Public Relations: getting a handle on the mystique

Helen Wylie, co-founder of Da Vinci Public Relations, looks at how organisations can make the most of their PR potential without stretching marketing budgets unduly.

One of the paradoxes of business today is that an organisation’s public profile has never been more important, while marketing budgets have never been more constricted.

Some organisations have halted all discretionary (ie. not absolutely necessary) expenditure completely. Most would include spending money on profile-raising activity within the category of discretionary expenditure.

True: even the most parsimonious organisations are devoting time and money to their websites. After all, websites have become the front lobby or shop window though which people learn about - and judge - an organisation. But promoting yourself properly is much more than just a question of getting your website right, and indeed your website should be in harmony with every other aspect of your public relations (PR) strategy.

Another problem with PR – quite apart from today’s tight budgetary constraints – is that there is still a curious mystique surrounding PR. This doesn’t help businesses to feel confident about launching PR initiatives even when they desperately want to get their name and expertise known to a wider audience.

I’ve run a public relations consultancy for nearly a decade. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a look of wariness and even anxiety in prospective new clients eyes at our first meeting. Believe me, I really don’t look all that scary. What I think makes prospective clients anxious is that they don’t know much about PR, and what they do know makes them fear embarking on any PR initiative, despite their often urgent commercial need to get their organisation better known. They feel like it’s going to be like opening Pandora’s Box. They’re often particularly worried about cost issues and about how they can measure the fruit of any PR investment they make.

I understand their anxieties. The public relations industry is all about promoting organisations in the most positive light to the greatest number of people in all relevant target audiences. Yet PR professionals have generally been lamentably bad at promoting their own industry.

Far too many businesspeople tend to think of PR in terms of stereotypes. Some people even bizarrely use the phrase ‘a PR’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Some managers imagine that PR professionals are all slick, insincere, fast talkers, skilled at fudging answers to key questions and as difficult to pin down as a soap bubble. Other businesspeople may have had experience of public relations consultants who spend a lot of time and client money wining and dining journalists, talking big, embellishing the truth by a kind of automatic process and generally being much bigger on hype than on substance.

Before writing this article, I thought hard about all the people I know in the PR industry. None of them - and I really do mean none of them - remotely match the stereotype of the big-talking, long-lunching, port-imbibing PR consultant. For one thing, the public relations consultancy business has been tough to be in over the past two years. Expenditure on PR was one of the very first things to be cut in the climate of uncertainty after the tragic events of 9/11. People who have remained in the industry have tightened belts considerably. Those who have survived, in my experience, are the ones who fervently believe in the commercial benefits PR can bring to businesses, and they genuinely love what they do.

After all, if you think about it, what could be more important and interesting than learning about an organisation, developing an intimate understanding of its products, service, aims and objectives, and then communicating the nature of that organisation in the most honest and positive way to all the people who might want to know about it?

I call being able to do that a profound privilege and a truly demanding and satisfying intellectual and practical exercise.

The point is that the two years of difficulty that the PR industry has suffered have trimmed the fat from all PR consultancies in the UK. The ones that still exist do indeed tend to be staffed by professionals who sincerely believe in what they are doing and care about it.

So if you are thinking about how public relations might be able to help you, the chances are that you will be able to find a PR professional – whether a freelance or within a PR consultancy – who will be committed to helping you and won’t charge you the earth for doing so.

Exploit this opportunity to make the most out of public relations. Grab the chance to develop a PR initiative that isn’t based around grandiose ambitions or pie-in-the-sky dreams, but is an incredibly powerful tool for making your customers aware of your organisation, what it offers and why they should be doing business with you.

In practice, how should such a campaign work?

Recent research by the UK’s Institute of Public Relations (IPR) has yielded three conclusions of great importance for any organisation planning on developing a PR strategy.

1. The IPR research indicates beyond any possible doubt that preliminary planning is absolutely of the essence in any successful PR campaign.

2. The IPR has found that the most successful PR campaigns are directly tied to one or more specific business goals.

3. The IPR research demonstrates that there needs to be a very clear and well-defined message used consistently throughout the PR campaign.

