Can PR agencies play the role of Marcom?

In the last 6-7 years or so, PR agencies in India have been on a roll with new businesses and most agencies today are handling more clients than they can possibly manage. In this scenario the biggest challenged faced by them is to gain scale and finding the right talent – so most of them are busy with just gaining scale and adopting processes and setting standards into their work processes to bring in efficiency.

On the other hand what has happened parallely is that the media itself has undergone a change and the consumers today are getting exposed to a variety of information from a variety of channel – leading to an extremely cluttered space.

In this scenario, the CEOs and Marketing heads are looking at immediate impact of ‘communications’ on their sales and businesses – mind you they do understand the importance of Public Relations and the benefits of managing the corporate reputation - but they are seen as long term objectives and PR is slow and can only work in long term – whereas the sales target are immediate objectives.

Most of the businesses are in an ongoing crisis (numbers) mode – which ad-agencies understand and PR agencies don’t or they choose not to as it is not their concern – it’s the marketing teams’ problem.

It is this philosophy of the PR agencies which makes many corporates/clients to look at PR as pure press relations or executioners rather than consultants.

CEOs look at Marketing communication on the whole to drive business objectives - which is nothing but amalgamation of advertising, events, contests, PR, road shows, seminars, brand properties etc..

And this is the opportunity which the Ad agencies and event management agencies are leveraging to their advantage – unfortunately it is the PR professionals who get caught off guard and are called at the last minute to get coverage in press for their initiatives/campaign – and then the team has to oblige because of the pressure of retaining the business.

This has lead to several PR professionals feeling a little confused about what is the role of PR?

The problem here is two folds –

• Though the heads of big PR agencies are thinking in the direction of marketing communications as a way of increasing their retainers– they are not really defining the deliverables upfront – they often say by the way we can also do a college activation program for you – which means nothing to the client and they don’t know what to expect from the PR agency on that front
• Secondly, since the agency heads have no clear definitions – the employees of the firm are only groomed and trained to deliver on the basic essential and deliverables of the PR. They are always caught off guard because at some meeting their CEO committed to do a certain project for the client - for which the employees have absolutely no experience on – resulting in PR professional doing odd-jobs with no clear cut idea of how to go about it

What makes the CEO commit to such deliverables to the client – because some team somewhere in the agency thought through a real business problem and discussed a campaign and executed it really well in close coordination with the marketing team – this makes the CEO think that every team should be doing it

There are a few agencies that have a very clear cut well defined scope of work – and charge the clients by the number of hours spent – and a lot of PR professional feel good about it as they have the power to say no to the client when called into to do an odd job.

But are they really doing enough for their client businesses? – I don’t think so – PR professionals needs to start thinking business – get a grip on the clients business environment - they should see the targets – they need to act as consultants - they should design campaigns along with marketing teams – they should roll out campaigns – give the clients what they are really want – ‘communicate with the target audience’.

Are PR agencies willing to take that road – some of them are trying – how many will succeed only time will tell.