The need for PR to understand business to make an impact

Provoke Media's Paul Holmes says PR and CCO need to understand business if they are to shape policy and impact organisations. Holmes was speaking at the inaugural PRCA Africa conference in Cape Town (Image supplied)

Holmes, founder and chair of Provoke Media has been writing about PR for more than 25 years, was speaking at the inaugural PRCA South Africa Conference on Wednesday, 29 January.

PR takes the lead

He outlined several events that have led to PR’s current position.

Starting with six years ago, when the Business Roundtable in the US advised companies to adopt a stakeholder mindset rather than a shareholder mindset.

This was a defining moment for PR and communications, says Holmes.

“Stating that all stakeholders matter was the first step on this journey of corporate communications, PR, corporate affairs - whatever we want to call it - up the value chain inside corporations.”

ESG was the next rung on that ladder, followed quickly by Covid, which created opportunities for corporate communications to assist CEOs to deal with issues for which they were not prepared.

Then came Black Lives Matter and companies jumped on the DEI bandwagon, and that was yet another area for PR to take the lead.

In the marketing realm, companies, from Unilever and P&G, were adopting purpose-driven marketing, and purpose-driven campaigns after purpose-driven campaigns won at Cannes.

“Again, with purpose at the centre, PR was taking the lead,” says Holmes.

Nexxt were the US elections and the insurrection that followed. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and many companies decided they could no longer do business in Russia.

“Many corporate affairs, corporate communications and senior PR agency people participated in communicating the decision to get out of Russia as well as being involved in deciding to get out of Russia.

“CCOs were in the room with the finance people, the operations people, the legal people, making the decision, balancing reputation risk against the financial and operational consequences of shutting down an entire market.”

That, he says, is exactly where PR’s function ought to be.

Then the backlash

But then there was a backlash against DEI and ESG, and purpose to a certain extent as well as the idea of corporate values.

“Many PR people completely failed to anticipate this, and they had positioned themselves as the leaders in the organisation on all those issues, and as the custodians of corporate values.”

Business issues

Holmes says issues such as ESG are not political issues or social issues for companies; primarily, these are business issues.

“ESG is a business priority, but PR talked about it as if we were doing something wonderful and altruistic for poor, underprivileged people who never got a break in life, and that, to a lot of people, looked like we were taking sides in a political object.

“Instead we should have been going into the CEO's office, saying we are investing in DEI because we believe it will make our company stronger in the long term or that recruiting equally from the entire talent pool will result in better quality candidates, not worse quality candidates and that diverse teams come up with better solutions and more creative ideas than homogenous teams.”

His point is that at the end of the day, business is pragmatic.

“Business does not care about your personal or social causes. It does not care about anything except making money.”

PR’s opportunity to step up

A CCO must bring arguments that state if we do this, we will lose money, or if we run this marketing campaign it's slightly offensive to a whole segment of the population, or if we cancel our PCI campaign, when a third of our customers come from the African American community, for example, we are going to lose business.

“Therefore, a good CCO must speak the language of business the same way that the legal, finance and operations people speak the language of business.

“As a CCO you need to understand everything about how the organisation makes money, about what is profitable and what is not profitable, because you are going to be in person walking into the room and saying, yes, it is legal. You can do it operationally. There are no great obstacles financially, it will make you some money.”

But, he says, if the reputation risk outweighs all that, but you can't show them (the C-suite) in their terms, why reputation is more important or as important as any of those other things, then you're not going to be part of the decision-making coalition in the organisation.