In essence, what these three conclusions urge is that any organisation should plan its PR campaign carefully and should think very hard about what message it wants to disseminate.

The most effective PR campaigns usually deliver a simple, strong message. Hollywood likes movies that do the same, it calls them ‘high-concept’. What this means is that the film’s essence can be distilled into a simple, momentous phrase. So we have, for example, Jurassic Park – ‘dinosaurs bought to life as amusement park attractions run amok; Independence Day – ‘malevolent aliens attempt to take over Earth’; Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – ‘mistreated orphan boy discovers he has magical powers’.

The reason these movie ideas excite us is because there is power in their simplicity. Similarly, organisations must boil their message down to a simple, truthful and powerful proposition.

Of course, organisations must then deliver on that succinct and momentous proposition, just as the makers of the above three movies had to deliver a quality product. But you can be quite sure it’s much easier to deliver a quality movie – or a great business proposition - when you start with a clear and powerful premise.

You may well be thinking: ‘this is all very well, but businesses operating in highly competitive niche marketplaces cannot hope to distinguish themselves from their rivals as radically and clearly as a new Hollywood movie’.

In fact, a big part of my work over the past few years has been working with organisations that have constrained budgets, and identifying elements of their thinking and practice – and especially elements of their founder’s or principal practitioner’s experience - which can stand out as powerfully and decisively as the concept of a major Hollywood movie.

The point is, we are all unique individuals. Ultimately it is usually just one or a few individuals – and their dreams - that are the engine behind a business. And believe me, individuals are far more unique than any Hollywood movie is ever going to be.

The challenge is to make the effort to think hard about what you are doing as an organisation and where you want to go. Stop limiting your vision by seeing yourself as just another player in your particular industrial, commercial or professional sector. After all, you strive every day not just in order to become a player in a particular sector, but because you wanted to fulfil your potential and become the person you always knew you could become.

Focus on that uniqueness and you can bet your bottom dollar it won’t be long before you’re starting to see how your business, with all its dreams, particular requirements, challenges, joys, frustrations and ambitions – differs from organisations which you may find are only superficially your competitors.

Your ideal PR consultant should be in tune not only with your organisation’s plans and ambitions, but also with how you can focus on - and develop - your uniqueness. Once you know how you want to be seen by the world, the PR consultant should help you to formulate that presentation into words, and harmonise that message with other aspects of your presentation such as your website, brochures and other marketing tools.

When you’ve distilled your message, the next stage is to develop communications channels to the people and organisations you want to reach. Public relations can play an important role in helping businesses to communicate directly to target customers. Yet more often it focuses on helping businesses influence the entirety of all relevant print and broadcast media in order to take the message to the widest possible market.

You should also expect your PR consultancy to have a decisive strategy for implementing your message. This will give you a clear idea of the kind of results you can expect in terms of coverage and business development. Your PR adviser must be a skilled communicator. He or she needs to have the tenacity to make repeat submissions if necessary to ensure that the information reaches the right journalist, and be persuasive and helpful to editors and journalists without being overbearing.

Finally, your PR consultancy should let you know upfront, before any activity starts, precisely what the activity will cost. Never enter into an open-ended agreement with a PR consultant that lets them work an unspecified amount of time and charge an unspecified fee. You want to know from the very beginning what the activity is going to cost so that you can budget for it. Don’t let them exceed the cost without your express - and ideally written - permission.

By proceeding with caution, taking the trouble to formulate your message as a result of thinking hard about your organisation, and by choosing a PR consultancy that can deliver both long-term strategic and short-term tactical implementation - for a cost agreed in advance - you are well on the way to enjoying the significant benefits a successful PR campaign can bring. You can expect it to bring you greatly heightened awareness among your target market and very significantly increased business opportunities.

Now tell me, how scary is that?

Helen Wylie is co-founder of Da Vinci Public Relations, a PR consultancy that carries out campaigns designed above all to grow clients’ businesses. Tel. 01227 472 874.

