Public relations in India
Encyclopedia
Public relations
, despite being over a century old across the world, began in India
in the early 1990s. Though there were several individuals and small companies which started even before that, they offered PR with the limited scope of media relations only. It was only natural that the entrepreneurs who began these services came from a background of journalism, seen as a natural hunting ground for the nascent PR industry.
set base in India in mid-1980s, they floundered to find a firm footing especially since their core focus remained mainly in advertising services. By early 1990s, after the opening up of the Indian economy, several other PR agencies, notably Perfect Relations, Text 100 and [Genesis] started with a core focus on PR alone. This decade also saw the advent of Indian IPO agencies offshoots like Adfactors PR began to offer PR services as a freebee along with their IPO services.
Unlike Edward Bernays
and Ivy Lee
in the United States, Indian Public Relations unfortunately did not have any mentor or any significant thoughtleader in the initial decade. PR agencies were seen to be waving a magic wand to create an intangible called image.
entered India with by taking over Roger Periera, the grand old man of PR by 2008 and with the decade almost coming to a close, 2008 saw the birth of i9 Communications, a specialist in Lifestyle, Entertainment and Hospitality PR.
After the economic slowdown and the resultant market crashes worldwide, several international PR agencies suffered enormous losses when clients cut back marketiing budgets. This forced these agencies to turn to higher growth markets like India and China. India naturally took a higher priority due to its large English-speaking base, stable political governance and consistent legal structure. The color of the market has flowered from grey to blue in this decade and the coporate's need for image building and strategic PR is very well understood and accepted.
According to the 2007 report on The State of the Public Relations Industry prepared by Paul Holmes (author of the Holmes Report), the western growth of PR has almost plateaued to a stable range of 9% to 11%, with the growth geographies being India (as too China) growing at four times the Western pace. To quote the report, "The greatest future in growth is expected to come in China and India, with good prospects for growth in Eastern Europe (particularly those countries recently admitted to the European Union) and in the Middle East (albeit from a very small base)."
Naturally then, India and similar paced economies have become favoured destinations for global PR firms keen to extract their share of growth from this market. The late realization by many global majors that India has an equal or superior potential than China, has left quite a few panting in the race for marketshare.
However, the Indian ngovernment took quick action and set up an interim board consisting of industry stalwarts for the company to assess the true worth of Satyam and to seek a suitable investor & management.The swiftly conducted and fiercely contested bid was won by Mahindra & Mahindra and Satyam was merged with a group IT company.
This swift & timely execution and the confidence-building-measures taken by the interim board helped regain faith by the customers and the world at large in the Indian IT industry.
The state of PR pedagogy in India is yet get the rigour that the industry requires. The high-growth PR industry is unfortunately caught in the classical trap of oversupply of clients and a shortage of good talent. Also, the industry needs to move cohesively towards a curriculum and talent that will be able to meet their needs.
The Indian School of Communications, a school floated by prominent people from the PR industry brings formal theory and practice of PR within the reach for the PR student.
The basis of the study is the proprietary 61-components of Brand Trust, and the 2310 respondents targeted in this study have an influencers’ profile. The report has a detailed analysis the 50 Most Trusted Brands in India and has listings of the All-India 300. The book is priced at Rs. 4350 (US$ 97).
This first edition of this study, published in January 2011, has listed Most Trusted Brands out of 16000 unique brands that were generated http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-indias-50-most-trusted-brands/20110120.htmhttp://profit.ndtv.com/news/show/nokia-is-india-s-most-trusted-brand-brand-trust-136783http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/services/advertising/nokia-most-trusted-brand-in-india-tendulkar-ahead-of-mahatma/articleshow/7319948.cms
Considering this, for this fledgling, but fast growing sector to flourish, the need of academic rigour and theoretical pedagogy is essential.
Corporate Voice | Weber Shandwick won in 3 categories and received one honorary mention at the first India Public Relations and Corporate Communications Awards (IPRCCA) in 2011.
The Holmes Report had awarded the consultancy of the year award for 2010 to Blue Lotus Communications @BlueLotusPR
etc., to reach journalists, bloggers and wider audience through effective use of social media.
Public relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
, despite being over a century old across the world, began in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
in the early 1990s. Though there were several individuals and small companies which started even before that, they offered PR with the limited scope of media relations only. It was only natural that the entrepreneurs who began these services came from a background of journalism, seen as a natural hunting ground for the nascent PR industry.
