An alumni of IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad, Sunil Agarwal, feels the role of PR will ultimately be to chart out right communication paths to propagate an appropriate word of mouth.

Managing Director, 20:20 MEDIA,

Sunil was the founding editor of Dataquest Magazine. He then established 20:20 Media, a marketing communications consultancy focusing on technology industry in 1988.

At present, 20:20 Media is a technology PR firm in the country with over 100 professionals and 6 offices in the key cities.

He has also worked with Wipro Systems, USA and Rediffusion. And he is also the Vice President of the Public Relations Companies Association of India (PRCAI).

In conversation with exchange4media's Nikhil Gupta, Sunil talks about the future of public relations, new trends in the industry and why it is alright to say 'no' to the client.

Firstly we are a technology PR firm. The real USP is that we focus on understanding the market of the client including frequent market visits. Our people actually go out, and visit dealers, they visit Chief Information Officers (CIOs), in fact we have relationship with some of the key CIOs. And we check for their perceptions about the clients industry and clients products. It is then that we recommend the right media and communication program, which includes direct marketing, which includes events, which includes online programs to create desires and perceptions that are appropriate in the current context of the changing market. In other words we help the client position himself in a changing marketplace. For example, in Samsung Cellphones, we went out and polled more than 200 cell phone users and listed down the type of messages they were sending. Like one very popular type of a message was, 'Call me.' The objective of this was to provide to Samsung the psycho-graphic profile of their target audience. To give you an example, we found that in Barista a far greater number of Samsung Blue eye phone users were present as compared to their presence in other segments. That gives an idea to Samsung about the type of profile that they have. The results of this survey were then sent to the leading magazines in the country and were published in great detail by the 'Outlook Magazine' and also in part by the 'India Today' magazine. This is an example of how we go about PR in our company.

I believe specialized PR firms will be a trend because there are a few writers, a few journalists who focus and write more and more about a particular industry. Similarly, with a firm such as ours, we specialize in IT and we have 100 people, most of them are totally focused on IT, and we do a 150 hours formal training per person per year and many of these hours are devoted to enhance their understanding of the IT industry.

Our key differentiation is our People Development Plan (PDP), like I said 150 hours of formal training per person. For example right now we have a training program being run by Astrum Sercon, which is a professional training organization and the topic is managerial effectiveness.
So, I feel that is our edge. Nobody invests so much or very few people invest so much in manpower development.

The clients come first, the organization and the employees are next and the base of this is relationship. Relationships with our people, relationship with our clients. We have another formula that is 'look forward to coming to work,' embedded in our internal culture. That is how we try to make the work interesting for everybody.

The job of public relations is to create the desire, perceptions in the marketplace which will help the organization achieve its business goals. But I believe ultimately the role of PR will be recognized as being able to create the right network for propagating an appropriate word of mouth. For instance, in a recent cricket match against Australia, India lost miserably. And immediately there were SMS messages saying that don't buy any product endorsed by these cricketers. So, I assume that this campaign was really effective as an expression of disgust that most Indians felt about the current debacle. As an antidote, PR can do a word of mouth campaign and talk about how in Cricket the best of teams have in certain circumstances; situations have lost with an equal degree.

I don't think PR and advertising will ever replace each other. And advertising is a great image- building medium and PR is a great credibility- building medium. And I am sure you need both of these for any product or any company. Though certainly I would say that in the old days you had those huge corporate campaigns like a company X believes in 'excellence'. I feel the credibility of such campaigns has clearly diminished as PR has increased.

PR is still somewhat mass communications. Direct-marketing is by definition is more one to one, events is one to some, so I think each one has its role, though I do see many of them merging in future.