Category: PR

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

 

This is the territory of the Public Relations and Corporate Communications world. Proficient board members and brand owners understand the value of corporate brand thought leadership. More so, these stakeholders also realize that advertising or other communication tools have little ability to construct it. This specialization is brought in from the house of PR & CorpComm.

If you study the Organisations that managed to sail through vs those which struggled during past eight months of Covid, a litmus test will suggest that health of their Thought Leadership was a key factor.

Brand Thought Leadership is all about a positive and contextual recall of a brand at the right time and place across all stakeholders so that business relationship gets stronger and business transactions keep increasing.

Over the years, public relations as a tool and corporate communication as a function have been trying to showcase the art & science of achieving it to the top management. However, over the years, some key dynamics have changed:

1. Management of the 2 Rs: Brand owners are increasingly understanding that their ability to orchestrate their organization’s thought leadership is key towards the success of managing the 2 Rs – reputation and risks. Reputation management and risk mitigation requires a healthy intervention of thought leadership.

 

2. Not just competition set: There was a time when thought leadership was created and sustained with respect to the competition set. Today, mere competition set is a misleading.  In today’s VUCA scenario, a telecom brand’s stakeholder can get influenced from an fmcg brand, an automobile, or even an IT brand…or vice versa. Hence, corporates today are hand picking the peer group of competition brands from across sectors and then constructing the desired thought leadership.

 

3. Thought is about Message Engagement: For a brand to invoke a thought is a game of key message matrix. Messaging is not about putting together a few sentences. It requires the science of analysis and art of emotion to construct it.

 

4. CEO and the army: Spokesperson’s role in key! CEOs are leading their armies from behind. CEO’s are not the whole and sole face of the organization. It is increasingly being observed that in PR/Corporate Communications warfare, CEOs are letting their sergeants – other CXOs, HR heads, vertical heads, product heads, etc. – take charge of creating and sustaining the brand’s thought leadership & reputation management across stakeholders. Though few but a trend has started where CXOs and brand owners are leaning on the corporate communications function to master the art of designing and sustaining Thought Leadership through the year.

 

5. Editorial Formats: Irrespective of normal or new normal scenarios media owners go through, every media platform does try to create more than one editorial or content format or style. Authored article is no longer the only way to build thought leadership. There are various formats a media title offers. Understanding the anatomy of the media title is all the effort that is required.

 

6. Thought Leadership across reputation pillars: Management needs to work towards building thought leadership in not just one but across all the brand reputation pillars. Finance, marketing, products and services, CSR and Sustainability, HR, Government, Technology and Innovation, etc. are some of the many areas that management is keen to build thought leadership in.

 

7. Advent of Analytics: Till recently, adoption of data and analytics was slow within our industry. Hesitation was largely due to insecurity or probably the lack of knowledge of what data & analytics means and how it can benefit the various corridors. However, thanks to various awards platforms that have cropped up, the (claim to) use of data and analytics towards PR & CorpComm planning, especially in the area of Thought Leadership is increasing.

 

The health of an organisation’s balance sheet is directly linked with the state of that organisation’s thought leadership. The faster and stronger it is tastefully built and sustained, the longer becomes of the life of that organization.

 

 

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

 

Being able to change the stakeholder or target audience behaviour into a desired action is what provides brand owners their ROO (Returns on Objectives) and ROI (Returns on Investment). Public Relations does that for both small and large brands by relating with their stakeholders. Most of us confuse it as a subject. However, it is actually an application or a convergence point of a variety of subjects such as language, psychology, physiology, anthropology, geography, history, science, and many more.

 

Given this, I wonder if the way we have evolved so far as an industry is anywhere close to what it ought to be.

 

While I have seen glimpses of this both on the client and the Agency side, I am not sure if it has gained momentum or has been marketed well. It is because of our confusion of what Public Relations actually stands for – subject or convergence of many subjects, both brand owners and service providers have not been able to size it up well.

 

What does this mean for the various industry corridors?

 

1. Talent: The Media & Management institutes will need to re-think about their course curriculum. The definition of Brand Communication & Management will need a think thru. The scope has to widen and deepen to incorporate subjects like psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, political science etc.

2. Publishing Houses: Both India Inc. and the education institutes lack authentic and well-informed books and periodicals that share knowledge about Brand Communications & Management. New and local Indian authors will need to emerge or encouraged to write authentic and holistic reading material. The current ones are too little or a rehash of the write ups from the western world. Reading materials need to steer the industry to a refined understanding of what Public Relations is and what it can do for a brand.

3. Clients or Brand Owners: The top management and board members will need to review their approach so far on brand management, demand generation and sustenance. The hard fact is that for last many decades, they have looked at Public Relations as a “Jugaad” Industry. News Management, headline management, negative news management, etc have been at the centre of their recall for public relations. They have never looked at Public Relations as a strategic engine for Business Growth and Sustenance.

4. Communication Firm: Communication Firms or Agencies have been the key drivers of many changes or movements within the Brand Management industry. So, here too, Agencies can play a huge role in shaping the understanding and perception of the Client or Brand Owners. The agencies can lead by example. What an agency stands for, what it will deliver for the client, how its performance will be evaluated etc will need a complete revamp. If done well, clients will understand what they have been missing out on.

 

The value that Public Relations can actually bring into the boardroom is not comprehended well. Board members’ understanding of what this convergence point stands for or can do is half baked. The agency community has also not executed a good job on educating their client members on what PR actually is vs what they are being expected to do.

