Sonali Sokhal, Co-Founder, PRPOI
In the 37th PRPOI episode, we focused on how the lines in brand communication are blurring between all marketing verticals. While Public Relations is increasingly looking at story-telling, brands still rely on Creative teams to help tell the story from a design and content point of view. In a no holds barred conversation, panellists, Ashwini Deshpande, Co-Founder &Director, Elephant Design; Niranjan Natrajan, Founder-WhyAxis and Shivanand Mohanty, Creative Partner-Daiko FHO Communications Pvt. Ltd. share their insights on how the creative industry has evolved to become almost indispensible in the way brands tell their stories.
Lessons that the PR industry can learn from:
The Consumer is Looking for a Seamless Experience: Even as marketing verticals have become more niche and many times work in silos, the consumer is looking for an integrated experience. In many ways, approaches of creative, events, marketing and PR teams today, in the words of Niranjan Natarajan is like the story of the blind men and the elephant, where each vertical may touch upon an important part but needs to see the big picture. The need of the hour is for being able to create a single touchpoint system for all verticals.
No One Owns the Big Idea: The best ideas are for brands to tell an engaging story. What to tell may be the purview of PR, but the way to tell it, may be the purview of the Creative Team. In that sense, according to Shivanand Mohanty, “A great idea can be anything that catches the attention of the consumer or even the media, but it can germinate from any team. Getting into the nuts and bolts of how the story will be told and who will tell it, can then be worked out; teams need to look at the same story in different ways and different mediums and figure out who does what part of putting it together.”
PR can help Creative Teams Listen in: While Creative Teams have become super specialists at telling stories, PR teams have always been aligned to listening in and understanding sentiments and inclination. While Creative teams ‘create’ from scratch, PR teams have been trained to align narratives into certain directions, both bring valuable skill sets to the table when a sensitive campaign is on the agenda. However in Ashwini Deshpande’s words, “Creativity is ultimately about taking bold decisions and pushing the envelope. In this way, creativity needs to operate in some degree of independence; else it can be stifled, so we do need to guard against the same.”
How Can Both Work Together? Ultimately communication is key. From the campaign involving disruptive consumer communication to a viral theme, both communicators play a critical role. While creative may work on a concept, it ultimately falls to the lot of the PR teams to amplify the messaging. While PR can try for virality, Creative might caution against diluting brand messaging for 8 seconds of fame. Ultimately both need to be able to help brands package a viable narrative that can be taken across various mediums.
Will we see 360-degree campaigns in the future: Yes, in all probability, as brands look for newer ways and mediums to tell their stories and engage with audiences, they will need for all marketing verticals to adopt a collaborative approach. As we move away from traditional advertising techniques as well as press release driven PR, both creative and communication need to reinvent their narrative medium. From creating impactful campaigns to having those campaigns written and talked about in media, endorsed by Influencers and ultimately resulting in some measurable numbers in terms of impact, the efforts of all verticals will have to come into play. In this context creative and communication teams will have to learn to collaborate for telling compelling stories for brands in the future.
The above is by special arrangement via a collaboration with PRPOI
Watch the video here:
