What’s the relationship between communications and marketing?
When I started my communications career back in the early noughties, it was clear to me that communications was its own discipline. It was an art and a science and some of the earliest things I learnt were:
How to write a press release
How to communicate with a journalist
The ethics of working with journalists
The editorial independence of publications
How to tell a good story
How to write a good headline
How to write and provide quotes
How to offer interviews or op-eds
How to respond to incoming journalist queries
These were all tactics of working with the press, and that was enough to keep me busy the first couple of months.
Managing media is indeed a core function of the communications department. But there was so much more to it, if one was to take a bird’s eye view.
The bigger questions were about what the company’s narrative was going to be, and why. It was about maximising the use of the many owned channels a company had to express its point of view and its core message. It was about interpreting and making sense of the changing world and helping the company position and reposition itself as the winds shifted. It was about looking out for reputational risks, challenges to authority and trust, and countering them with advice that prevented CEOs making myopic decisions. It was about managing reputational crises as they brewed and successfully nipping them in the bud.
It wasn’t until much later in my career when I started to see communications teams reporting into marketing. This felt like an anomaly as I do hold the view that the communications function should ideally report to the CEO, because the narrative is set at the highest level and is a reflection, very often, of the CEO’s own view of the business.
In small and scaling companies, however, I understand the value they place on the marketing function. Marketing is the route to growth, to scale, to leads and clients and sales. It is the function that gets the most investment.
And forward-thinking marketers - many of whom I have met in The Slice network - see PR as an important channel to help their companies grow in reputation and importance.
When companies start to consider their public profile - whether they are perceived as trustworthy, respectable or reputable by the wider society beyond their clients - that is when PR comes in.
Stories are powerful. Whether you’re a small start-up or a multinational conglomerate - your PR and communications carries more weight than you think!