitalist exploitation was ostensibly taboo in official circles. This was especially so at a time when private enterprise was less fashionable than it has since become, when employment was relatively full and when the spectre of Rachmann, Poulson and Cunningham haunted those in authority. Interestingly, at the time of writing, the son of Alderman Cunningham is a cabinet minister; perhaps the wheel turns full circle.

Terms such as ?PR? and ?advertising? while not exactly dirty words, were not fully trusted by those still grappling with the problems of implementing the liberal, alternative dreams of the 1960s in a society whose fabric was being increasingly torn apart by economic ills, radical reform and industrial strife.

Consequently, employers in local government, education and health authorities and quangoes circumvented the difficulties of jumping on the bandwagon of greater communication and openness without compromising their ideals by calling by some other name the PR practitioners they were busily recruiting.

?Information officer? was one which was, and still is, greatly favoured by universities, colleges and some of the public utilities which have since been privatised. Of the other commonly found terms, ?Communications? became burdened with another meaning and on which is still confusing to many who expect it to represent aspects of technology or postal services. ?External relations? or ?afairs? acquired favour in both private and public sector organisations which had difficulty with ?PR? ? usually where these functions restricted themselves to externally targeted work.

?Employee Relations? grew in the 1980s when that responsibility was quite often transferred to the professional communicators in PR, often to the despair of the Personnel, or latterly HR, department.

Those with vision in the 1970s saw that PR, whatever it was called, would become an indispensable part of the marketing mix, that grandiose title which describes a rag-bag of duties from pricing to market research to advertising.

Thus, as enterprise and marketing regained credibility throughout the hatcher years of the 1980s, so the proliferation of titles crept into the private sector as well. Companies with a need for strong sales support pushed PR people into marketing departments, sometimes as ?Product Afairs? or ?Publicity?.

In order to distinguish the market support roles from the broader business-wide role, therefore, ?Corporate Afairs? or ?Relations? titles began to appear and are now the accepted label in a number of large organisations.

Latterly, something of a compromise has been reached with the adoption of yet another variation, ?Public Afairs?. This, a senior figure in the profession once sourly remarked, was all too appropriate for the role.?They can?t do anything decently in private,? he observed. ?They?ve even got to make a public drama out of their sex lives.?

Whatever it?s called, PR is here to stay and to be used and the number of organisations which have an awareness and appreciation of what it offers increase every week.

Who needs it?

All organisations, public or private, who have a need to communicate their point of view convincingly to any audience. They all have a need for some kind of PR service, even if they don?t always call it that.

But isn?t communicating with other people or entities largely common sense? Yes, it is, but there are also many different ways of applying that sense, not least the professional knowledge of when to communicate to which audiences and why. There are also a large number of professional techniques involved in expressing what you want to say. his is where PR is a practical combination of the best method and the best discipline to achieve your objectives.

It may well be that the relatively new emergence of the PR profession ? over the last quarter of a century ? is partly a process of bringing together a wide variety of traditional communications skills under one umbrella. It may also be that this process has impinged upon several other areas of communication while overlaying them with a veneer of skills and respectability, some of it imported from other management disciplines and other cultures.

Irrespective, there are three main reasons why an organisation needs a PR service in one form or another:

1. It is extremely cost effective in comparison with other methods of communicating and publicising a message. An advertising campaign for a new product can easily cost around ?500,000 even without TV exposure. A much publicised recent airline campaign using TV reputedly cost ?5m. Yet a PR campaign to promote the same product is feasible for 10-15% of that cost. There won?t be quite the same control over what is reported or where or when, but this is often more than compensated for by the second factor.

2. The impartial opinion. For example, by having a new product or service reviewed in the press and media, the public is reassured that an independent, third party observer has tested it, understands it and is reasonably sure that it presents fair value for money. No advertisement can achieve that effect for adverts are always perceived ? perhaps subconsciously ? as paid for space or air time which carries a hard selling message or hidden propaganda motive. Perhaps surprisingly, even alarmingly, the general public still believes much of what it reads in the papers, sees on TV or hears on radio to a very high degree.

3. PR has become an essential tool in the overall process of business growth and organisational development. It is now becoming accepted as an integral part of the combination of disciplines which go to make up any properly structured organisation, public or private. Operating across its three classic areas of product, business and internal affairs, it provides a service complementary to the overall objectives of growth and profitability by interlocking with marketing, sales, HR, manufacturing, purchasing, finance, engineering, business planning, R & D, operations and all the other elements in a modern integrated business structure. Indeed, in many respects, it cuts across all these in a way in which few other operations are able to do and, in some structures, the PR Director is closer to the Chairman or CEO than any comparable director, with the possible exception of Finance.

