5. Implementing a PR Spending Framework: The Three Is
- Amith Prabhu Founder Trustee - The PRomise Foundation
The three Is of PR are Innovation, Impact, and Influence. All these three need money to be spent.
The first I is Innovation. This is anything that a company or brand does in the realm of PR and communication that is innovative.
The best example is about 25 – 30 years ago, when automobile companies like Suzuki, Honda, Toyota came to India. They realized that there could be a possible threat from Korean companies.
To address this threat the Japanese companies started taking Indian auto journalists to Japan. They were called familiarisation trips or fam trips for short, and they had never been done before.
Most Indian journalists just lived in their houses and went from home to office, but with these trips they got to fly to Japan, to Tokyo, to Yokohama, and see how these companies ran their plants.
At that time in the late mid late 80s, this was innovative. The journalists were not paid money, but their flights and stays were paid for. They were taken as guests for 3 – 4 days and then they came back and wrote great articles. They would add a little disclaimer saying that I was a guest of the company. But, people were wowed.
Sadly, the one Korean company that came to India back in the day, Daewoo, didn’t survive too long. Today, familiarisation trips are common. Many companies do that.
Every time there’s a World Cup football soccer tournament 50 – 60 journalists are taken by certain brands from India, for an all-expense paid trip to wherever the World Cup is happening. This is one example of innovation in PR.
Then there’s Impact. Impact is nothing but any time and money spent by a brand and its employees to make a difference to society.
We have all seen this. There are volunteering days, there’s charity given, a corporate philanthropy or a foundation/NGO created within the company. Impact is nothing but CSR done by companies, but sometimes even more than just CSR.
The third “I” is influence. The most high level influence that we see is brands paying top dollars to leading celebrities in the world of sports, cinema and actors and cricketers to endorse a brand. That’s high level influence.
People will go and buy a brand because Amitabh Bachchan is endorsing it or Deepika Padukone is endorsing it. They will trust the brand because they love the celebrity and want to emulate them and use the same products as them — even if they can’t afford it sometimes.
Many years ago, PR dealt with such influencers, but eventually Marketing took it over. Largely, it does not matter who owns it. These are three I’s which costs money and sometimes PR doesn’t own it. Advertising or CSR, or somebody else owns these in some form, but they use money to do it and it comes from a PR budget.
On the other hand, the more traditional PR, storytelling on its own and strategic communications with the company’s stakeholders doesn’t cost too much money.