This is a guest article by Deepak Aneja, a communications research professional at a leading global media analytics company and a reader of the India PR Blog. Deepak will write a series of posts here on PR measurement. The views here are his. Read on…

PR Measurement has been under tremendous pressure by marketing professionals to prove its contribution in business outcomes. Now there are techniques and tools that can show a direct link between PR and business outcomes, for example: correlation between volumes of coverage and sales. These advances in PR measurement techniques are helping prove spending on PR programs and justifying PR’s role in marketing mix.

Most PR measurement programs are traditionally focused around its media generation role. Typically most measurement programs seek to analyze media exposure - which is similar to the traditional advertising approach that marketing and brand managers are familiar, and comfortable, with.

First Level – Reach, This will cover number of media, number of readers, key message delivery, placement and the tone. Basically, the facts, what came out?

Second Level – Benchmarking, This measures the equivalent of the traditional advertising ‘share of voice’ approach tracks the corporate media coverage vis-à-vis its competitors. It provides the advantage of knowing how much media coverage and of what type it obtained relative to its competitors. In a very competitive business environment, it’s essential for organisations to be serious about their PR. Combined with the first level it provides good evaluation approach.

Third Level – Now measurement techniques at the second level can be correlated with sales patterns. And this has been named by ‘Share of Discussion’.

The theory about Share of Discussion is that if,
- PR can increase the amount of public (principally media driven) discussion about a topic, It can gain the majority share (or dominance) for its client or product, then It is likely that there will be a consequent increase in sales for that product/competitor after a period of time.

There are several case studies that directly - and scientifically - provide a link between peak periods of discussion to increased sales. However I would like to add that the time lapse between activity and action varies according to the type of product or service.

It must be recognized that these studies are related to unpaid media coverage i.e. that which is generated through PR. It supports other studies that report that consumers are much more influenced by editorial comment and coverage which they perceive as being independent and credible.

Accordingly, (for example), if mobile phones are very much an item of discussion in the media, the mobile phone brand which gains the greatest exposure stands to reap the greatest sales benefit. Please refer to the figures below:

Share of Discussion based on story counts…

Here the articles have been collected for the period of 2004-05 for Ist table and 2003-04 for IInd table from Factiva for India region, which covers all financial, mainlines newspapers and top business & telecom magazines. Articles are more or less exclusive on brands and are not being analyzed for tonality.

Correlation- During both the periods Sales to Share of Discussion (Volume of articles mentioning mobile handset brand names) were highly correlated. During 2004-05 correlation was r=0.97 and during 2003-04 it was r=.98.

The table above illustrates the correlations between the client’s (Nokia) own media coverage / count and its competitor’s with regards to the sales figures. Of course, it may be argued that marketers have always intuitively known this anyway. However, what makes this different is that this is showing the potency of unpaid media exposure - and that’s PR.

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Will be covered in part - II

More meaningful & in-depth measurement can be done based on media values and based on impressions.