Public Relations as a subset of marketing communication is becoming increasingly important in India. exchange4media has been continuously striving to serve the information needs of brand managers, marketing communication professionals and advertising decision-makers. PR Watch aims to throw the spotlight on this growing practice and its key professionals.

Prolific marketing guru Al Ries, ex-ad executive and coiner of the phrase "positioning" in his recent book, 'The Fall of Advertising and Rise of PR', joins his daughter and consulting partner Laura Ries in contending that public relations quietly has become the most powerful marketing-services discipline.

PR SPEAK

PR is not public relations. In India, it only stands for ‘press relations’. And this too is a misnomer, because it is not about relations at all, but is closer to the ‘sales’ function… Even today, the majority of queries or new business enquiries we get has to do with how much media, where all, when, which page…? Top management meetings with us are about the quantity and quality of media coverage. The truth is that the client or the CEO has no clue whatsoever about what value the function or the corporate communication person can add. Vinod G Nair, Managing Director, Clea Public Relations

The Rieses still see a role for advertising, but primarily as a defense mechanism for established brands and products, not as a builder of new ones. Public relations -- specifically publicity and the resulting word of mouth -- is what really build new brands, they maintain.

Most industry executives might dismiss that as "a gross generalization" but all agree that PR is an important and growing tool being increasingly used by marketers.

However, both suffered last year. PR spending has long paled compared to ad spending, given the lack of media expense and relative lack of production expense involved. A 2001 survey by Thomas L. Harris/Impulse Research found consumer-products companies, for example, spend about 0.05% of revenue on PR. That's a tiny fraction of the 2% to 10% of revenues such companies ordinarily spend on overall marketing expense. Those figures don't count salaries and overhead.

The survey also found that marketers cut PR budgets as a percent of sales from 0.09% to 0.07% last year, a 29% drop. The percentage of client PR budgets earmarked for product publicity, however, actually went up five points to 23%, even though total spending on product publicity actually went down 10% to $518 million.

In India the Public Relations industry reached a major milestone last year in December with the launch and formation of Public Relations Consultants Association of India (PRCAI), an umbrella body representing all the professional consultancies in India. The PRCAI, mooted by a group of seven leading public relations firms, is a pioneering body that will represent the over Rs. 1 billion industry, which employs about 8,000 professionals today.