Managing Reputations
At the time when Aurora’s cover story Do You Have Good PR? waspublished in the January-February 2002 edition, we observed thatPR was not viewed as a “professional profession” and was oftenmet with scepticism.
In fact, according to a PR professional at thetime, the profession’s function ranged from ensuring that a brand’s pressreleases were published in the leading daily newspapers to picking upthe chairman’s wife from the airport – hardly the hallmarks of a strategicdiscipline. In fact, PR was to a large extent viewed as a “corporate luxury.”At that time, it was estimated that there were fewer than 10 major PRagencies in Pakistan. The first was Mediators, established by BabarAyaz, followed by several others including Asiatic Public Relations (APR),Corporate and Marketing Communications (CMC) and Xenith. The growthof PR was attributed to the multinational companies and, to a largeextent, many advertising agencies carried out PR functions or establishedtheir own PR divisions or subsidiaries, while a significant number oforganisations had their own in-house PR departments.
Fast forward two decades, and PR in Pakistan has become a distinctfunction within the communications industry. A major reason for this is theincreasing importance placed on corporate communications, especially inthe digital space, where a single negative post can easily snowball into areputational crisis for an organisation. Social media has also led the wayin transforming the PR function, moving it away from a focus on gaining aneditorial-led presence in the print or electronic media to the heavy use ofsocial media influencers to drive the brand narrative, especially in a worldwhere consumer expectations demand purpose and authenticity from thebrand communication.
Despite some considerable progress, several challenges still have to beovercome. The first is the lack of dedicated courses in higher educationinstitutions for PR, and learning on the job is still the only effective way fornew entrants to learn about their profession. Another is creativity in terms ofdeveloping PR-specific initiatives that go beyond an increasingly saturatedinfluencer ecosystem. Then there is the concern in the way brands stillactually view PR; the fact that overall PR budgets account for three toeight percent of a brand’s marketing budget is indicative of the priority thefunction is given.
As one of the cover stories of Aurora’s May-June 2022 edition – Does PRNeed PR? – concluded, PR companies must do a better job of promotingthemselves. Put another way, PR itself needs PR.
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