Why PR is important: a cry from the heart!

Posted by Peter Ivanov on September 23, 2009 under Articles/Cases/Analytics/Advices | Read the First Comment

To answer this question one should post very different thesis: how many people in Ukraine think that PR is important? I don’t have any statistics but according to my own recent observations inside of the bank, no more than 20% of the whole staff. When I started to work at this bank there were only 5 people thinking of PR as useful and efficient instrument. One of them was CEO. He wanted to develop PR as it is for a company. I don’t know his reasons for that but suddenly CEO started to initiate PR activities (press conference, on-line conference, interviews and comments responding). It looked sometimes as if chief executive officer liked to read his name in the newspapers, magazines or on TV news commenting on banking crisis. At the same time, when people took away their deposits TOP manager blamed me (PR manager) for low activity, as he thought. I was a reason for world economic breakdown (:-))!
After a few months of battle “PR VS Banking crisis” more and more people who worked in the bank started to repeat after CEO that PR is extremely important. Sometimes such repetitions looked funny and even stupid. Once, I was blamed by one of the vice-presidents for absence of our bank’s reports on a Ukrainian Banks Association site. Of course, sending of the reports to UAB and National Bank is a duty of financial department and not PR, but he didn’t want to mention that. It was “bad PR” for a vice-president!
When I was talking about 20% of those who think PR is important, I meant such people as a vice-president. Their principle is based at knowing absolutely nothing about an issue, although, repeating the exact words after the manager.
What about the others 80%? It’s quite simple. Their principle sounds like that: “why do we need to spend money on something useless? We have to pay for advertising, so people could see our deposit rates everywhere!” Those people aren’t just stupid. They just can’t analyze the essence of a banking crisis – losing of trust towards finance sector. They can’t match trust and repute with PR. Advertising neither bring back trust nor restore damage repute. It is only influencing public opinion PR specialists can change the situation for good.
In conclusion, I would like to sum up with my own opinion at why PR is important issue.
I think PR is important because it helps people to find way out of the crisis situations.
It is important for those who know something about PR because they start to build strategies around it.
It is important for those who don’t know even PR definition, because they have to blame someone for their own mistakes. Everybody blame PR managers in anything.
Finally, PR is important for those who neither know something about it nor find PR useful, because without public relations their lives would be non-interesting – no politics, no celebrities, gossip and crisis as it is (!).