The Four P’s of PR

When you speak of Public Relations, it’s such a vast subject that it’s not easy to try and fit it into tiny containers. Good PR is all about building a favorable brand image for a brand or individual. An image that will be trusted and respected. This does not happen overnight and has to be well-planned and strategized.

The Four P’s of PR are Protect, Promote, Perform and Prove. Following these four faithfully will make every PR campaign a huge success. The top PR campaigns have used this formula successfully.

Protect

Building a good reputation is not easy, so every brand must invest time and money towards building trust and goodwill. Once the brand begin to occupy a particular positive space in the customer’s head, it’s important that this remains sustained. Therefore, all efforts to protect the reputation gained must be taken in terms of carefully articulated press releases and information that reaches the public.

Crisis management is one of the most challenging situations that PR faces. When a company or brand finds itself embroiled in scandal, this could directly impact its stock prices and sales. The information being passed about the situation may or may not be true. It’s up to PR agencies to keep their eyes and ears open for any negative reports about clients and either pro-actively kill the stories or instantly go into damage control mode and attempt to sort things out. Failing to do this can be detrimental to the future of the brand.

Promote

Once press releases have been drafted and everything set to connect with the media is ready, the PR agency must not waste a single minute.  Connecting and promoting the news with something newsworthy enough to hook them is the key. It could be an innovation, a new product launch, a piece of information that’s completely fresh.

To make this truly effective, it’s important to truly build bridges with reporters and editors. Personal relationships with them takes patience and persistence but this is a key factor in getting the news you want disseminated.

Perform

Earlier PR used to be an activity delinked from the rest of a company’s marketing activities. However, modern PR is completely different and is expected to align and contribute to the profitability of a company.  Today, the expectations from clients are very different. PR cannot succeed to its fullest on its own. It must properly integrate with marketing, social, digital, IT, data, insights, and /customer market intelligence.

Prove

Giving clients effective proof of the efficacy of a PR campaign will not only keep them happy but bring in repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals. The impact must be measured using metrics and this will help the brand gain customer insights and correct any wrong assumptions that might have been arrived at. The insights provided must be data driven so that customers can tweak their offerings based on this. To be taken seriously, PR must deliver tangible benefits that reflect in improved brand perception and in increasing sales.