Why do people find it so hard to understand what we do in PR?

“So, what do you do?” This question always makes my heart sink. It was easy to answer when I was a teacher because everyone knows what that means. But when I say “I work in public relations” I get a myriad of responses, from “Oh, like Edwina in Absolutely Fabulous. Cor – that must be really exciting with all those parties”, or “Do you mean ‘spin doctor’ like Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It?” And while journalists view PR as “the dark arts”, others think PR means customer relations, basically meeting, greeting and schmoozing. 

Trying to explain what public relations is about is like wading through a puddle of liquid cement. Perhaps the story of the blind men and the elephant is more apt. Because PR means different things to different people, depending on your experience. The official definition, according to the CIPR, is “… a planned effort to maintain a reputation and build goodwill between an organisation and its public”. PR is basically all about earning understanding and support from people (or “publics”), influencing opinion and behaviour, and establishing mutual understanding. Those of us who work in PR get this. But try explaining that in a 10-second elevator pitch to someone else without ending up in verbal tumbleweed. 

In its early days, PR was all about publicity, as encapsulated by its American founding father Edward Bernays. That approach fits the profile of the publicist whose job is getting actors on chat shows to promote their new film, or dressing people as teddy bears, wizards or robots to sell children’s books. But as we well know, PR isn’t just about one-way communication. It can cover anything from stakeholder engagement, public affairs and content creation to investor relations, internal communications and crisis communications, as well as media relations. Trying to explain that succinctly is tricky. 

And this lack of understanding of what PR is all about may be one of the reasons for the decline in undergraduate courses in public relations, from around 20 a decade or so ago to just one, at the London College of Communication. CIPR Fellow Richard Bailey, who has just retired as a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, cites the ‘Samantha syndrome’ as the reason why PR was once a popular subject. Played by Kim Cattrell in Sex and the City, Samantha Jones was a successful PR agency owner living a glamorous social life (with plenty of sex) in New York. “It was brilliant for recruiting students onto public relations degree courses,” says Richard. “The downside is the sense that PR was seen as somehow fluffy – which couldn’t be further from the truth in this age of permacrisis.”  

A complex beast 

At undergraduate level the trend now is to combine PR with marketing, defined as “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably”. The inference is that PR is a supporting act to marketing, rather than a discipline in its own right. The reality is that PR is a very different beast involving a mindset far removed from selling products and services. Indeed, many people reared on the culture of marketing find it hard to revert to non-sales language, devoid of superlatives, when writing press releases.  

As we know, PR is a much more nuanced and complex business. Much activity happens behind the scenes, such as advising the CEO on how to handle bad news or forging relationships with communities – which, again, makes it hard to explain what we do. In the BBC podcast ‘When it hits the fan’, presenters David Yelland and Simon Lewis explained how the 10-minute phone call by Keir Starmer to Donald Trump shortly after his assassination attempt was carefully choreographed by the communications team at Number 10, in liaison with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Buckingham Palace and the British Ambassador to the USA. The conversation wasn’t scripted but neither did it happen off the cuff. Similarly, the recent TV broadcasts by Catherine, Princess of Wales would have been discussed carefully by her team to avoid being accused of “just a PR stunt”.  

Perhaps the best example of how PR differs from marketing is during crises. Taking my sector of education as an example, when schools, colleges and universities had to close during the pandemic they needed to find ways to reassure their publics – students and pupils, parents and teachers – to keep them informed about buildings closures, how assessments would take place and how to learn remotely. For a large organisation that job would probably have been managed by the head of communications. For a small school it could have been the head teacher. The skills needed – empathy, compassion, clarity and timing – are prime examples of the intrinsic value of public relations, which are distinct from marketing. 

The likeability factor 

So, we’re back to the question: ‘How do we define public relations?’ Maud Davis, who teaches on the only surviving BA degree in PR says this is difficult because PR means different things to different people – just like the blind men touching the elephant. “In the main, it tends to focus on working with media and influencers, using social media and working with stakeholders,” she says. “I guess in its easiest form PR is communication. And I wonder if today we should explain PR within the context of ‘likeability’ as that is a   word young people can identify with.”  

Do we need a new overall definition that makes sense, or is it better to talk about the different branches of public relations? And are we suffering a protracted identity crisis?    Perhaps we should we think about substituting the term strategic communications for public relations. The former is more commonly used in Europe, whereas in the UK and the USA we prefer the term public relations. Imagine changing PR Week to SC (strategic communications) Week or instead of the CIPR we have the CISC. Ugh.   

In the ‘When it hits the fan’ podcast you’ll hear the term PR used extensively, described as “the gap between what is known in private and what is said in public”. Put simply, PR is all about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. That needs driving home, but we need to get better at explaining it to the wider world. 

Anne Nicholls is chair of the CIPR’s Education & Skills Sector Group. She works as an independent consultant and is forever struggling between calling herself a PR consultant or a communications consultant.