The Future of PR

I’ve been challenged a lot this year to think differently about PR and I know many of you feel the same. The fact that we have so many mediums available to us now to communicate with our stakeholders, and that there are demands for us to not only communicate, but to package that communication into short, shiny, glitzy audio-visual soundbites, is challenging us to re-define our role as PR practitioners. To question whether we are in public relations or communications.

I recently presented this paper on the Future of PR at the 2nd ASEAN PR Conference in Kuching, partly because an academic, who proposed the topic, asked me to share my thoughts about the definition of PR. It’s not an uncommon request as, in the fast-paced environment of digital communications, we are grappling with role definitions that distinguish PR, marketing, and communications.

But do we really need to redefine Public Relations, or PR?

To answer that question, I felt that I needed to figure out how PR evolved before I could tell you if we should re-define PR for future needs.

To capture the discipline of PR as it is today, I developed a comprehensive Mind Map of Public Relations (PR) in 2019:

Anecdotally, I hear people saying that they want to change their label of ‘PR’ to Communications, but I don’t think that is a reason to change the definition of PR. Let me show you why.

PR scholars and educators, such as Scott Cutlip, have dated the establishment of the "Publicity Bureau" in 1900, in the United States, as the start of the modern public relations (PR) profession.

The founder of the Publicity Bureau, Edward Louis Bernays, is widely considered the father of Public Relations. He founded the Publicity Bureau as a way and means of propagating propaganda. Of course, propaganda existed in many forms of public influence and communications management earlier in history, as it has been shown to exist Before Christ, but this initiative was the foundation of PR.

In 1923, Bernays published a paper called “Crystallizing Public Opinion,” in which he established several public relations principles. He said that public relations had these two primary functions:

?          To interpret the client to the public, which means promoting the client

?          To interpret the public to the client, which means operating the company in a way that garners public approval

Often referred to as “the father of public relations,” Bernays in 1928 published his seminal work, Propaganda, in which he argued that public relations is not a gimmick but a necessity:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”

Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime.

Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”

In the 1930s, around the same time that PR began to flourish, modern stakeholder management thinking began in response to a debate on the responsibilities of corporations. According to Henry J. Lindborg, E.D. and CEO of the National Institute for Quality Improvement, who wrote the book Stake Your Ground’ Unearthing the origins of stakeholder management, at the time, although shareholders came first in law for corporations, society began to wonder what, if any, responsibility the corporation had to the public at large.

Though the Stanford Research Institute is credited with first using the modern definition of stakeholder in 1963, the concept wasn’t fused with management thinking until R. Edward Freeman published his influential book, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, in 1984.2 Freeman remains a thought leader in stakeholder management.

It wasn’t until the late 1980s that stakeholder management came into its own, under the umbrella of PR.

For several decades after PR and Stakeholder Relations was established, public relations aimed to educate stakeholders and to tell brand narratives, creating publicity for a brand through media relations, public speaking engagement and direct mail.

Before the internet developed, brands had few methods to communicate with their consumers. The Yellow Pages, word-of-mouth and advertising were the main ways to deliver key messages.

A company's reputation depended on personal experience and the reputation grew and expanded based on the market's perception of the brand.

Once the internet developed, the public relations broadened outside of media relations to manage the image and build the reputation of a company or individual. Where once journalists were the main source of content, then came blogs, review sites and social media to give voice to consumers regardless of qualification.

Brand reputation management truly entered the Public Relations domain.

Early on in the piece, Sales was the custodian of the Brand. Take the old car salesman example. The Salesperson took the lead in communicating the brand attributes at the point of sale. But, because there were only so many prospects that a Salesperson could fossick for, and convert, Marketing was born.

Marketers reached out to the community, using tools such as mailers, posters, fax fliers, in a sort of scatter gun approach to target and to educate a prospect, capturing their attention to lure them to Sales, who would hopefully convert the Prospect into a Customer. At this point Marketing became deliverer of key messages, the Brand Custodian. Marketing was responsible for presenting the arguments to believe in the Brand.

To soften the sales approach, Public Relations was used to educate the general public about an entity through the media - especially Automobile, Rail and Chemical companies in America in the 1920s and 1930s.

And around this time, companies developed narratives to sell their brands. The stories were designed to reach stakeholders, influencers and target audiences through the media like Coca Cola and Santa Claus, and DeBeers who made up that there had to be an engagement ring.

PR, through the media, sought to inform influencers and Prospects, softening them for the sales and marketing message, and priming them for sales conversion.

 Alongside the media, the PR team used other mechanisms like newsletters, company profiles, and annual reports to educate company stakeholders about the company’s raison d’?tre, its reason for being.

And although Marketing has had oversight of PR, if Marketing could tap a healthy pipeline of Prospects that they could feed to Sales, they weren’t overly concerned as to how the PR team operated. And it remained that way as long as the public was receptive to Marketing’s push messaging.

But the World Wide Web changed everything.

For the first time, through marketing, you could directly target a consumer.

Dot com fervour hit a huge high. To quote internet historian Brian McCullough, the successful dot-coms of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s had a few things in common: they all vowed to “change the world”, had crazy-high valuations, and were wildly unprofitable. (That sounds a lot like the Unicorns of today… doesn’t it?)

