FEATURE: MARKETING
L-R: James Holden, managing director of Leader; Bryan Holden, founder of Leader, and author Rachel Hicks
Getting the message across
By JAMES HOLDEN, managing director of Leader Communications, discusses how the PR industry has changed in the last 50 years – or has it?
‘Different yet very reassuringly always the same.’ These are the last words in a book entitled ‘In Pursuit of Success’ that we commissioned to commemorate our 50 years in the PR, design and marketing communications business. Leader was founded by my father, Bryan Holden, in May 1965, and our Golden Jubilee has given me a good excuse to look at how things have changed in terms of how you get your message across. I’ve started, as you can tell, with the conclusion to the book: which is that
things look very much more complex on the surface, but scratch a little deeper and actually they’re very much the same. In some ways for SMEs it’s actually a much better situation than back in the mid sixties when Leader came into being in the same year that Winston Churchill died and Jean Shrimpton sported a miniskirt that set tongues wagging amongst the chattering classes worldwide. Nonetheless, it’s probably best to start by looking at the differences, and
here of course the principal change has been the advent first of the internet and secondly (and possibly even more radically) the social media revolution. Note, I have used the word revolution advisedly, because there’s no doubt that both of these developments have created substantial discontinuity in the way that many people get their information. Even going back to the early 1980s when I began my PR career,
communications channels were relatively straightforward and a single copy of the PIMS media directory contained just about every contact you needed to know in TV, radio and all things printed. I can vividly remember drawing up hand coded media lists to issue press material, waiting a few weeks before the press clippings returned and then compiling reports to clients that demonstrated that we had effectively reached the market. Of course this is a relatively gross simplification but in many ways it was
the bread and butter of PR for many practitioners. Getting your client in the media despite protestations to the contrary was what we were paid for and for the majority of SMEs that we handled back in the day, that meant the
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relevant trade and technical titles of which there were many hundreds on just about any topic you can think of. Of course conferences, exhibitions and printed literature were part of the
mix and so too was networking but there was nothing like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or the many other social interfaces between an organisation and its publics. And any thoughts of SEO and anticipating what Google’s spiders might make of your website would have sounded like the stuff of sci-fi. Not only are the channels multiplied in an extraordinary way but their speed of delivery is in fractions of a second not days and weeks. So, if there’s so much change how can it all be the same once you’ve
scratched the surface? Well the answer probably has its roots in something that Henry Ford is often attributed to have said: “I know half my advertising is wasted, the problem is I don’t know which half.” This points to the fact that for all organisations it’s expensive to communicate and always has been and that there’s an awful lot of wastage. This is as true for SMEs as it is for corporate behemoths. This really does bring me to my key point of similarity between the PR
industry of today, of 1965 and points in between – in order to communicate accurately and effectively the starting point has to be an understanding of who you are trying to communicate with, what you are trying to say and why. Once these basic questions have been answered it’s then a case of assessing where it needs to be said and when. When all is said and done we should never forget that PR is about
influencing the way that people feel, think and act; it is about conversation and developing relationships with real people. By comparison technical communication channel discontinuities are a genuine challenge for sure but not enough to persuade me that we don’t have a case of ‘different yet very reassuringly always the same.’
‘In Pursuit of Success’ by Rachel Hicks can be downloaded free of charge at
www.leader.co.uk
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