As a profession, PR is still in its formative years. It does not yet have the seniority or respect afforded to other professions, such as law or accountancy, nor is it necessarily going to achieve this in the foreseeable future. What it does have is a power to change people?s minds, sometimes in an open and direct fashion, sometimes in an altogether more subtle and delicate way, more akin to the intrigues of an Italian Renaissance court than to the hurly-burly of modern business. Jack of all skills and master of only the power of expression, it has an enduring and increasing role in modern society.

Applying PR in practice

By now, you may be feeling that it?s about time you got your teeth into something meaty, with apologies to vegetarians. Very well, then. For, although a lot of PR is just common sense, hard work and the application of basic principles ? like any other skill ? there are a number of specialised areas in which you would do well to take the advice, if not the full time services, of a professional practitioner.

It also touches on the advantages and pitfalls of using a PR consultancy to do all or part of the job for you. If you decide to go down this route, therefore, you will be more aware of what you want from the service, how you should be briefing and working with a consultancy, what you should be paying and what you ought to be getting in return.

Product PR

This is the most common and traditional aspect of PR work: the promotion of the product, brand or service, usually through the press and broadcast media as well as other channels. It involves persuading journalists to write about the product or service, preferably in a positive way but, at least, to write about it. This brings the subject to the notice of the customer without the often prohibitive costs of advertising while at the same time imbuing it with the benefits of an informed third party opinion.

Product PR is clearly very useful to launch a new product when a consistently high level of visibility is required. It is also used, however, to keep the product in front of the public. Most of the cars which appear in fictional programmes on TV and in feature films, for instance, are placed there after much hard work from the PR department of the car companies, invariably without charge and, it has been rumoured, sometimes with backhanders to ensure selection ahead of the competition. Just think of the Bond films and, depending on how old you are, you probably associate them with Aston Martin, Lotus or BMW. Oddly enough, brands like Lada, Daewoo, SEAT and Hyundai hardly ever come to mind in this connection. Or in most other connections.

More people are employed in product PR than in any other form of the art and it remains the staple diet of most PR consultancies, largely because it is the most frequently required service, especially for small and medium sized companies (SMEs).

To many practitioners ? and especially consultancies ? it is also the most tedious aspect of the business and often tends, therefore, to be relegated to the more junior staff whose enthusiasm to ring up journalists and sell product stories remains as yet undimmed. Be that as it may, the skill to pull down the coverage is still the one which is most often in demand from the majority of companies.

Business PR

Often a more subtle approach, business PR involves creating the impression that the company from which the customer is buying is fundamentally sound with a good track record and even better potential in areas such as growth, profitability, stability and so on. Often used to reinforce the product PR effort ? because customers like to buy from successful organisations ? it can contribute greatly to the confidence a public has in an organisation ? and this includes the voluntary and public sectors.

Although often dealing with the financial side of the business, especially results, performance and investment, business PR is not strictly speaking financial PR in that it is aimed more at the customer and other major stakeholders such as suppliers, trade networks, the public and other opinion formers rather than at the City and financial institutions. Nevertheless, the two are very close and many campaigns can be aimed at both sets of audiences with relatively minor changes.

The communications of the employee relations and industrial relations issues, which too often haunt our newspapers, are also an important part of the business PR remit, fortunately slightly less so now than during the habitual unrest of 1960-1990.

Financial PR

A highly skilled branch of the discipline, financial PR requires a thorough knowledge of the workings of the City with its myriad financial institutions, rules and regulations, the particular habits and requirements of investors and analysts and the intricacies of the Stock Exchange. So tightly focused is it that the majority of financial PR practitioners make a very comfortable living by specialising in this and nothing else. For several years there has been a dearth of good financial PR talent and this is fully reflected in the fees of financial PR specialists ? which can be quite spectacular.

Unless you are quoted on the full Stock Exchange, are threatened by an unwelcome takeover, wish to take over somebody else against their wishes, have a burning need to raise cash without going through the usual channels or wish to be listed on the USM, financial PR is not an area to get into.

Political PR

This is another highly specialised field which concerns itself very largely with Parliamentary lobbying, in which field there has been a noticeable increase over the last 20 years. Usually run by ex-politicians or ex-civil servants and now largely guided by the findings of the Nolan report into public standards, it is not a discipline which has too much in common with mainstream PR and will not be dealt with in these pages.

The lobbying of local government and other public bodies is, however, a different kettle of ish altogether and is covered as part of the business PR range of activities.

Internal PR

This, one of the most important areas in which anyone can operate, was for many years an HR responsibility and in some organisations, it still is. However, responsibility is now often being channelled away from HR and into the professional communicators, either directly into PR or via a hybrid Internal Communications functions which often draws upon PR skills and people.

Since employees are in many ways the most difficult of all audiences with whom to communicate, it follows that those practitioners who are best at communicating need to be heavily involved.

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