At this time too, Marketing became well positioned to convert a Prospect to a Sale, without handing the Prospect over to the Sales team.

PR began branching out from Marketing around this point because the internet critically brought to bear stakeholder relations and reputation management, and because in the late 1990s companies like Microsoft and Google ran into massive regulatory and monopoly issues and faced huge fines. (A bit like Facebook today.)

Thus, stakeholder relationship messaging and management became a focus for PR.

Then something else changed everything.

Social Media was conceived, born and proliferated via the Internet.

Suddenly people, people who never had connections before, could communicate with one another, randomly or intentionally.

 Communities formed around a brand through social media, and consumers of the Brand rapidly communicated with each other, sharing perceptions, which at times were contrary to the push messages Marketing were delivering.

At this point, not only did Marketing lose its way, but so did the Media.

PR picked up the slack because PR had long established an authentic relationship between an entity and its publics.

Companies began spending their advertising and marketing money on PR.

Which meant that the power to convince the consumer to purchase shifted to PR.

That marketing and the media had lost their way meant that PR, for the first time, had to package its messaging to pick up the slack for marketing and media. They began building creative skills and engaged creative teams to package their narratives.

It is noteworthy that social media also changed the relationship that the Media had with its audiences.

Suddenly, through social media, individuals became reporters. Anyone could deliver the news pretty much wherever they could find a place to post it. Just think about how many news stories still break via Twitter. The plane on the Hudson River, for example.

Citizen journalism then created the 24-hour news cycle.

Then both Marketing and the Media began re-appreciating PR and their story-telling skills, realising they needed story-telling to engage with the public.

And here’s the thing. PR has always been cerebral.

It’s been about the words, the messaging and the story of the Brand. It hasn’t been about the packaging of those messages because we have traditionally relied on the media to do that.

But what’s distracting us from the definition of PR today, is the packaging of the messaging.

Although the function of Public Relations has been able to withstand the test of time, today, we wrestle not only with interpretation, but with engagement.

To the essence of PR, we told stories to interpret the client to the public. But in the world of internet and social media, we need to also engage with the public, which means we need to evoke emotion in our story telling.

That’s all the more reason we need to work with Marketing, rather than take the mantle of the creative packaging of story ideas and narratives on our own.

(Take the example of the Vicks India marketing team working with their PR team and PR agency to develop a brand story, #TouchOfCare.)

The world will always need good content. How we get that content across in the future is what we are deciding today.

It’s almost laughable that, suddenly, because we now have affordable equipment and delivery mechanisms, the biggest thing in PR is video, because the first live newscast took place almost 80 years ago!

Video is powerful because humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text and it succeeds because Millennials dominate Internet use.

Today, Sales, Marketing & PR collectively aim for greater depths in reaching out to their customers.

Not only do we collectively need to build a target audience, but we need to engage with that audience in dialogue. We are in the midst of establishing communities.

We moved from preaching to discourse.

We already see the roots of this today in the use of Augmented Reality, which enables a community to engage with a Brand via a story. For example, if you are reading a story and want to learn more about that story, you can be guided via a URL or, or a QR code. That’s Augmented Reality. If you are shopping and you want to see the dress in blue, rather than black, that’s Augmented Reality.

But where next?

To build communities, we, as story tellers, must evoke empathy. In general, we need to give people something to bond over. The communities we build will be bonded by empathy.

We are accustomed today to the Internet connecting Things [IoT], but soon everything will be connected via the Internet, propelling us into the age of the Internet of Everything [IoE]), which will help spur rapid migration from video to virtual reality (VR).

Already today, enterprising newsrooms are considering how to deliver news with Virtual Reality. A TV station in Los Angeles used VR to show its audience how a diabetic in a food line had to wait so long in a queue to get food that he passed out in a coma, shocking everyone around him. By bringing that occurrence to life using virtual reality visuals, the TV station provoked empathy in the viewers, which had impact in addressing the issue that caused it.

For decades, we’ve been able to keep our distance from reality that exists, but we don’t experience, because we experience news as information. However, virtual reality delivers immersive and meaningful stories in such a way that it evokes sensory aspects to storytelling. For example, bringing to life the experience of being in war torn Syria through VR.

Moreover, VR means that Brands can now deliver an experience through storytelling.

So wrap this up, in the past century of PR:

·        We’ve moved from Propaganda to publicity through Media Relations.

·        The delivery of key messages has moved from Sales to Marketing to PR

·        The art of informing an entities public has moved from Stakeholder Relations, to brand positioning and Reputation Management.

·        Responsibility was first with the entity, then the World Wide Web, and now Social media as the gatekeeper of the entity’s reputation.

There have been several distinct transitions in the past century of PR:

?          We are moving from the written word to audio-visual

?          We have moved from talking from one to many; to many to one

?          We no longer can preach; we have to engage in discourse

?          And we are moving from an onus of interpretation to engagement, and on to evoking empathy.

So, in a way, today we do need to redefine PR. Per Bernays definition, I think we not only need,

? To interpret, but to engage the client with its public, which means promoting the client

? To interpret the public to the client, which means operating the company in such a way as to gain the approval of the public