Lucy Darling is a comedian. Dressed in full length ballgowns, her opening gambit is to ask a member of the audience their name, followed swiftly by And what do you do? If somebody cannot articulate their role or offers an inane ‘project manager’ type response, Lucy will retort: That’s delightfully vague!

Fear not. If an audience member at Lucy’s upcoming London Palladium shows (yes, I have tickets) responds ‘PR’, they now have a handy definition, courtesy of the PRCA, to escape such opprobrium.

They simply add: ‘Public relations is the strategic management discipline that builds trust, enhances reputation and helps leaders interpret complexity and manage volatility - delivering measurable outcomes including stakeholder confidence, long-term value creation and commercial growth.’

What’s that, Lucy? Short and snappy, like a slogan. I know: the advertising world’s loss is the PR world’s gain. Straight to the point. No confusion. As elevator pitches go, just press M for Moon.

But if, perish the thought, there remains any puzzled looks, the PRCA has also produced an ‘extended definition’ to accompany its ‘Concise definition, designed to stand alone’. (No laughing at the back!)

What’s that, Lucy? You’re losing the will to live… but the extended definition is only 143 words, plus it comes with ten explanatory principles. Yes, I know. Ironic. These people are meant to be communicators.

I’ve shown the concise (OED definition: ‘expressed in few words’) definition to several leading comms professionals. Their responses ranged from ‘word salad’, ‘corporate buzz words’, ‘jargon heavy’ to the plaintive cry of ‘I’m too old for this’, so I’m not alone in my despair.

But my biggest issue with the definitions (both concise and extended) is that I don’t believe they reflect the broader industry. And nor do those that I surveyed.

The PRCA is a trade association, predominantly for agencies, ranging from 72Point, which according to its website ‘provides creative content solutions for household name brands’ to WPR, which supports ‘marketing teams of all shapes and sizes in their quest to build brand awareness, generate sales and drive business growth’.

They’re not claiming to be a ‘strategic management discipline’. And nor should they. The PRCA might aspire to such lofty ambitions, but it doesn’t make it so. If public relations was universally viewed as a ‘strategic management discipline’, then there would no need for the perennial discussion regarding a seat at the table. It would simply be pulled out, ready for your pert posteriors.

The reality is that the world of public relations is an ecosystem of talents, abilities and strengths. Every agency has myriad roles that all come under the umbrella term ‘public relations’ but yet can be quite different.

I’ve worked in journalism for more than 35 years, so I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. But I always remember the stand out ones, the ones who truly do have the ear of the CEO, who are viewed as strategic and commercial, who really understand the way their business and sector operate, and, though it pains me to say, they are in the minority.

They’d need to be. The PRCA’s last State of the Sector report, produced in 2024, suggested almost 109,000 people work in the industry… imagine if they were all ‘helping leaders interpret complexity’. No work would ever get done.

But, and here’s the kicker, that same survey revealed the main functions performed by those PR and comms professionals who responded. The leading one, cited by 15pc, was branding and marketing, followed by communications strategy development (13pc), and corporate public relations (12pc). Just three per cent mentioned reputation management.

I think the real issue for the PRCA, and it admits as much, is that it dislikes the term ‘public relations’, which some interpret as simply media relations or publicity, ignoring the raft of other valuable work produced by this industry. It is also a term tainted by an association with some now disgraced spin doctors. So why not work to change the name? Starting with the two trade associations. But let’s not try to claim it’s something it’s not.

Postscript: Apropos of nothing, I also have tickets for W*nkernomics, the same week as Lucy Darling.

CORPORATE AFFAIRS

From the mouths of practitioners
(who do ACTUALLY help their leaders navigate complexity)

At last year’s Corporate Affairs Summit, I assembled four of the top in-house communications professionals to share the secret of how they demonstrated the value of their functions. I’ve re-read the transcripts and none come anywhere near the aforementioned definition.

In fact, they all started with the importance of the story. As Greg Dawson, formerly of the parish of DS Smith, exclaimed: ‘Storytelling? That’s the job!’ With a background in consumer brands, when Dawson arrived at the then little-known packaging company in 2017, he sought to identify the story on which to hang his communications hat.

The company, he quickly realised, was at the nexus of two leading debates: sustainability and wasteful packaging, the latter prompted by the rise in home shopping. There was an opportunity for DS Smith to resolve the issues. It was also a story that journalists could stand behind.

