The article had multiple triggers the most recent being the question a BBA student of a leading college in Chennai posed post my presentation at a national seminar on entrepreneurship. After my presentation which dwelt on how and why I became an entrepreneur and what are my goals? her question was on the lines of how diplomatic and nice one is expected to be in the PR industry? I almost blinked since all along my career in this space have been quite vocal that we are not just nice people who smile a lot, socialize and are good at diplomacy. 

Couple of months back, was catching up with a very senior journalist at a leading business magazine and one the questions I asked her was why does she try to avoid PR executives? Her answer was that most of them do not know much of their clients beyond the background sheets drafted and the moment she has a question beyond they are at sea and hence she may as well do it directly. 

A year or so back we had this smart lady from one of the leading communication institutes in India as a volunteer for one of our client stalls at a leading international exhibition. After three days at the stall she had no clue as to the business of the client nor was interested in their business model and technology. She was more keen on striking a good rapport with senior executives and coming across “well” to them. The question that arose in my mind at that time was why is she not laying as much importance on understanding the business? 

Last week, had someone come to our office for an interview for a senior position. While talking I did mention that I do not socialize or attend parties. She was visibly surprised and went to the extent of saying I need to relook at it being the head of a PR firm as most networking only happens like this. 

Another instance that comes to mind is something that happened long back when I was not an entrepreneur and working in one of the large MNC PR firm in India. I was making the pitch presentation to the CEO/Head of marketing of this ITeS Company. Had done some home work and had was very convinced that technology will automate some of their service areas and hence it will be ideal for the company to actually reposition itself keeping this market eventuality in mind even before looking at any image efforts. Since it was a major insight was quite kicked and was expecting kudos for going beyond being a PR person and actually being an advisor to the client company. To my disappointment, my super boss later told me that the client was uncomfortable and needed someone who would focus on doing PR and not make business predictions. I had left by then and another team from the agency handled the account  

This one is even more candid. We have a client CEO who is pretty religious. So, one fine Saturday evening when he met one of PRHUB’s senior managers at the temple he was quite surprised. His first question was what are you doing here on a Saturday evening the surmise being that PR people always hang out and are in parties?  

Though random, these instances and our continuing stereotyping pose some nagging questions which all of us must answer and strive to address. I know for sure that many of us will squirm and will be uncomfortable at such categorization, that we do high quality work and take pride in what we do. This article is more a poser and not an attempt to provide answers. The only thing I feel quite strong about is that we should more and more showcase the substance aspect of what we do and not the packaging/finesse bit for this image to change. Await all your responses. 

(Xavier Prabhu, the author of the article runs PRHUB, a fast growing integrated communications firm with a national footprint. He can be reached at Xavier@prhub.com)