By Mary Gearing (South Africa)
Deputy Managing Director, Magna Carta
The unprecedented and unexpected events of COVID-19 shocked the world and accelerated organisational change. The pandemic brought about some disruptive changes to PR and reputation management, providing an exciting opportunity for brands and practitioners.
It highlighted the urgent need for brands to rebalance and realign business priorities to drive brand loyalty and build sustainable reputations into the future. As a result, the financial performance of an organisation, alongside the leadership and vision, is no longer the leading indicator of a solid and credible reputation.
Brands have started to realise that profit goes hand-in-hand with an emotional connection. There is a re-prioritised need to achieve a higher purpose, beyond just excellent service delivery, quality products and innovative solutions.
While COVID-19 may have accelerated the need for organisations to move from being transactionally focused to more purpose-led aspirations, it was not the only factor driving this trend.
Across markets, news headlines are dominated by economic, societal, and governmental (ESG) issues, from energy and water shortages to floods, war, health, gender-based violence and unemployment crises. As these issues continue to rise, the pressure on brands to not only engage on these topics but, more importantly, act on them increases year-on-year.
As such, leading brands have started to place “impact with purpose” at the centre of their reputation management strategies as leadership on ESG issues, market value and brand sentiment become more closely interlinked.
This is seeing many C-Suite executives pushing for reputation management with the purpose to become a core part of every organisation’s marketing and branding strategy and marketers believing that building trust will be the primary focus of future campaigns.
Although organisations have woken up to their responsibility to use their brands for good, central to the point of purpose is the role that creative, communication, and reputation management agencies can play. With the pressure mounting for agencies to do the same, brands are looking to the industry to apply creative thinking and energy beyond marketing challenges to business challenges ensuring that cultural tensions, inequality, climate change and much more are addressed.
But if agencies are going to play a bigger part, we need to recognise that creativity is just part of the solution.
Research from McKinsey Global Institute highlights that the industry has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to boldly embrace what they have termed “the growth triple play” which considers creativity, analytics and purpose. All three elements are crucial and must work together to create positive change and future business growth.
With the trend of purpose-driven work growing over time, reputation management and PR become even more important in developing meaningful creative solutions with true impact.
What would traditionally sit with the strategy and creative teams to ideate and develop (with PR supporting only at the implementation stage) now forms one corner of a triangular brand-building approach. This approach relies on PR positioning that puts purpose within a greater narrative and harnesses the power of influencer engagement to endorse that position.
When this integration truly works together in harmony, magic brand moments happen to build reputations with purpose. However, if each part is done in isolation, no matter how strong the insights identified by the strategy or the importance of the societal issues being tackled, the opportunity to create purpose-first strategies with reputational benefits for brands will be lost due to the lack of integration.
In other words, if the creative discipline does not consider what would be newsworthy to a journalist by tapping into the institutional knowledge of PR and media relations specialists, then you only have a great idea that lives in an above-the-line or paid-for space. Similarly, if PR does not work with the creative to ideate and think beyond the news value of the idea, then the work will continue to sit in the traditional space of media releases and advertorials. And lastly, if the social media element doesn’t complete the triangle, the opportunity to create an influential and talkability moment will be lost to the world of boosted and promoted content.
By working together and leaning on the expertise of each discipline, the focus of any future-fit strategy can shift from the channel to deliver the message to the influence-potential of the creative. Ideas can also move from the point of creative stunts and “cool-talkability” to experiences and impactful action.
The impactful actions or solutions give brands the credibility and permission to play in the purpose-first space and truly own the societal leadership voice. Just identifying an injustice or shining a spotlight on it is not enough. To have true changing power and reputational benefits, a brand’s role needs to focus on creating real solutions to real problems across the continent.
In today’s continuous engagement world, brands (alongside their agencies) must tread carefully when addressing ESG issues at the risk of reputational topics such as greenwashing. It becomes even more challenging for brands to claw back credibility when caught out.
Giving reputation management a seat at the table and key consideration in any purpose-driven strategy will safeguard any brand and ensure that the purpose is not manufactured or hijacking a topic for awareness but because it is relevant.
With the industry on the brink of a new chapter, we can no longer win at the expense of others. If we don’t review, tweak or reinvent the way we work and the solutions we put forward, we (and the brands we love to work on) will be skipped, scrolled, left behind or cancelled.
More than ever, purpose-led brands are required, and with this, PR and reputation management have the incredible opportunity of contributing real purpose to organisational fitness.