Public Relations Agencies' in India in the 1990s
India came with many advantages in the context of PR - it showed a consistently high growth rate of the economy; the initial penetration of PR had been low leaving much scope for growth, and the internet & traditional media also penetrated exponentially giving rise to the quick rise of PR in India. Though some international PR agencies (usually offshoots of advertising agencies) like Ogilvy PROgilvy & Mather
Ogilvy & Mather is an international advertising, marketing and public relations agency based in Manhattan and owned by the WPP Group. The company operates 497 offices in 125 countries with approximately 16,000 employees.-History:...
set base in India in mid-1980s, they floundered to find a firm footing especially since their core focus remained mainly in advertising services. By early 1990s, after the opening up of the Indian economy, several other PR agencies, notably Perfect Relations, Text 100 and [Genesis] started with a core focus on PR alone. This decade also saw the advent of Indian IPO agencies offshoots like Adfactors PR began to offer PR services as a freebee along with their IPO services.
Unlike Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays
Edward Louis Bernays , was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda along with Ivy Lee, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations"...
and Ivy Lee
Ivy Lee
Ivy Ledbetter Lee is considered by some to be the founder of modern public relations. The term Public Relations is to be found for the first time in the preface of the 1897 Yearbook of Railway Literature....
in the United States, Indian Public Relations unfortunately did not have any mentor or any significant thoughtleader in the initial decade. PR agencies were seen to be waving a magic wand to create an intangible called image.
PR agencies in India in the 2000s
If the 90s were the starting block for the Indian PR sector, the next decade was the growth era. Significant in this time was the full buyout of Genesis by Burson Marsteller, and the investment in Hanmer & Partners by MS&L, a Publicis company. The new century saw new agencies being born with a new approach to PR. Blue Lotus Communications, a knowledge based PR agency started in 2002 and Apco Worldwide, a policy advocacy expert worldwide, also entered India by 2005. EdelmanEdelman (firm)
Edelman is a global public relations firm with consumer, finance, healthcare, technology and industrial practices. It employs over 3,600 people in 53 offices around the globe. Edelman was founded in 1952 by Daniel J. Edelman and is today led by his son President & CEO Richard Edelman...
entered India with by taking over Roger Periera, the grand old man of PR by 2008 and with the decade almost coming to a close, 2008 saw the birth of i9 Communications, a specialist in Lifestyle, Entertainment and Hospitality PR.
After the economic slowdown and the resultant market crashes worldwide, several international PR agencies suffered enormous losses when clients cut back marketiing budgets. This forced these agencies to turn to higher growth markets like India and China. India naturally took a higher priority due to its large English-speaking base, stable political governance and consistent legal structure. The color of the market has flowered from grey to blue in this decade and the coporate's need for image building and strategic PR is very well understood and accepted.
According to the 2007 report on The State of the Public Relations Industry prepared by Paul Holmes (author of the Holmes Report), the western growth of PR has almost plateaued to a stable range of 9% to 11%, with the growth geographies being India (as too China) growing at four times the Western pace. To quote the report, "The greatest future in growth is expected to come in China and India, with good prospects for growth in Eastern Europe (particularly those countries recently admitted to the European Union) and in the Middle East (albeit from a very small base)."
Naturally then, India and similar paced economies have become favoured destinations for global PR firms keen to extract their share of growth from this market. The late realization by many global majors that India has an equal or superior potential than China, has left quite a few panting in the race for marketshare.
Recent PR Crisis and its mitigation
On January 7, 2009, Ramalinga Raju, the erstwhile chairman of Satyam Ltd., India's leading IT firm, made an admission of conscious fraud & misreporting perpetrated by him over several years . The media who had eulogized him till then, suddenly turned on him with a vengeance, conscious that they had also failed in their duty as watchdogs of businesses. This crisis, coincided with the peak of the global crisis and held the potential to snowball into a credibility & trust issue for brand India and its IT firms, where several billion dollars worth of servcies were being outsourced every year. The crisis also impacted several companies associated with Satyam including EMRI (Emergency Medical Response Insititute ), a not-for-profit endeavour (for running free ambulance services) in which Satyam had committed 5% of running costs with the balance 95% coming from various state governments.However, the Indian ngovernment took quick action and set up an interim board consisting of industry stalwarts for the company to assess the true worth of Satyam and to seek a suitable investor & management.The swiftly conducted and fiercely contested bid was won by Mahindra & Mahindra and Satyam was merged with a group IT company.
This swift & timely execution and the confidence-building-measures taken by the interim board helped regain faith by the customers and the world at large in the Indian IT industry.
