The people or groups who may be your clients in public relations are endless. For consultancies, the two major groups are consumer and industrial-that is companies manufacturing consumer goods and those concerned with industrial products, processes and services. Your public relations work may be involved with products themselves, the company's image or financial status. Charities may be clients, whether or not they have their own publicity officer. Special interest groups, such as professional associations, societies, and commercial associations, including trade unions, frequently call upon the public relations function both inside their own organizations and with outside consultancies.
A Public relation is a continuing activity which is sensitive to a changing market-place, public attitudes and national and international events. Therefore, to some degree any public relations proposal for any potential client is out of date as soon as it is written. This awareness of the changing world, and the ability of a consultancy to react to it and prepare for it, separates the most professional public relations practitioners from those who merely regard public relations as getting or suppressing publicity.
Building mutual respect
Some clients are wonderful and some are a pain in the neck-indecisive, argumentative, and generally difficult. The very nature of public relations means consultants possess a talent for relating to others and, in general, being warm and sociable. Therefore, keeping the client happy ought to be easy, but it can be a hard job if you don't make a conscious effort. The thing to remember is that the client pays your salary and that makes you primarily responsible for the relationship.
When you first meet a client, there is always a 'honeymoon' period when everything seems to go smoothly and the atmosphere is charged with cheerfulness and hope. How long it lasts-and it can and ought to last for years depend on your delivering what your agency promised. The more you achieve and the better the quality of that achievement, the happier you will keep your client.
There are some ways to help make this happen. You need to know what the client's own role is in his company. After understanding this, you need to learn as much as possible about what makes him 'tick'; how does he handle himself in business; what are his job ambitions; is he married and a family man or still single; what are his interests in sports, gardening, sailing and other leisure pursuits; can you define his life style. Finding out about your client provides opportunities for talking to him in a relaxed and warm manner and for showing that you are interested in him as a person. It gives you a break from purely business discussions in order to keep the tone of the meeting relaxed and friendly. In the end, it is a matter of common courtesy to relate to your client as an individual.
The French writer Colette believed that 'discipline is everything' and this certainly applies to client meetings. Discipline means having an agenda, starting and finishing the meeting when you said you would, answering the client's questions with authority (and if you cannot give an answer, say you do not know but you will find out); having your paperwork neat and easily at hand; offering the best hospitality you can provide, such as telephones, a cup of coffee, a comfortable chair and a pad and pencil in case he didn't bring his own. Don't leave these details to your secretary or 'assistant'. Check that it is done before the client arrives. It will help keep you relaxed and in control of the meeting. Finally, see that your meeting achieves the following three objectives no matter what is under discussion: Tell the client:
- What you have achieve.
- What you are currently working on.
- What you will be working on until he sees you next time.
Re-active public relations are when you respond after a situation has arisen or an event happened. Your actions are most likely then to be remedial.
There will always be a need for reacting after the event, but many public relations executives depend solely on this kind of activity. To maintain good credibility with the client, you need to call him before he sees an article in a newspaper that may affect his company-after all you are supposed to be his key person with the best knowledge of the media. Of course, that does mean keeping up your daily reading of newspapers and magazines and maintaining contact with journalists.
Pro-active public relations are when you are helping to make a situation or event happens and is keeping ahead of things. One of the best ways to keep pro-active is to feed regularly the client with new information-even rumor and gossip-that show him you are thinking about his company and its commercial interests. A good public relations executive can often be the first person to tell a client of a new fact about his competitor. It is a kind of intelligence surveillance exercise. Your level of awareness will help keep you pro-active.
When the pressure is on to respond to an event after it happens, the client will then judge your professional competence. Are you a strong fighter for his company's position? Are you guiding him safely through a crisis with the media? Imagine that you are the public relations executive for a soap powder company when their new product is suddenly claimed by the newspapers to have caused 300 babies to be sick. The pressure is enormous and can happen in a matter of minutes in the public relations business. A pro-active public relations executive would have gone over, in detail, the problem of the new soap powder with the client before it was launched and got approval of an action plan just in case of any problems. No one can insure against all eventualities and so you strike a balance between the re- and pro-active aspects of your work. This does much to encourage a client to be confident of your ability and to cement relationships.
It is all too common to hear a client say, the agency was terrific-they really seemed to understand our needs. But after the first few meetings...well, the people there are nice enough... it's just that we never seem to hear from them between our quarterly meetings. Such a client is feeling neglected. His public relations executive is probably working hard enough on his account, but they simply did not keep in touch on a regular basis.
Continuous communications is easy enough to achieve and there are many ways to do it. In fact, you could say the average public relations executive's world is littered with messages to send the client. For example, press releases to send for approval; minutes of contact meetings with client or others; a letter about a special meeting with a journalist; a note concerning some new consumer packaging development; a cutting from a regional newspaper that might prove important to the client's new factory setting plans. Relevant information abounds and the client will be glad to receive it. From time to time, it is also useful to submit to the client a new idea or a variation in the way you intend to handle some part of his publicity campaign. This shows creativity and interest on your part.
There is little doubt that a client changes his agency when relationships turn sour. However, no amount of relationship building will replace hard work and accomplishing what the public relations campaign set out to do.
