Sept 26 Briefing | Foundations

Last month we were thinking about how fast the way people search, shop and engage with the media is changing, and how PR keeps up.

But the more we thought about change, the more we thought about what stays the same, where things started, and the power of strong foundations.

It reminded us of relaunching our website back in 2024. We spent months on one question - "How do we speak to brands about what we do?".

Looking at how everyone else did it, we couldn't believe how few agencies use the word PR at all.

For an industry built on making clients better understood, it’s not very good at making itself better understood to clients.

Turns out they're talking instead as "culture companies", "delivering blended intelligence", "engineering presence, proximity, and cultural memory", and "building uncommon ground upon which progress is made".

What happened to “get better press and sell more”?

Has it always been this hard to say what PR is?

So we went back to the beginning. PR people have spent a century struggling, and confusing everyone in the process.

In 1976, Rex Harlow, who founded Stanford's PR department, published a paper called "Building a Public Relations Definition". He collected every published definition of PR back to 1900 and rolled them together to solve it.

"Public relations is the distinctive management function which helps establish and maintain mutual lines of communication, understanding, acceptance and cooperation between an organisation and its publics; involves the management of problems or issues; helps management to keep informed on and responsive to public opinion; defines and emphasises the responsibility of management to serve the public interest; helps management keep abreast of and effectively utilise change, serving as an early warning system to help anticipate trends; and uses research and sound and ethical communication as its principal tools".

Doesn't really roll off the tongue...

The Public Relations Society of America says it's about relationships. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations says its about reputation. The Public Relations and Communications Association says its about trust.

All true, but all different.

The answer's actually been hiding in plain sight the whole time. It's how a business relates to the public and builds a relationship with them. Public Relations. It's printed on the tin.

PR is simple. The way PR agencies talk about it isn't. ` Now we're not saying PR is easy. Far from it. It's taken us decades of shared experience to be this good and the competition for attention is growing all the time - but that's our problem, not yours.

"Essentials done really well", "elevated basics", and "timeless classics executed beautifully" are all lines PRs use around fashion brands all the time, and never think to apply to themselves.

Really good PR done really well.

So we made it the core of what we're about.

Going back to our website relaunch - we took a .PR domain, changed the bio on our accounts to "We do PR", and put PR back into the company name.

In a word? We do PR.