Crisis in the Indian PR industry
After the global slowdown hit that Indian PR agencies in 2008 http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/global-crisis-hits-indian-pr-industry/51181/on, it took a further hit in November 2010 due to what has come to be known as the 'Radiagate' scam. Open Magazine in an expose, covered the story of Niira Radia's nefarious power-dealings. An Income Tax phone tap collected more than 5000 tapes and hundreds of these tapes were leaked and found their way into Outlook magazine's website http://www.outlookindia.com. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) interrogated Radia several times and as a fallout of the tapes, the Telecom minister, A. Raja, with whom Radia had close links was also forced to resign. Several prominent journalists like Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi were also in the middle of the quagmire, caught in power-lobbying conversations with Radia.PR Education and academics in India
Public Relations has been taught as a curriculum for the last decade or so in India. Whistling Woods International's School of Communication (SOC) in Mumbai has a post graduate program that allows one to specialize in PR and Corporate Communications along with an MBA(global) degree in Media and Entertainment. While some PR specialist courses exist in Xavier's Institute of Communications (Mumbai) and Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication (Pune), most of the courses are combined with Journalism or Mass Communications. The Mudra Institute of Communications (MICA) is mainly focused on advertising and the 6 year old AICAR (Asian Institute of Communications & Research) started with an MBA and communication which soon became limited to advertising only.The state of PR pedagogy in India is yet get the rigour that the industry requires. The high-growth PR industry is unfortunately caught in the classical trap of oversupply of clients and a shortage of good talent. Also, the industry needs to move cohesively towards a curriculum and talent that will be able to meet their needs.
The Indian School of Communications, a school floated by prominent people from the PR industry brings formal theory and practice of PR within the reach for the PR student.
Indian reports on public relations & branding
The Brand Trust Report, India Study, 2011 (ISBN 978-81-920823-0-1) is published by Trust Research Advisory (TRA)http://www.trustadvisory.info. The book is a result of a syndicated primary research on Brand Trust that generated 10,00,000 data points and 16,000 unique brands, from over 10,000 hours of fieldwork conducted in 9 cities. TRA’s study partners in this research were Indian Statistical Institute http://www.isical.ac.in/ and eNxt Financials http://www.e-nxt.com/. The research report is available in hardcase, paperback and e-book formats. The book is distributed by Embassy Book Distributors http://www.embassybooks.inThe basis of the study is the proprietary 61-components of Brand Trust, and the 2310 respondents targeted in this study have an influencers’ profile. The report has a detailed analysis the 50 Most Trusted Brands in India and has listings of the All-India 300. The book is priced at Rs. 4350 (US$ 97).
This first edition of this study, published in January 2011, has listed Most Trusted Brands out of 16000 unique brands that were generated http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-indias-50-most-trusted-brands/20110120.htmhttp://profit.ndtv.com/news/show/nokia-is-india-s-most-trusted-brand-brand-trust-136783http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/services/advertising/nokia-most-trusted-brand-in-india-tendulkar-ahead-of-mahatma/articleshow/7319948.cms
Growth of Public Relations in India
The Assocham report released in March 2010 shows the growth of the PR industry in India to grow to US$ 6 billion by end of 2010 with a CAGR of approximately 32%. The study reports the biggest challenges of the PR industry to be the following:- Lure of better pay: Skilled manpower is scarce, professionals will be poached for higher salaries.
- Leadership crisis: Not too many established players, presenting a crisis of leadership in middle & smaller firms, which makes people move to larger, more reputed PR agencies.
- Lack of understanding of PR: Most people, even from sibling professions, don’t understand PR.
- Perception issues: Many stakeholders, including media and corporate organizations, consider PR to be similar to that of a spin job.
Considering this, for this fledgling, but fast growing sector to flourish, the need of academic rigour and theoretical pedagogy is essential.
PR Awards and Accolades
The Holmes Report has awarded the consultancy of the year award for 2011 to Corporate Voice | Weber Shandwick . Corporate Voice Weber Shandwick's campaign for Gillette India (Shave India Movement) won India's first PR Lion at Cannes in 2010. The campaign, in its next phase went on win multiple PR Lions again in 2011.Corporate Voice | Weber Shandwick won in 3 categories and received one honorary mention at the first India Public Relations and Corporate Communications Awards (IPRCCA) in 2011.
The Holmes Report had awarded the consultancy of the year award for 2010 to Blue Lotus Communications @BlueLotusPR
Online PR Industry
With the advent of rapid changes in today's social media scenario and internet penetration in India, there created a need for Press release promotion and distribution to reach wider audience. Indian Online PR Industry has few noted names in press release distribution and publishing like BusinesswireIndia, India PRwire, LivemangoLivemango
LiveMango is an online press release distribution service in India that was setup to publish and promote press releases and company news. It distributes news releases and other prepared publicity to the news media and public for the benefit of its members or clients, including Indian businesses, PR...
etc., to reach journalists, bloggers and wider audience through effective use of social media.