Discovering the power of PR

BY ISRAEL OPAYEMI

On Wednesday, August 27, 2005, the Africa Global Public Relations Week began in Nairobi, Kenya, on a very powerful note. I had the honour of addressing the gathering of brilliant minds from across the world as a panelist. I told the gathering my reservation that, for us to reclaim the amazing power of public relations practice, we must get down again to some brilliant basics. They didn’t see me coming! When we come to conferences like this, we often love to deal with the latest buzz words such as PR & AI, PR and deepfake, storytelling, new metrics for measurement and evaluation, etc. Good stuff, no doubt. However, we often forget that the brilliant basics are more powerful and enduring than the emerging buzzwords in our profession. They are the very foundation upon which the edifice we are constructing rests.

As leaders and practitioners of public relations, I took the liberty to take the audience back to some brilliant basics like the need for us to constantly remind ourselves of our calling, the definition of our calling, the place of strategy in what we do, and the etymology of the word strategy itself. Many may not know that my own way of reminding myself of who I am since I started my journey in public relations and integrated communication, is rooted intentionally in my designation at Chain Reactions Africa. I am an MD/chief strategist. I have never been promoted or demoted out of that position in 18 years. I told the audience my truth. That every day, when I wake up, I wake up as a strategist and a prophet in the marketplace to my company and to our clients. I told them to think of the Maasai. Whether in Kenya or Tanzania, he wakes up every day a warrior. The Warrior DNA is inside him. I told the audience, this is how we must wake up every day. Each one of us must wake up as a strategist and a prophet. We are not fixers. We are not spin doctors. We are the first custodians of strategy.

What is strategy? The word has its etymology in the word, strategos, which means “the art of the General.” Strategists are the designers of the marketplace battle plans. In business, our battlefields are different. It may be a quest for market share, trust, or social capital, and reputation recovery after a crisis. That is why Public Relations Professionals must show up every day as Generals made for war. We are the ones to help corporate institutions and governments move from Point A to Point B. We must also show up every day as Prophets. Prophets help you unravel the past, make sense of the present, and predict the future. That’s our JD simplified. Those are the guys that today’s corporate clients and government leaders are looking for.

I reminded them of the best definition of public relations every public relations consultant must return to if they must stay relevant and in power. To be honest, I think the framers of that definition were a band of prophets who saw tomorrow. It is the Mexican Statement which defines public relations as “the art and social science of analysing trends, predicting their consequences, counselling organisational leaders, and implementing planned programmes of action which will serve both the organisation’s and the public interest.”

This is the very definition of our calling as public relations professionals. The truth public relations practitioners, both on the consulting side and the client side, must be told is that we have placed too much emphasis on the art side of the practice than the science part, to the detriment of the profession. This is not to downplay the importance of the art part, which involves copy and content writing, message development, storytelling, and so on. So, any public relations consultancy or department that wants to remain powerful and influential to the client or executive leadership must embrace this truth.

These are the new talents public relations businesses and departments need in today’s competitive world to stay relevant to corporate and public sector clients. They include Culture Anthropologists, Social Psychologists, Political Scientists, Behavioural Scientists, Trends Spotters, Data Analysts, Consumer Neuroscientists, Neurologists in general, Psychiatrists, and Artificial Intelligence Specialists. This is how today’s Public Relations Practitioners can become Forecast Pros, Prophets in the Marketplace, Counsellors-in-Chief to the CEOs, Executive Leadership, and Government Leaders. I asked the audience, “Who are you still hiring?” Silence enveloped the room.

As we play up the science pillars of the public relations profession in our quest to reclaim the power of public relations, we must never downplay the discipline of planning and execution. We must not only be good at planning, but we must also be adept at implementing our planned programmes of action. This explains why strategists began to be referred to as planners even as far back as the 1960s. The programmes we plan and execute either for clients or our organizations must, however, serve both the organisation’s and the public’s interests. Nothing underscores the nobility of the power of Public Relations professionals than the realization that, despite the multiple roles we play to clients or the organizations we serve, we are still the custodians of ethics; we are still the voice of reason, the conscience of executive management and government decision-making organs.

Even on the sides of the main session in Nairobi, the conversation continued till dusk. To my colleagues, it was a conversation. To me, it was a crusade. I have been preaching this message for 11 years now. If public relations practitioners must reclaim the awesome power of the business, we must return to the brilliant basics. Our forebears saw today. They knew the battle for market share, price war, battle for social capital, surviving demarketing by competition, winning citizens’ trust by government, wading off the attacks of political opponents, among others, would require that we set up the War Room for the clients we serve as strategists and as Prophets. Our job description was in the very definition of public relations they crafted for us in 1978. Let’s go back to it. It is the power of public relations for today and the future.

A new order is here. The talents of yesterday can’t win today’s battles. Public relations people must rise as orophets in the marketplace and become the true custodians of strategy. Here lies the power we are looking for. Before I stepped off the stage, I admonished those on the consulting side of the public relations practice that there are two professionals we must learn from. They are the lawyers and the prostitutes. They bill and get paid before they move one inch. Lawyers get their bills signed off before they write you the first legal opinion or even step into the courtrooms.

Same with the prostitutes at red-light districts. They know what public relations and other marketing communications professionals don’t know. Fees are best settled at the point of engagement. The prostitute, for example, knows that once she steps into the car of her customer, value diminishes every step of the way. The customer’s posh car does not move her. Public relations and communications consultants need to learn from the lawyers and get schooled by the prostitutes!

Israel Opayemi is the MD/chief strategist, Chain Reactions Africa