The Most Powerful PR Aligns Interests Clearly

People often ask me what it takes to deliver a really successful PR campaign. These days they believe usually that it revolves around some stunt that drives digital media virality.  If that was the case then cute kittens would already have decided most of our futures except for those not yet drawn helplessly to the tractor beam of social media, of course.

No, if you really want to get bangs for your buck with public relations you need to see the big picture and align yourself with the strategic imperatives that are reshaping the world in which we live. Yet, so often, the subject matter, presentation and execution of PR campaigns are tactical, limited, short term and insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

That’s where PR budgets get poured down the drain. I’ve long since lost track of the number of `news announcements` I've seen where there is no discernable news content and that have been clearly forced through by a management or personal ego satisfaction agenda. Campaigns that don’t pass the `so what test` don’t deliver and `poor communication` - PR - is blamed and the messenger is shot, making it even more difficult to mount successful campaigns in future.

Tragically, this is even true when the subject matter is of the utmost importance. Take the sustainability debate, for instance. You’d think this would be pretty much the epitome of serious stuff. But debate is stifled because so often communication in this segment is polarised. It’s typically about being worthy - `doing good’ in the long term as a route to a better world pitted against `doing bad` money grabbing devil-may-care short term environmental and social destruction.  This quickly de-generates into the quagmire of a quasi-religious argument where no-one is any the wiser and the best that can be hoped for is a messy compromise that satisfies nothing.

The current ongoing omnishambles of the UK Government’s `Green Deal’ fiasco, PV Feed-In Tariff debacle,  Onshore vs. Offshore wind energy vacillation, dash for Shale Gas policies and just about every aspect of energy policy is a case in point. Despite the critical need to ensure long-term national energy security and hit carbon reduction targets, it shows a classic case of delivery of mixed messages that reveal misalignment between the immediate interests of the politicians, public sector, industry and the consumer, not to mention Mother Earth.

The same challenge to delivering sustainability has applied for many years in the financial markets. Investors have struggled with the demands of delivering superior returns whilst at the same time requiring environmental, social and ethical responsibility in the companies in which they invest.

Good intentions in the financial markets, whilst admirable, have not proven to produce decent returns, neither have they proven to encourage sustainability - just like UK energy policy. Again aims are not aligned, everyone has lost.

Responsibility, investment, sustainability and business are routinely regarded as odd bedfellows, with tactical PR campaigns often attempting to paper over the cracks as communities, legislators or the markets are placated or appeased as a way of making progress. But ultimately, to be an effective partnership, and to support powerful PR messages that cut through, their marriage must be born of objectivity, pragmatism and most of all, of course, aligned interests.

But there is a twist to the tale. Far from being a simplistic Band-Aid, the existing efforts of corporate and financial PR professionals and their PR agencies, combined with the transparency the internet brings, have created a large and growing pool of hard and comparable audited data on corporate sustainability.

Using this it is possible to determine the resource efficiency of a company relative to its peers. Resource efficient organisations are those that produce more output from less input.  The added benefit is that resource efficient businesses also display attractive investment characteristics. Everybody wins - the organisation, the investor and the environment.  Now that’s a story worth getting behind.

Resource efficiency is not a subjective rating determined in a corner office on Wall Street any more than it is the preserve of people who choose to live in teepees in the far flung corners of the British Isles. The basis of resource efficiency is the actual observed amount of resource used, consumed and in the case of waste, created, in the process of generating a unit of revenue; the cubic metre of water, the kilojoules of energy, the ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. It is real, objective, hard and unequivocal.

And the benefits are not static. Research shows that resource-efficient companies become more resource efficient over time through innovation and `intrapreneurship’ both internally and through the company’s supply chain, making them more competitive and therefore capable of delivering greater value to investors.

Everyone keeps winning as management teams that are forward thinking, aware of the economic imperatives brought about by resource constraint, attract investment. Wealth creation from resource conservation - that’s a very powerful self-reinforcing combination of two interests, a virtuous circle that also makes a powerful story.

Aerospace and cars manufacturers, logistics suppliers and cosmetics firms might not be the first place you’d expect to find sustainability - perhaps because they don’t explicitly prioritise sustainability as a key platform in their communications. Yet the numbers show leviathans such as Boeing, BMW, UPS and L’Oreal are highly resource efficient in their respective industries. Even Unilever recently announced it was swapping the earnings rat race for sustainability.

Boeing, for instance, has maintained a forward thinking approach to energy consumption for many years. The fact that it draws on both historic and renewable energy sources and use internally created technology to store and distribute this energy may not be immediately apparent. But energy intensity measures constructed from corporate sustainability reports over several years indicate high and rising relative resource efficiency.

Now here’s the rub. Markets tend to reward these companies, not for their resource efficiency per se but for how their resource efficiency translates into financial ratios that the market appreciates. The point is the two powerful forces are brought together to be a force for good.

So, PR is playing its part in creating the conditions for sustainability as well as the storytelling. Rather than greenwashing reality, it is producing the figures that can take good intent to an objective, pragmatic and measurable level and aligning communities of interest to make a real difference and creating a virtuous circle of sustainability. In in that respect PR, for once, is really walking the talk and that’s a truly good thing.