UGOCHUKWU UGWUANYI
The job of the public relations department is made difficult when it’s left to defend what it didn’t decide. A corollary is that communication isn’t meant to make decisions sound right after the fact but to help organisations think before speaking. Communications, as the guardian angel of a brand’s reputation, relationships, and relevance, shouldn’t be a finishing service but a strategic leadership discipline within organisational planning.
If not given a voice where and when it matters most, the strategic solutions public relations delivers will be muzzled. Customers buy from brands they trust. Investors put their stakes in companies they believe in. Talent join organisations with goodwill. With trust as the gateway to commercial success, communications shouldn’t be left on the margins!
PR must, however, justify its clamour and elevation to the C-suite by tying the practice’s reputation-building endeavours to business growth. This deliverable should be the primary concern of account executives, as ChatGPT and other AI tools handle the storytelling layer. Machine learning can be tasked with routine drills like tracking, pattern-matching sentiment across stakeholder groups, generating briefing docs, social copy, press release drafts, summarising a media list or budget, etc.
Public relations should translate business strategy into understanding so that employees, customers, partners, and leadership can connect the dots between decisions, actions, and outcomes.
The Divergence cum Convergence of PR and Comms
You’d have noticed the interchanging usage of PR and communications so far. One is the outside game; the other is the comprehensive system. While PR shapes external perception and builds trust, communications retains reputation and creates credibility. Where PR manages moments, communications manages meaning. In other words, whereas PR works to ensure that people feel good about a brand, communications goes all out to make them understand the brand.
Public relations ensures that organisations communicate transparently, honestly, and consistently, helping to build trust with employees, customers, journalists, and investors. It engages with stakeholders, listens to their feedback, and promotes ethical practices that protect the brand’s integrity. PR ensures that the organisation’s communication is clear, ethical, and consistent, particularly when it matters the most.
Communications, on the other hand, translates the attention and trust earned by PR into alignment and action. It does this by making sure that employees understand the “why” of every move by the management, investors see the value, customers remain confident, and leaders speak with one voice. Communications is the narrative architecture that harmonises what you say with what others think and say about you.
Corporate comms sits at the intersection of business objectives, operational reality, and publics’ expectations. It ensures that when the CEO says, “We’re customer-first,” teams are rewarded for user experience – not speed. And that when the founder says, “We value innovation,” staffers don’t avoid risks because they know that mistakes are quietly punished. The real opportunity lies in integrating PR, communications, branding, and stakeholder engagement into a cohesive unit. If PR is a computer programme, communications is the operating system it runs on.
Involvement Delivers Messaging Better than Running Errands
Much more important than deciding where a story should appear is ascertaining if there’s a story worth telling, and now! This highlights the need for a much-earlier presence of PR. Reducing corporate affairs managers to spokespersons or mouthpieces doesn’t bode well for returns on investment. They have a higher calling because what is announced pales into insignificance compared to what audiences assume of an organisation’s customer service, hiring processes, leadership behaviour, employee experience, product decisions, silence, delays, and quotidian operations. Communications caters to all of those; consequently, it must be brought close.
It’s now dawning on founders and top execs that reputation drives markets and directly enables scalability. This light-bulb moment has informed the repurposing of corporate affairs from a comms function to a commercial role. CEOs now expect their communications leaders to understand business drivers, be able to address strategic risk, and demonstrate the economic value of what they do. Yet, it takes involvement à la invitation to the decision table for communications tactics to be appropriately aligned with overarching commercial objectives.
Visibility is created on media pages, but credibility is engineered in the boardroom. For goodwill’s sake, coming across as meaningful (an offshoot of involvement) is far more advantageous than being merely seen (running errands). A company will be limiting its ability to effectively influence outcomes by relegating communications to a translator of decisions it never influenced. Communications isn’t support but strategy. During a board meeting, the comms lead is on the lookout for how to bridge the gap between what the brand is set to do or say and what stakeholders actually want to feel or hear. They pay rapt attention to the industry maneuvers of their organisation with a view to plugging strategic communication. To this extent, the PR department has grown beyond being represented in the boardroom to answer these pedestrian queries:
How many tier-one journalists and editors covering our industry do you have on speed dial?
Can you kill a negative story?
Can you help us get the best media coverage?
Can you grow our social media followers by 10x with almost no budget?
Can you make us trend?
What does it take to make a brand go viral?
Solutions to these questions don’t quite solve the situation, given that businesses are increasingly regulated, thoroughly scrutinised and interconnected with government, partners, investors, communities, employees and technology.
Requirements for Relevance in Corporate Comms Changing Course
Businesses now downplay vanity metrics, seeking solutions that have a major bearing on their topline and bottom line. This much can be gleaned from the recently released report by Deloitte titled “The Road to 2030: A Study of Corporate Affairs Functions in an Unpredictable World.” One of the key findings is that 43% of corporate affairs leaders across FTSE 100, Fortune 500, and Euronext 100 companies identify their function as a “growth driver,” a figure that has more than doubled since 2024.
According to the research, the five most sought-after capabilities for corporate affairs managers right now are commercial understanding, strategy, agility and speed, AI fluency, and storytelling. Notice the foremost status of commercial understanding and strategy. Nonetheless, Deloitte found that 69% of functions still rely primarily on reputational metrics, while only 26% of corporate affairs execs use economic indicators to demonstrate value.
It is incumbent on the PR department to move towards the more strategic commercial territory by being able to articulate what they do in a language that convinces C-suite executives of the risks, value, and scalability potential.
Boardroom Questions Comms Team must Be Ready for
Deloitte’s The Road to 2030 research raises hopes for PR finally occupying a seat at the table. It contains a five-year roadmap that forecasts that by 2027, corporate affairs will “deepen strategic presence with consistent C-suite engagement.”
As this expected engagement gets underway in less than six months, corporate affairs managers and senior comms execs should be able to provide answers to the following business-oriented questions:
What big picture are we not seeing?
How does this outclass what our competitors are doing?
Is there stakeholder risk involved?
Would there be compliance issues or regulatory backlash if we announce this?
Can you read the political weight of our industry regulator’s silence?
Can we lead meaningful conversations with this for social impact?
From an investor relations perspective, is this necessary?
Will our employees push back if we introduce this policy?
How does our brand show up in generative AI answers and summaries?
If a crisis hits by tomorrow, would we respond from strength – values documented, stakeholders mapped, spokespersons prepared – or from a scramble?
How do we ensure that our messaging actually influences buyers’ decisions?
In what ways can the gap between what stakeholders perceive of us and what we think of ourselves be closed?
Can you inculcate the kind of credibility that makes people choose our products/services over others in the marketplace?
How do we get into the good books of those who matter and have them speak positively about us?
How can we move fast while remaining authentic in the face of erratic public sentiments?
What makes this decision relevant today, and can its storyline contribute to our broader brand narrative?
How do we entrench connections that deeply resonate with our shareholders, employees, customers, business partners, host communities, and other stakeholders?
Ugochukwu is a branding specialist, storyteller and media trainer who can be reached via [email protected]
