When what your client wants doesn’t align with what your client wants

by Jacco Zwetsloot

PR Company (PRC): This won’t align with your company’s goals. It doesn’t make sense. And besides, the contents are both boring and confusing.

Client company counterpart (CCC): I understand, but this is what my boss wants.

PRC: Have you told her that this is not the most effective way to tell your company’s story?

CCC: Please understand my situation. I am just a junior here. I just do what I’m told.?

In the PR industry we encounter situations like this more often than we would like. Your client company wants a certain message to go out, and your point of contact in the company is low enough down the food chain that their major concern is to simply do what is asked of them without making any mistakes, and may not see the big picture of what the overall message or who the intended audience is.?

To understand why this happens it can help to draw a distinction between the big picture and the little picture or what you are trying to do for your client.?

The big picture is that as a public relations professional, you are helping your client to present its best face to the world and communicate in a positive way with the public about your client’s vision, aims, and activities. This should be obvious but sometimes it is worth restating because although this is your main, overriding goal, it can sometimes be forgotten in light of the day to day missions that you work to fulfill. Therefore it is important not to lose sight of the wood for the trees. This lofty objective should always be born in mind.?

The little picture is on a much more down to earth and ephemeral level. On a day-to-day basis, you and your colleagues are carrying out small missions for your client in the service of the bigger, overarching goal. To make an analogy, if your big picture goal is building a house for your client, your small picture goal is building the structure, brick by brick.?

And it is here that the mismatch between goals can occur, because the working level people at the client company who are responsible for putting those bricks in place may not always understand or even care much about the bigger picture of the house that is being built, the house designed by the senior executives of their company. The concern at the working level is often much more pragmatic and immediate: how do I make promotion? How do I make it to the end of the week? How do I not make a mistake?

This mismatch can lead to what seems like strange decision making, for example, spending ad revenue in market sectors that your client is not active in, writing content that is clunky and awkward sounding, going against principles and guidelines that were set up in the initial client consultation sessions.?

It’s important to both be in constant communication with your own staff to know when they are being asked by their counterparts to do things like this, and to have regular strategy sessions with the senior PR or marketing executives within the client firm to check and reaffirm the bigger picture and to make sure that the smaller picture activities align with that.