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	Public Relations: getting a handle on the mystique Helen Wylie, co-founder of Da Vinci Public Relations, looks at how organisations can make the most of their PR potential without stretching marketing budgets unduly. One of the paradoxes of business today is that an organisation’s public profile has never been more important, while marketing budgets have never been more constricted. Some organisations have halted all discretionary (ie. not absolutely necessary) expenditure completely. Most would include spending money on profile-raising activity within the category of discretionary expenditure. True: even the most parsimonious organisations are devoting time and money to their websites. After all, websites have become the front lobby or shop window though which people learn about - and judge - an organisation. But promoting yourself properly is much more than just a question of getting your website right, and indeed your website should be in harmony with every other aspect of your public relations (PR) strategy. Another problem with PR – quite apart from today’s tight budgetary constraints – is that there is still a curious mystique surrounding PR. This doesn’t help businesses to feel confident about launching PR initiatives even when they desperately want to get their name and expertise known to a wider audience. I’ve run a public relations consultancy for nearly a decade. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen a look of wariness and even anxiety in prospective new clients eyes at our first meeting. Believe me, I really don’t look all that scary. What I think makes prospective clients anxious is that they don’t know much about PR, and what they do know makes them fear embarking on any PR initiative, despite their often urgent commercial need to get their organisation better known. They feel like it’s going to be like opening Pandora’s Box. They’re often particularly worried about cost issues and about how they can measure the fruit of any PR investment they make. I understand their anxieties. The public relations industry is all about promoting organisations in the most positive light to the greatest number of people in all relevant target audiences. Yet PR professionals have generally been lamentably bad at promoting their own industry. Far too many businesspeople tend to think of PR in terms of stereotypes. Some people even bizarrely use the phrase ‘a PR’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Some managers imagine that PR professionals are all slick, insincere, fast talkers, skilled at fudging answers to key questions and as difficult to pin down as a soap bubble. Other businesspeople may have had experience of public relations consultants who spend a lot of time and client money wining and dining journalists, talking big, embellishing the truth by a kind of automatic process and generally being much bigger on hype than on substance. Before writing this article, I thought hard about all the people I know in the PR industry. None of them - and I really do mean none of them - remotely match the stereotype of the big-talking, long-lunching, port-imbibing PR consultant. For one thing, the public relations consultancy business has been tough to be in over the past two years. Expenditure on PR was one of the very first things to be cut in the climate of uncertainty after the tragic events of 9/11. People who have remained in the industry have tightened belts considerably. Those who have survived, in my experience, are the ones who fervently believe in the commercial benefits PR can bring to businesses, and they genuinely love what they do. After all, if you think about it, what could be more important and interesting than learning about an organisation, developing an intimate understanding of its products, service, aims and objectives, and then communicating the nature of that organisation in the most honest and positive way to all the people who might want to know about it? I call being able to do that a profound privilege and a truly demanding and satisfying intellectual and practical exercise. The point is that the two years of difficulty that the PR industry has suffered have trimmed the fat from all PR consultancies in the UK. The ones that still exist do indeed tend to be staffed by professionals who sincerely believe in what they are doing and care about it. So if you are thinking about how public relations might be able to help you, the chances are that you will be able to find a PR professional – whether a freelance or within a PR consultancy – who will be committed to helping you and won’t charge you the earth for doing so. Exploit this opportunity to make the most out of public relations. Grab the chance to develop a PR initiative that isn’t based around grandiose ambitions or pie-in-the-sky dreams, but is an incredibly powerful tool for making your customers aware of your organisation, what it offers and why they should be doing business with you. In practice, how should such a campaign work? Recent research by the UK’s Institute of Public Relations (IPR) has yielded three conclusions of great importance for any organisation planning on developing a PR strategy. 1. The IPR research indicates beyond any possible doubt that preliminary planning is absolutely of the essence in any successful PR campaign. 2. The IPR has found that the most successful PR campaigns are directly tied to one or more specific business goals. 