Only 2.5% of Public Relations agencies in India focus on ‘Consumer touch PR’, while 84% execute the ‘white & pink paper PR’ focused on media relations. This is according to a recent survey conducted among 216 PR agencies in the country by Harish Bijoor Consultants.

(A far reality from what most PR firms portray or should be doing!)

That’s Harish Bijoor, Brand Expert & CEO, Harish Bijoor Consultants Inc. speaking at the 29th All India PR Conference organised by PRSI at Chennai. Harish also emphasised on the need of infrastructure development in India becoming more sensitive to the people and how planning needs to be done bottom-up and seamless in its involvement of all consumers and it is in this key area that PR needs to play a more strategic, long term role.

Are the other speakers at the Conference echoing similar opinions? Are we all just press release pushers, and need to ideate and manage programs more that involve the end-consumers directly? Maybe in the guise of the ‘infrastructure development’, the theme of this year’s conference, there is a greater message that is seeking out to reach to the entire PR fraternity. Let’s see.

Dr. Ghosh, in his presentation titled ‘Beyond 60, From entropy to symphony’, highlighted the need to move away from the previously ‘exploitative’ relationship with nature to a more ‘enriching relationship’ in the future. “The possible 21st century model,” he said, “does not lie in aping the developed countries since the world is now gradually changing its infrastructure model and therefore the solution does not lie in following what the world had done 50 years back. There needs to be a fundamental shift in perception from urbanisation to decentralisation, linear application of technology to convergence, hardware driven to humanware and software driven, consumption driven to conservation driven and from isolated infrastructure initiatives to more holistic ones and it is this awareness that PR needs to create.”

Another guest speaker at the first session of the conference was Prof Atul Tandon, Director, Mudra Institute of Communications. He highlighted that the key need of PR is to build a degree of national pride in our infrastructure and to educate people. The education he said had to cover several aspects such as creation, maintenance and preservation of infrastructure. The audience also got to view a few communication campaigns on infrastructure funds and the awareness campaigns on preservation of our infrastructure. Ironically, most of them were Government initiatives, which we blame so often for poor infrastructure!

The first day’s sessions at the PR conference were definitely some food for thought for PR practitioners and other stakeholders alike.

Picture Source: The Hindu.