Every once in a  while, there comes the case of a company that is unable to throughput communication in stark contrast to its otherwise brilliant performance indices. I have sought to understand this malady now and again but a chance conversation yesterday with a known genius in the Indian Financial Services space triggered this post. If you are the guardian angel of the Aspirational; the evangelist with passion, fire and a head full of mindgames, the PR kind, then read on…

Perception lags performance, due to many reasons. The causes manifest themselves in three primary reasons. For a Public Relations, Communications or Brand consultant, it is important to understand the terrain before they pick up on a project that seeks to break logjams in the media and perception circuits for a customer.

Breaking gridlocks and logjams for late entrants to the perception game requires special skills, the tricks  and tactics have been there forever, question is have you ever thought about it, enough to elevate it to strategy?

Changing share of voice in the media and lecture circuit from a inane buzz to the screaming roar of a Ferrari or shepherding your customer (internal or external depends which side of the table you are sat) from the mind-numbing terrors and traps in the media, triggering a turbo boost for your spokesperson in terms of messaging uptake and effectiveness, is what this post is about.

Firstly, an inability or fear of dealing with the media due to a past bad experience can make efforts hard or non-starters. Media Relations is an art that requires constant practice, the ride comes with bumps and smooth stretches, sporadic crises thrown in for spice.  You give, you get, but you always talk! There is media out there that is out to trick you out, will they hesitate to rubbish your carefully build reputation for an exclusive? Absolutely not for a second! Can PR change the game for your business? Absolutely yes! Good comes with the bad, package deal like with most things in life. If you are going to get anywhere, you need to get started! Tell them like it is, chances are that they take risks in business everyday and will grow into the act with a little hand holding from you, the specialist!

Secondly, there is a clique out there as in most other domains, these ‘usual suspects’ then pretty much control the share of voice in the media, and this maybe specific to a beat. The media is most times too lazy to do any hard digging when mapping a business space and again relies on the ‘usual suspects’, who maybe be convenient darling MDs, CEOs and other assorted rabble rousers. Awards: every publication and their mother has an award stacked with their favourites, breaking into this game needs perseverance, a nose for ‘distress sales’, finally being able to work the apex bodies like CII, FICCI, NASSCOM, etc, for advocacy and influencer relations.

Third and last here, is clearly a lack of process internally at the client organisation be it in terms of communication superstructure, even if one does exist, its ability to deliver strategic advice to management may be suspect in hierarchy driven situations or where communicators are too junior to be taken seriously. Some people use external consultants to tell them what is known already as it brings a credibility they lack.

Anyone can tell you that game changing maneuvers are few and far in between as stereotypes and ’safe’ options abound but if you as a PR professional were ever able to affect changes that made a company’s perception congruent with its performance as benchmarked against its peers, then you indeed deserve to be in the hall of fame. If commitment is your destiny and you can help tell a story that is true and ethical but inconvenient, then you are indeed one lucky person!

We need our heroes just like we need our war stories to feel good about the tribe and what it does, so come on give!

I am a little tired of rants including mine so here is a contrarian view, as you can see I do this contrarian thing quite well (or badly depending on your world view today).  This post originally started as a comment and as it grew embarrassingly large, I decided to claim back my Friday from Madhavi and actually graduate this to a post instead of the original comment it was meant to be!

Client and PR relationships are like marriages, they feud, but can”t stay without each other and more or less work out if both parties give it a half decent shot. There are exceptions on both ends and so let’s not go there today for the sake of the majority. On the specific question of clients not paying or paying too less or other grouses, I see essentially see this phenomenon in two parts.

Product or Services Differentiation

Firstly, it is an ability to differentiate your self in positioning. The PR Firm market has been a commodity market for the longest time with no entry barriers for hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop shows. I saw this happening 10 years ago and today is no different. There is room for both and it is good that entrepreneurship is still a possibility in the market place. What is the big difference in working for the big 5 PR Firms in the country (if you can actually figure out ever who they are by number of people employed or revenue in a transparent fashion, beyond claims) and the home office 2-3 people outfit, one can argue. I am sure there are a lot of differences in offering and durability in time of intense attrition but we who profess to be champions of branding do a rubbish job of its when it involves our own brand characteristics and touch points across websites, corporate identity markers from business cards to collateral branding including electronic collateral like the microsoft power point, the one leg of the one legged, PR Industry are all pretty crap.

How many people can recall different practices in a large popular PR Agency unless they happen to be a specialist firm? If I take names I will be slaughtered as these are all friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, so I’ll be prudent and duck my tail in on that but there are no many opportunities lost because no one in the leadership is really thinking about it beyond lip service and also-ran measures. Practice differentiation is not something just to do as a business whenever a fat client with a fat retainer demands it or when a project turns  into a reusable solution offering. It too needs the branding and marketing that will differentiate it as an offering and help you charge a premium for the effort in doing so.

