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.