Communications is increasingly recognised as a strategic management function. That means truly getting under the skin of an organisation.
Go on LinkedIn and you’ll find a hive of repetitive marketing and PR advice: how to write the perfect press release, how to deal with difficult journalists, how to make your writing sound like a human, not a chatbot…
Yet this focus on the “shop window” aspect of communications is largely superfluous – because it overlooks the one thing that really determines whether communications works: how well you understand the organisation, the industry or environment it operates in, and what it’s really trying to achieve.
One of the first things we tell clients is that we need to open up the bonnet on the organisation. Not just the products and the social media presence, but where the organisation actually is – its pressures, its commercial goals, even the things keeping its leadership awake at night.
This approach mirrors one of the bigger shifts we’ve seen in communications over the last half-decade. Rather than being an afterthought – a function bolted on at the end to “get coverage” – it’s increasingly becoming an extension of an organisation’s strategic and commercial operations.
A recent Wall Street Journal piece, “The Revenge of the Publicists”, captured the change well. Communications chiefs once stuck on the margins clipping coverage are now reporting directly to CEOs and helping shape strategy itself.
They’re expected to know the organisation as well as anyone else in the room. As one of them rather boldly put it: “Sometimes I’ll refer to myself as the Chief Truth Teller, just so I can be really candid.”
We haven’t quite ascended to oracle status yet. But reflecting on our own work, the most successful campaigns are invariably the ones where we’ve grown close enough to feel like we belong in the court of the client.
Here we can ask the obvious questions as well as the uncomfortable ones. And where we’re confident the communications we develop become an extension of marketing, business development and ultimately the brains of its leadership.
