Corporate PR needs to lighten up

‘Hang on, the corporate agency will need to review’. A phrase that often strikes misery, if not fear, into the heart of many an in-house team.  

Over the years, us corporate affairs types have sought to position ourselves at the top table of advisory and decision making. And rightly so. 

Corporate people are the ones who most frequently pivot from creating a strategy, to managing a crisis, to building a campaign, to advising the CEO not to wear that watch on the recording. And at our best, corporate people are the ones who can most easily collaborate with consumer, public affairs, marketing and financial PR.  

And yet, somewhere along the way, we’ve lost our souls. We’ve allowed ourselves to become bland imitations of lawyers. Overly fixated on risk. Too quick to say no. Hiding behind vagueries about ‘opinion formers’ and our little black books as we misguidedly try to play the financial PRs at their own game. 

There is no need for it. 

The proof of our value comes from our work. Strategic advice. Creative campaigning. Solutions to problems, not just ‘no’. It was a corporate affairs team that led the McDonald’s UK turnaround of the 2010s through a combination of risk-taking transparency and bold campaigns. It was a corporate affairs team that transformed Wolverhampton’s small business economy as part of eBay’s Retail Revival. Real, operational action with commercial and reputational impact. Not just words on a slide.

We don’t need to dress ourselves in the drab positioning of a bygone era. More than that, we need to get over ourselves - and have a bit of fun. Corporate work can of course be heavy duty. Clients and colleagues absolutely deserve situation-appropriate, serious advice - but don’t want to leave every meeting more confused and less happy than when they came in.

We’ve lost our balance. And to regain it, we could learn a thing or two from consumer. My colleague Kate recently wrote about ‘energy’ as a crucial metric of agency success. She’s right - but it’s also a powerful, intangible advisory tool. Clients feel energy. The Board feels energy. The City responds to energy. They buy that as much as - if not more than - those serious bullet points on the slide.

Let’s be clear. I am not talking about a dumbed down version of corporate PR. Instead, I want to see the sector get more heavyweight by lightening up. Embrace culture in the way consumer PR did long ago. Take creative risks. Genuinely both to understand new media. Collaborate with Marketing and Consumer PR. Make stuff happen rather than just recommending words on a page. Our audiences are human too and need to feel something. More than that, this approach buys you greater flexibility to be radical if you need to in a crisis or moment of change.

It’s a cliche to say the world has changed, but look at the advisory environment today vs pre-Covid. It’s virtually unrecognisable. CEOs and leadership teams are younger, (somewhat) more diverse and more attuned to culture. You can’t be what they need if your agency feels like it’s stumbled out of the noughties, with tired slides and drab vibes. 

And you can’t build trust or license to operate with the tools of the 2010s. The competition for attention extends well beyond the business pages - it now covers Substack, Reddit, ETN and so much more. Before the quest for trust comes the fight for attention. 

In that context, corporate PR doesn't need to become less serious. It does need to become less boring. The advisors that get this shift from corporate to culture right are the ones that will win the next era of growth - and the mandate to shape reputations.