DS Smith became the first B2B company to partner with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which retrained its 550 designers in the circular economy, thus changing the story into one that its sales people could tell their clients. DS Smith was no longer part of the problem, it became part of the solution. Initially, paper fibres could be recycled 25 times; DS Smith upped that number. Finding that story, which inevitably evolved over time, was the key to unlocking significant commercial gains for the business.

When Safina Mirza arrived at Canary Wharf Group four years ago to take on the role of group director of communications, she found that nobody was telling either the corporate story or the place story, which meant that the company had no control over its own narrative.

Canary Wharf was viewed as a ‘stale financial district, and [had become] the poster child for anything negative’, she recalled. ‘Brexit, the financial crisis, working from home, the office is dead… you name it, when there was a headline around that, it was a picture of Canary Wharf and the towers, that appeared in the Financial Times.’

She needed to regain the narrative, which started with the basics: media relations – building relationships with the press, taking them to Canary Wharf to hear about its transformation, its importance to London and UK plc. Only then did her team work with the business to demonstrate how such coverage could benefit their targets across residential and commercial.

Caitlyn Hayden, group communications director at BAE Systems, views herself as the company’s chief spokesperson, and has been highly effective in using LinkedIn to share corporate news. Why? The company’s own data revealed employees discover information on LinkedIn before they do so on internal channels.

But it also allows Hayden to lift the lid on what it’s like working at BAE Systems, to demonstrate its culture in a way that would be impossible on corporate channels. She’s been able to develop the employer brand, demonstrating the breadth of work undertaken at BAE Systems and instilling a sense of pride within the workforce and curiosity in potential new employees.

But the final word(s) must go to Matt Ridsdale, group chief corporate affairs officer at Sky, who said the primary purpose of the corporate affairs function is to shift opinions to create business value, adding: ‘The means of doing that is persuasive narratives that run arguments to challenge misconceptions and persuade reasonable people of your world view. How you do that is ultimately up to the audience, not the organisation, because they will engage however they choose to engage, and you must adapt to that.’

Storytelling and relationships – that’s what this job is all about. These are skills that are not to be sniffed at. They are the bedrocks of the function. Let’s embrace them because, bluntly, if you don’t get these foundations right, nothing else matters. You won’t get through the leaders’ doors, let alone advise them on complexity.

NB For your [in-house] diaries, this year’s Corporate Affairs Summit in London is tentatively scheduled for 7 October at the British Library. And the Corporate Affairs Summit Ireland returns on 28 May at its home: the Dublin Royal Convention Centre.

AI

What do you know about Greenland?

When I was a child, I thought Hong Kong was a toy factory because all my dolls were made there. As for Greenland, I assumed it was an island that was very green. What can I say? Me and geography. Not close friends.

But Greenland is now in the news. President Trump wants to buy it. And Denmark’s not selling. The team at Hard Numbers recently conducted an experiment to test what information AI was serving up on Greenland and the issue of sovereignty, for those, like me, with limited knowledge.

Hard Numbers posed 41 questions (or prompts) about Greenland, focused on six themes: the issue of ownership and sovereignty, its relationship with the EU, its relationship with the US, its relationship with NATO, the potential for independence and its value.

Its research focused on three AI platforms – ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews – and the results are fascinating. Far from being insightful, these platforms rely heavily on user-generated content from Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit, including one thread called S*itAmericansSay, rather than trusted news services. (The BBC does feature, although it is currently in dispute with Perplexity, which is accused of reproducing its content without permission.)

ChatGPT actually cites Grok, the AI chatbot found on X (or Twitter to us old timers) and Grokipedia, as well as Chinese and Russian state news services. Luckily, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews didn’t fall into the same trap, but a real estate blog from the Philippines does make an appearance as a source.

As Hard Numbers co-founder Paul Stollery puts it: ‘ChatGPT citing Grok is the information equivalent of a snake eating its own tail – once AI tools start treating each other’s outputs as sources, the quality floor drops and nobody can trace where the original information came from.’ It’s a conundrum.

Apologies
This column is very long – what can I say, the muse got me! (Or was it the Merlot?) So I have omitted some key elements, but from next week premium readers will find ‘behind the paywall’ profile interviews, case studies and other insightful thoughts (ie not mine). Plus Gabe Winn’s bi-weekly, thought-provoking views of the industry will return.