Text 100 first changed the retainer landscape in the country in late 1990s with retainer values far in excess of what was then ‘going price’ for retainers in the Tech PR game at least. Again without taking names, there were enough nay sayers who never thought such retainers were possible or rated the survival chances of Text 100 in India. When the dust settled, history had been made with the Microsoft Account and there were many red faces. To be fair Text 100 came with an international mandates, best practices, processes but whatever local clients they picked up too came at larger retainers.

They were leaps and bounds ahead in differentiation, branding, positioning, and clients loved them and paid too. This gave hope and eventually benefited so many other legacy PR Firms who over a period of time started to attain similar retainer values because they moved up the value chain and comparing. This is when they had all along been largely sedentary about the possibility of a retainer being more than a lakh or two. There are many other examples of large retainers in Automotive, Financial Services, and Real Estate etc. 

Let’s talk for a minute about the client perspective here. What clients complain about is a lack of employee stickiness and just getting legs and no brains when they employ a PR Firm. If you sit on the client side which I have many times with multiple PR Agencies, these issues become important, so there are two sides to this coin! Don’t kick what you eat as there is seldom a one sided argument and there is no smoke without a fire!

So it isn’t like clients don’t pay. If you think you have an offering that deserves more (and good old vanilla media relations ain’t going to hack it partner) Pitch it right, be bold, be brave, and state your value proposition up front, brand your offering and you can get away with a screamer for a retainer!

Lack of Employee Stickiness and Intellectual Capital Capture in Public Relations Firms

The second important aspect one would do well to consider here involves employee longevity. Measures that arrest attrition including real dedication to employee training, specialization in vertical or horizontal practices, succession planning and an ability to see the next step-on-the-ladder.

There are philosophical and conceptual question there - what profitability are you after in terms of a gross margin is something that needs to examined in the interest of growth and scaling up. ‘Reverse price arbitrage’, this time in favor of employees and an inconvenient analysis of employee cost-to-company, as compared to retainers will show the employee wage bill as a percentage of revenue. What an owner, or promoter forsakes in terms of pay and work environment can only be good for the business but it is a question of rationale and greed.  I have seen many owners and promoters lash out about a lack of loyalty and commitment in employees while they themselves have zero empathy in return. Why is loyalty and commitment only an attribute expected of the employee and not the employer? If you want your people to stay please take care of them, treat them like individuals with aspirations and pay them right! Pay peanuts get monkeys - sound familiar?

So that is what I meant by garbage in- garbage out. Although there are good things happening out there in pockets, I am inherently in love with the idea of a consolidation based on market and supply dynamics, big names with standard global practices coming in can only mean better things for the industry and things moving to a new equilibrium.

The culture of crony PR firm associations has no done anything for the Industry or maybe I have not seen it and inconvenient issues never surface as these may not be in the best interest of constituents.

Let us embrace change and not stay shackled to the hackneyed tenets of a accidental birth, as India moves into the spotlight with its integration with the world economy, the future is bright for all of us!

A strong correlation has been observed between a company’s corporate communications and the company’s ranking on Fortune magazine’s ‘World’s Most Admired Companies’ list. The professional background, communications priorities, and inter-organizational relationships of the corporate communications head are also indicators of the ability of a corporate communications department to make a positive impact on a company’s reputation. These are some of the results of a survey ‘The Rising CCO (Chief Communications Officer)’ of 141 corporate communications executives from Fortune 500 companies in the US and Europe, conducted by global PR firm Weber Shandwick, executive search firm Spencer Stuart, and KRC Research.

The research also found that communications executives in the world’s most highly regarded companies have more prominent organizational status and longer tenures than their counterparts in contender companies. Additionally, approximately one-third of CCOs from the most admired companies cite corporate reputation as their number one priority for 2008, compared to fewer than one-quarter of CCOs from contender companies (34 vs. 21 percent, respectively). Contender company communications executives said they were spending more time working on product-related issues and crisis communications, while most admired CCOs said they spent more time on corporate social responsibility and building corporate reputation.

Based on Fortune’s 2006 Most Admired Survey (March 19, 2007). In general, Most Admired Companies are the most highly ranked companies in an industry on overall reputation. Contender Companies are ranked in the industry’s bottom half.

