What do you do if your Public Relations strategy is leading to poor strategic decision making?

It's super important to keep a cool head in PR. Not all ideas are meant to be a hit, so it's cool to share your thoughts and ideas when it comes to strategy. Always try to understand the reasoning behind every decision. This way, you can make better decisions and avoid any unnecessary poor decisions. PR is all about being flexible from short-term objectives to long-term goals.

Most organizations grossly over-estimate the expected impact of their PR campaign, rather than have a sanity check on the achievable outcome. It's easy to be misled by glitzy messages, catchy branding slogans and a celebrity endorsement. But it's useful to always go back to the fundamentals - why are we doing this in the first place? Is it to fix a bad customer service episode that went viral? Push up sales for a stubbornly stagnating product? Or burnish the brand for an upcoming service/ product offering? Once it's clear what the core impetus are, it's useful to start tiering and prioritizing - the "must-dos", the "good-to-haves" and the "cherries-on-top".

If companies realize that PR and Branding is everyone's job, then it is clear that consultation for a PR strategy should involve broad functional groups. That is not the same as saying that everyone's inputs need to be taking into consideration. Some inputs help us shape messages, some prevent us from missing a blind spot, and others can remind us on small but critical demographics. Having feedback from loyal clients or trusted counsel outside of the company will certainly be useful as an outside voice. I often find it useful to try discovering any mismatches between the intent, the message, the delivery platforms and the audience to try and figure out what had cause the campaign to veer off-course.

O ideal em uma estratégia de PR é metrificar o impacto pelo objetivo de negócio que você está buscando alcançar, e não só pela performance do projeto em si. Um exemplo prático: Uma empresa de inovação B2C que é um aplicativo de consumo, inserido em um mercado hipercompetitivo. O que vai realmente te ajudar é ser top of mind do público que você quer atingir. Mas só os números de audiência dos seus resultados são insuficientes para entender se você está no topo das escolhas dos consumidores em potencial. É necessário metrificar e qualificar a sua presença. Se você tem 3 concorrentes relevantes, é necessário liderar 45% das conversas do segmento para estar em busca de ser top of mind.

If your PR strategy is steering towards poor decisions, it's time for a deep dive. Analyze the impact of your current approach on key metrics like brand reputation, audience engagement, and ROI. Identify any patterns or trends that indicate areas for improvement. Consider gathering feedback from stakeholders to gain valuable insights and perspectives. Use this data to pivot your strategy towards more informed and effective decision-making, ensuring alignment with your overall business objectives.

Really take a close hard look at it from the perspectives of your target audience. Many a times, the best PR strategies are lost in cultural or social misinterpretation, failure to accommodate economic relevance, or even simply a branding faux-pas. The ability to pivot your position, and the humility to accept that maybe we didn't see a blind spot will make all the difference.

If your PR strategy isn't yielding desired outcomes, it's essential to reassess and adapt your approach. After identifying the specific areas where your strategy falls short, strategically adjust your tactics. This could involve refining campaign messaging, exploring new communication channels, or modifying the overall brand narrative. The goal is to ensure your PR efforts align with and support your organization's broader strategic objectives.

Your PR strategy cannot exist in a vacuum. It has to be completely in tune with the organizational strategy and its vision/mission charter. The PR team in any organization needs to work in tandem with other departments especially strategy, finance, HR and marketing. A holistic 360 degree view is essential to design an effective PR campaign that can increase the brand recall of the organization. And for this to truly work, ensure consistency and simplicity of messaging to break the clutter and resonate with the target audience. In essence PR is more than just managing perceptions, it is about embedding the organization's goals into the fabric of public consciousness, driving forward with precision and clarity. #publicrelations