Ask anyone in our industry what is their most dreaded question to be asked, and I hazard a guess ‘What do you do?’ would be somewhere near the top. Our antipathy towards this question is not grounded in any embarrassment or shame. In fact, quite the contrary. Practitioners are, rightly, very proud of our profession. But I detect a growing frustration that the common ‘PR’ default for our vibrant and diverse industry falls well short. Regardless of where you reside on the communications spectrum, “I am in PR” remains the easiest answer that guarantees both the most agreeable response and least number of supplementary questions.
Unfortunately it also guarantees the audience assumptions about what you do are likely to be well wide of the mark. Our community is so broad, and each specialisation so specific, achieving a reasonable level of understanding of what we do will usually require a bit of effort. This is one of the challenges we face in engendering a wider and more accurate comprehension of our industry.
According to a recent IABC/Ogilvy PR survey, 76 per cent of our industry believes that by 2021 the term ‘PR’ would cease to be used, possibly replaced with ‘communications professionals or agencies’. Therefore, only 24% of industry professionals, or “nearly a quarter” if you are writing a media release, believe ‘PR’ will be the default term for our industry in 10 years’ time.
So the industry clearly wants, or is already identifying a shift towards, a change in the vernacular. While I hope the more accurate descriptions of different practices are championed by the industry as commonly accepted terms, I am not sure either ‘communications professionals’ or ‘communications agencies’ offer the step change in clarity and specificity needed. I have toyed with various descriptions of my own role over the past decade or so. “I am in communications” was discarded, eventually, as it was generally met with blank stares or detailed questions about the relative safety of cell site antennas. Practitioners want, and deserve, a widely understood and common nomenclature for the myriad of practices that make up our industry, beyond a universally generic ‘communications’.
But change will only come if we each resist the temptation to take the path of least resistance with ‘PR’, and take some individual responsibility for communicating how our specific discipline delivers measurable results. In doing so we will break down preconceptions of what ‘PR’ really is, thereby engendering a wider understanding of the broad range of specialist fields we cover, and the best terms to use to describe them. So the next time a civilian asks ‘What do you do?’ remember the future, and don’t just leave it at ‘PR’.