3. The IPR research demonstrates that there needs to be a very clear and well-defined message used consistently throughout the PR campaign. In essence, what these three conclusions urge is that any organisation should plan its PR campaign carefully and should think very hard about what message it wants to disseminate. The most effective PR campaigns usually deliver a simple, strong message. Hollywood likes movies that do the same, it calls them ‘high-concept’. What this means is that the film’s essence can be distilled into a simple, momentous phrase. So we have, for example, Jurassic Park – ‘dinosaurs bought to life as amusement park attractions run amok; Independence Day – ‘malevolent aliens attempt to take over Earth’; Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – ‘mistreated orphan boy discovers he has magical powers’. The reason these movie ideas excite us is because there is power in their simplicity. Similarly, organisations must boil their message down to a simple, truthful and powerful proposition. Of course, organisations must then deliver on that succinct and momentous proposition, just as the makers of the above three movies had to deliver a quality product. But you can be quite sure it’s much easier to deliver a quality movie – or a great business proposition - when you start with a clear and powerful premise. You may well be thinking: ‘this is all very well, but businesses operating in highly competitive niche marketplaces cannot hope to distinguish themselves from their rivals as radically and clearly as a new Hollywood movie’. In fact, a big part of my work over the past few years has been working with organisations that have constrained budgets, and identifying elements of their thinking and practice – and especially elements of their founder’s or principal practitioner’s experience - which can stand out as powerfully and decisively as the concept of a major Hollywood movie. The point is, we are all unique individuals. Ultimately it is usually just one or a few individuals – and their dreams - that are the engine behind a business. And believe me, individuals are far more unique than any Hollywood movie is ever going to be. The challenge is to make the effort to think hard about what you are doing as an organisation and where you want to go. Stop limiting your vision by seeing yourself as just another player in your particular industrial, commercial or professional sector. After all, you strive every day not just in order to become a player in a particular sector, but because you wanted to fulfil your potential and become the person you always knew you could become. Focus on that uniqueness and you can bet your bottom dollar it won’t be long before you’re starting to see how your business, with all its dreams, particular requirements, challenges, joys, frustrations and ambitions – differs from organisations which you may find are only superficially your competitors. Your ideal PR consultant should be in tune not only with your organisation’s plans and ambitions, but also with how you can focus on - and develop - your uniqueness. Once you know how you want to be seen by the world, the PR consultant should help you to formulate that presentation into words, and harmonise that message with other aspects of your presentation such as your website, brochures and other marketing tools. When you’ve distilled your message, the next stage is to develop communications channels to the people and organisations you want to reach. Public relations can play an important role in helping businesses to communicate directly to target customers. Yet more often it focuses on helping businesses influence the entirety of all relevant print and broadcast media in order to take the message to the widest possible market. You should also expect your PR consultancy to have a decisive strategy for implementing your message. This will give you a clear idea of the kind of results you can expect in terms of coverage and business development. Your PR adviser must be a skilled communicator. He or she needs to have the tenacity to make repeat submissions if necessary to ensure that the information reaches the right journalist, and be persuasive and helpful to editors and journalists without being overbearing. Finally, your PR consultancy should let you know upfront, before any activity starts, precisely what the activity will cost. Never enter into an open-ended agreement with a PR consultant that lets them work an unspecified amount of time and charge an unspecified fee. You want to know from the very beginning what the activity is going to cost so that you can budget for it. Don’t let them exceed the cost without your express - and ideally written - permission. By proceeding with caution, taking the trouble to formulate your message as a result of thinking hard about your organisation, and by choosing a PR consultancy that can deliver both long-term strategic and short-term tactical implementation - for a cost agreed in advance - you are well on the way to enjoying the significant benefits a successful PR campaign can bring. You can expect it to bring you greatly heightened awareness among your target market and very significantly increased business opportunities. Now tell me, how scary is that? Helen Wylie is co-founder of Da Vinci Public Relations, a PR consultancy that carries out campaigns designed above all to grow clients’ businesses. Tel. 01227 472 874.
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