What is public relations?
If you get 10 PR professionals in a room, you will get the same number of differing definitions.
To the wider public, including those at our cousin disciplines across the marketing spectrum and beyond, there is a similar lack of awareness. For many, it’s synonymous with publicity, the act of garnering attention via the media. To others, it’s lobbying or some sort of management consultancy. To your mum and dad… well, it’s advertising, right?
None are entirely wrong. But none are right — certainly not on their own.
This identity crisis has long gripped our discipline, even during its mid-twentieth century ascendancy, as the “fathers” of PR, such as Edward Bernays, tried to define exactly what it is they did. Flash-forward to today, and PR’s identity and definition aren’t just navel-gazing. With its historic ties to, and seeming dependency on, legacy news institutions during a time of great media fragmentation, the very value of PR is being questioned.
It is time to settle the debate: to truly define what PR means, what it does, and what it can achieve.
Enter the PRCA, which, after consulting its members, has published a new definition for public relations.
The new definition is to “reflect the role of today’s practitioners as strategic advisors.” It follows that today’s PRs don’t just get media coverage, they help “organisations navigate complexity, manage risk, build relationships with stakeholders and operate responsibly in a fast-changing environment.”
This revision is pitched at helping PR to secure its seat at the top of the boardroom table, something our discipline has continuously aspired to achieve. But it is what underpins this new definition that matters most.
The PRCA’s new principles can be broadly divided into two lines: those that reinforce the PRCA’s belief in PR as a strategic management function, and those that are modernising it.
It is these latter principles which will take us forward and demonstrate the value of PR not just to the boardroom, but to marketers and other key client stakeholders. And maybe even your mum and dad.
“Earned credibility as the primary currency”, “platform-agnostic storytelling”, “shaping the information ecosystem”, and “long-term value over short-term noise” all speak to the fundamental truths of the new attention economy. It is no longer enough to secure an article in a broadsheet, or go for a long lunch with the city editor. The fragmentation of media and what we should consider as “earned” media has seen our domain vastly expand beyond just “the press”.
Public relations has always been centered around earning trust for the brands we represent. But today, the how we achieve that needs to be broader, or at least not singularly dependent on one channel. Platform-agnostic storytelling over the long term is exactly the answer: consistently earning credibility wherever your audiences are in order to accurately and authoritatively shape the information ecosystem, itself increasingly dominated by AI.
Of course, there will still be disagreements on the nuances of the new definition. But what the PRCA has done here has laid the groundwork for our discipline to redefine itself as a truly modern practice. To be audience-centric and not geared on the outputs of communications work. And finally, to be uncoupled from narrow definitions of what PR is, which prevent us from harnessing the channels that matter most to our audience.
In short: PR means earning attention over the long term, which translates into credibility and finally influence. This can be done via the press, of course, but equally it can and should be through social content and platforms, in partnership with creators, directly with your communities, and even out on the street.
The sky is the limit for the future of earned media. And if we continue to show the breadth of what can be achieved under that banner, then we will earn our place as a strategic discipline.
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