Firms must appreciate PR as a management tool
By People Reporter, July 22, 2020Bernard Kimani
Covid–19 has posed enormous on businesses across the globe, forcing them to rethink their survival strategies.
An operational change invites a public image reassessment and therefore a public perception change.
One thing that has come out clearly in this crisis is the critical role public relations (PR) plays in every organisation.
Certainly, now more than ever, organisations are appreciating that to achieve objectives and goals they must deploy PR to create, manage and refresh their brands.
Unfortunately, a number of firms are still grappling to understand what PR is and the role it plays.
This is because the evolution and growth of PR industry in Kenya has been slow. However, a critical analysis reveals that a number of organisations are gradually appreciating PR.
To manage PR, firms either employ practitioners or hiring consultants. However, the industry continues to endure several challenges such as poor recognition by organisations’ top leadership that PR is a management function, increase of quacks, unfair competition, lack of adequate education for practitioners and lack of proper laws and structures to govern the profession.
The current crisis brought about by the pandemic has shown the future of proactive PR lies in the industry’s capacity to counter these challenges. Otherwise, all there will be is the same old reactive PR that achieves no meaningful results.
Interestingly, key among these challenges is how PR departments are positioned in organisations.
There is also some level of misunderstanding of what PR entails and its role in organisational management especially during a crisis.
One of the identity challenges facing PR is how it defines its relationship with marketing, with firms positioning it as a sub department of marketing and/or administration, among others.
Many PR practitioners are regarded as operators rather than managers in planning and decision-making levels.
For example, there is a trend where PR managers do not report directly to the CEO, but through a general manager who may not have an idea what PR is all about.
This leads to serious PR mismanagement within organisations, indicating the dire need for PR to gain recognition and respect from top management.
Accordingly, for firms to earn maximum benefits from PR, PR managers should be accorded executive privilege of being in top management where they can influence decisions.
Further, most PR managers lack the necessary training/skills in PR, thus affecting their performance and that of the organisation.
In the long run, it ends up costing the firm needless expenses leading to outsourcing as they must maintain an image of “knowing PR”.
The practice is also facing competition from other professions such as management consultants, and event managers, eager to portray PR practitioners as operators.
Further, PR units are faced with inadequate budgetary allocation since top management undermine potential and importance of the department in comparison to others.
Finally, it is important for organisations to understand PR as deliberate, planned and sustained effort to create and sustain shared understanding between a firm and its publics.
One of the reasons why most organisations fail to realise their objectives is that PR is never given much consideration, yet it is the heartbeat of every strategy within the organisation. Indeed, in most firms, PR is not deliberate but more of an inadvertent process, usually largely driven by a misconception that PR is easy. —The writer is a communication specialist and certified public relations analyst