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This week’s thought piece. In their excellent podcast on crisis communication on BBC Sounds this week, David Yelland and Simon Lewis were surprised to be called PR men in a newspaper review of their podcast. They asked, Why is it the one industry that doesn’t like calling itself what it is?

Why? There is considerable misunderstanding about what PR is. The BBC has often described PR as publicity or spin. Doesn’t help. A bored researcher back in the 1970s found over 400 slightly different definitions of PR. Doesn’t help. Publicists who made money from promoting celebrities or people in the news at that moment (people like the late Max Clifford) often hid behind the more respectable veneer of PR. Doesn’t help.

In my experience, the term Public Relations is rarely used by organisations: companies, central or local government, or not-for-profits. Even some PR agencies no longer say they do PR but call it by another name. A plethora of other terms are used in organisations – strategic communications, corporate communications, marketing communications, community relations and even public diplomacy (where I used to work). Somehow, the term PR is tainted. Few of my 40 PR/Communications apprentices have PR in their job title. I find myself always saying “PR/Communications” – which is easier to write than say orally! Is there a lack of professional self-confidence?

Yet the two professional bodies, CIPR and PRCA, clearly have the promotion of public relations as their purpose. Professor Anne Gregory, in my view, the most distinguished public relations guru in the UK, went on X/Twitter yesterday to compliment David and Simon for agreeing that they were PR men.

Time to put ‘Public Relations’ back into our public relations work?

[Image: Unsplash]