 

Relooking at Public Relations as a convergence point will redefine the entire brand management industry.

 

 

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

 

It took close to three decades of umpteen seminars, media write-ups and plenty of PR campaign failures, ineffective evaluation of Corp Comm desks and PR agencies to reach today’s state of PR Monitoring (and not measurement).

 

As a score, what the industry has achieved is a disciplined behaviour to regularly monitor the PR scores of the brands they represent and its competition.

 

This, by itself, is a big achievement because till some years ago, almost 30% of the industry members did not feel the need to regularly monitor the PR score needle.

 

However, the discussion on the Desired versus Achieved gap comes into account when we look at the progress of industry’s transition from PR Monitoring to Measurement.

 

Here are some observations:

1. Over-dependence on Output and not Outcome: The biggest problem is that the PR and Corporate Communications industry still depend on output and not outcomes. Rarely does the industry realise that the C-suite will look at the impact on the business. Till such time, the C-suite will continue looking at PR & Corporate Communications Machinery as a personal gratification tool.

2. To be fair, I know of some (very few actually) visionary industry captains have progressed to the Business Impact or Outcome line of thinking. Howver, the challenge they face is that the current measurement system has still not adapted itself to the new measure. While news and views exposure measuring metrices are there, what is missing is the ability to directly correlate a successful PR campaign to actual business outcome.

3. Most often than not, clients do not start with “Why am I doing this PR Activity? Therefore, what do I measure?”. Which is why, most of the times, the objectives are not measurable.

4. One of the key things that usage of PR Measurement does at the ground level is that it creates a SWOT for the Organisation, especially the Corporate Communications Team. Which is why I have have always believed that PR measurement is a zone of those who are brave hearted. It is exactly this reason that a very small percentage of them in the agency and corporate side are now seriously exploring, talking and discussing measurement seriously. The remaining part of the industry is not doing measurement, but what they are doing is actually PR monitoring.

5. PR measurement basically all about outcome. It is all about what the benefit or the what outcome is on my brand and business health.

 

I think it’s a good time now for industry leaders, PR service providers and PR measurement service providers to come forward and drive a campaign on the difference between PR Monitoring versus Measurement.

 

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a senior marketing services research professional. He was until last year Business Head at Eikona and is currently Founder of Brand Balance (brandbalance.in). This column appears every other Thursday.

 

By Siddhartha Mukherjee

 

PR firms being able to extract desired fees or on-going fee hikes from clients is a rarity. Is the client to be blamed? No. More often than not, the problem hinges on the way PR companies have presented their case at the time of the performance review discussions.

 

My personal experience has been that more often than not, the PR firms have done a wonderful job! It is just that at the time of performance review discussion, there was no systematic and scientific MIS of what was done, when it was done, why it was done and finally, what the outcome was.

 

Some of the pointers below should help in our preparations going forward:

1. What was agreed in the Deliverables section of the Service Agreement

‘Why’ are we doing PR? This simple elementary question is the key to the success and future growth of the PR Firms Industry? The details and deliverables we put on the last page of the client service agreement is the key determinant and source of the what we prepare and how we present.

More often than not, PR firms keep this section vague – whether it is deliberate or naiveness is debatable. It is this act that boomerangs at the time of performance review. It prevents them to envisage the kind of MIS they need to maintain and the KRAs they need to work on.

 

2. Is the Reviewer a CXO

Is the final reviewer a CXO or a Head of Communications is an important point to keep in mind while we start our work immediately after signing up. What is the person’s understanding or perception of what we offer or the value we bring on the table? CXO’s perspective and their language – from the domain of Marketing, Sales & Brand Management – are very different from the language PR Firms use. Let us just say that there is a huge GAP

 

3. Even if it is the CCO, what is his/her background

Head of Communications come from more than one background. Part of it is because of what the employer expects from the desk. If the Employer is expecting “News Management or Headline Management”, chances are that the Corporate Communications individual will be from the journalism background or someone who has spent majority of his/her life doing “media relations” in agencies. For PR Firms, showcasing efforts etc. in such cases are relatively easier to deal with.

 

However, if the Communications Head comes with Brand Management, Marketing or Communications background, PR Firms will have to prepare much more.

 

4. What kind of MiS are we maintaining

Starting from Day One, month-on-month, the design and quality of Management Information System a PR Firm maintains internally is key towards how satisfied the Client will be with its answers during the performance review. Month-on-month client meetings, planning, management of quantity and quality of media exposure, managing of business as usual and business not as usual, balancing of corporate brand reputation, thought leadership, launches, press release dissemination, database management, etc are key to be being well prepared.

 

5. What presentation parameters do we use

Well, this section depends largely on the answers for Questions 2 & 3 above. If the evaluator is a CXO, chances are that mere discussion parameters like count of articles, advertising value, share of voice, rankings etc. may not impress him/her. The CXO has a very structured thought process and often thinks through the lens of account planning – listening to outcome. He is used to the concept of thought processes such as media planning, sustenance, recall, engagement, etc. Absence of such thought processes often irk CXOs

 

So, enough can be done. The revenue streams of PR Firm will see lesser client attrition and higher fee hikes flowing in. What is needed is to revamp the age-old thinking! This needs intent and willingness to breathe fresh air.

 

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a senior marketing services research professional. He was until last year Business Head at Eikona and is currently Founder of Brand Balance (brandbalance.in). This column appears every other Thursday.