In the first of a new series, Sharon Bannerton goes back to basics on a discipline most people rely on and few can define.
Ask ten business owners what PR is and you will get ten answers. Spin. Publicity. Press releases. Something to do with Instagram. A few will tell you it is who you call when something goes wrong.
I wrote the first PR Pundit series for ThinkBusiness in 2021, in the middle of a pandemic, and the definitions that jarred with me then still jar now. Spin implies a fiction. The textbook talk of layered communication with internal and external audiences makes a simple thing sound mystical.
The definition I keep coming back to is an old one. PR is doing good and getting the credit.
That is it. A business that makes something well, creates jobs, shares what it knows, backs its community or changes how things are done has news in it. The job of PR is to find that news, shape it so an editor or producer wants it, and put it in front of the people whose opinion matters to you.
What PR is not
PR is not advertising. Advertising is space you buy. PR is space you earn, and an editor decides whether you have earned it. That is exactly why it carries weight. A reader knows the difference between a page you paid for and a page a journalist chose to give you.
Your sales pitch is not news either. Nobody wants to read a brochure. But the thing behind the pitch very often is: the new market, the senior hire, the result, the problem you solved for a client.
And PR is not a stunt. One clever moment can get you noticed for a day. Reputation is built over months and years, through steady communication that tells people who you are and what you stand for. I work to what I call the Bannerton 80:20. Most of what a business puts out should help people understand its world, and only a small part should ask them to buy.
What has changed since 2021
Five years ago I was writing about Covid. Today the bigger shift is in how people find things out. Audiences are spread across more outlets, podcasts and feeds than ever, and more and more people ask an AI assistant before they ask Google. Those assistants build their answers from what credible publications have already said. If the trusted media in your sector has never written about you, you are invisible in more places than you think.
That makes earned coverage more valuable, not less. It is the record other people, and now machines, rely on.
What it is worth
The hardest question in PR is the value one. The old line about knowing half your advertising is wasted but not which half is attributed to everyone from John Wanamaker to Lord Leverhulme, and it holds for every kind of marketing. Measuring a relationship is never neat.
What I have seen since 2010 is simple. A good reputation stands to a business when times are hard, opens doors when times are good, and costs far more to rebuild than it ever cost to keep.
Here is the part people forget. Your business has public relations whether you manage them or not. People are forming a view of you right now. The only question is whether you have any say in it.
Next in the series: what makes something news, and how to find the story in your own business.