Other key findings are:

1. CCOs’ responsibilities will increasingly shift from tactical to strategic. While CCOs are carving out their role as strategic partners at the highest levels of business, they view work today as predominately tactical (58 percent tactical, 42 percent strategic). This imbalance, as reported by those surveyed, is sure to change as focus shifts from financial communications, media relations and internal communications to the broader strategic issues of environmental/social responsibility and corporate reputation. The tools used to perform their jobs will expand as well, with blogging/social media and corporate Web sites becoming increasingly important.

2. CCOs hold prominent positions at the world’s largest companies. Nearly one-half surveyed report directly to the chief executive officer (48 percent) and are visible to their boards (had a median seven interactions with their board during the past year).

3. CCOs and CMOs are friends and rivals. CCOs’ dynamic relationship with chief marketing officers (CMOs)–often a main rival and ally–reflects the growing influence of communications in today’s marketing mix.

4. Measurement of CCO effectiveness is predominately qualitative. The vast majority of those surveyed report being measured on qualitative measures such as “positive” media coverage (75 percent) and CEOs’ “gut” feel (73 percent). They are least likely to be measured by quantitative metrics such as the number of media mentions (35 percent) and ability to control costs (32 percent).

The weather in Mumbai or Bombay as I tend to yet and maybe always will refer to it is amazing. For those interested in the weather, the best time to be here is from November through February.

As I look outside the window, around me the madness continues. No one has noticed the weather. When I moved back to Bombay, my adopted home from Bangalore earlier this year, the weather was the last thing on my mind. The excitement of the rubber hitting the road again in a sell side assignment is what was floating my boat. That the traffic in Bangalore is arguably and notionally more crap may have entered my mind.

Where am I taking you with this? Well, simply: Where would I rather work today, Agency or Client? For years, it has been the path of exodus from PR or Advertising or other MarComms agencies to Client or Buy side roles. Traditional wisdom seems to suggest that moving to a client role has been the staple ambition of most communications or marketing interns, a larger aspiration seemingly bordering on the infinite.

This traditional wisdom translated and still does to considering client side roles as better paying; better working conditions, standard industry best practices in HR and Benefits policy. Salary surveys and this image of the make-doer being higher up the food chain than the doer. Add to that legend, cult chatter and imagined greatness to make a heady mirage of desire and aspiration, to my mind the only other comparable oversold silver bullet solution to bliss is marriage!

So you made it to the buy side with an unbelievable hike. Congratulations. First move, I know what’s best, this agency sucks; fire the Agency! One year and two agencies later, all agencies still suck. “My budget is crap, no one understands my vision, and the boss is an idiot“. The cycle moves downstream from confusion; frustration; denial; pragmatism; cynical submission and points further. Slowly the cognitive realization of the existence of other traditional company functions like Finance, HR, Corporate Planning & Strategy, Sales, and Quality dawns, besides of course Marketing into which a traditional PR or Communications or MarComms function will report.

If I sense defiance and a few backs getting up already lets up the ante a bit; imagine reporting into Sales or its often interchangeable euphemism - Sales & Marketing or worse HR! Politics assumes a new meaning and such things as annual budgeting (read begging, negotiating, storming out of meetings and sometimes even threatening to leave are usual tricks). Empire building and head count become the corner stones of all calculation!

The news isn’t all bad, happy things include a PR Firm to flog (depending on how fat this company is lets add an advertising agency, a web agency, a media buyer, an investment relations firm and so on) on retainer who you usually never call before 7pm with new requirements to be delivered first thing in the morning. End-of-day (EOD) and close-of-business (COB) and other similar dire abbreviation start peppering your e-mail. The tyrant in you starts to surface and the latent evil becomes apparent. Alarming surveys and such non-issues at most agency jobs such as consumer media preferences in the internet age start factoring on your radar!

So you think you should be one down from the corner room and the place of Communications and PR is at the Board Table along side the CEO or MD, that’s good, Bombay weather remains amazing, no one has noticed.

So what’s happened here? From being, ‘the Business’, you have suddenly been relegated to a “Support function”. Yes, you got paid better, probably drive a car now instead of the old faithful motorcycle or a better car if you already had one, and live in a slightly more up market location. You’ve acted wisely, have decided to get married, have a child or two, settled down and become and EMI lifer too, the hours are better, it’s all coming together!

What is this thing that makes agencies more passionate, creative power houses that function on the cutting edge of innovation? I took a call and moved back to the agency end of things, there are good days and there are bad days but I am having a lot of fun…so far that is!

There are arguments for and against and while the jury is out on that one.

I leave it there for you folks to start a debate with your views. I would love to hear what you people out there in the PR Agency or Sell Side/Client or Sell Side or combination thereof in cyberspace think about being a doer or a make doer!

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india