What is PR? And what makes it meaningful?
Two questions that will have many different answers, depending on who you’re talking to.
At Analogy, we don’t see it as our job to make our clients look good. We dig deep to find what’s genuinely good and then tell that story well.
Meaningful PR must resonate with the people that matter. Whether that’s your employees, customers, politicians or opinion formers. If it doesn’t resonate, it risks standing alone as a beautiful piece of work that has no outcomes.
After all, we are here to get results for our clients, not just to create noise. Meaningful PR engages hearts and minds, inspires action, creates change or influence sales.
Meaningful PR aligns itself closely to your values. Sometimes it might be part of a strategic campaign, and sometimes it’s more tactical than that. But it must always feel like it belongs to the personality of your brand or organisation in a way that is genuine, and recognisably ‘you’.
The pandemic has given us lots of examples of meaningful PR, that I am sure PR professionals will be analysing and drawing on for years to come.
It has presented an opportunity for businesses and organisations to take action that matters, whether that is switching over the production line of a gin distillery to make hand sanitiser, or a street food business unable to trade due to lockdown switching its operation to a crowdfunding model to feed exhausted NHS workers.
From our own client base we have been able to share heart-warming stories of the community at Sherford, a new town still under development, coming together by creating community pantries, new businesses starting in garages, and even a socially-distanced VE Day celebration.
These stories were not just lovely to share, they cut to the very core of what Sherford is all about. A sustainable community with a unique identity and atmosphere. They made for meaningful PR because they resonated not just with the community but also with audiences well beyond the town’s perimeters. The people who may not have heard of Sherford before, and maybe had not been planning to move, but who now can see themselves living there in the future.
None of these stories were part of our strategic plan for Sherford when 2020 began. But this illustrates perfectly the point that meaningful PR doesn’t always need to come from a tight strategy. Sometimes it is more opportunistic than that.
Finding the good has, for many PR professionals, become easier during the pandemic. More than ever, brands and organisations have the opportunity to win hearts and minds with meaningful PR.
