Time

Last month we were thinking about how big cultural calendar events make noisy moments on social algorithms, with content trends that fill our feeds.

That got us thinking about the relationship between content trends and real trends in what people do and buy. How connected are they really? As PRs, should we be chasing consumers or content algorithms? And what’s the case for big-picture strategies, instead of chasing every micro trend that pops up?

Trends used to build slowly, enjoy a long peak and tail off slowly, sometimes over a season, sometimes over years.

Recently we’ve been seeing more and more content about “this week’s trends”. Our feeds now lead us to believe trends arrive on a Monday and are replaced before the week is out.

What jumped out was that most of it was in categories nobody shops weekly, and probably only a handful of times a year at most.

Every day brings more round-ups and carousels of “what to buy this week”, and every new post spawns copycat content that fills our feeds, for that 24-hour period at least.

When you make chasing every trend that bubbles up the centre of your strategy, what are you actually saying as a brand?

It’s a bit like being the person in the room who tells everyone whatever they want to hear. You stand for nothing, everyone gets bored of listening to you, and you get a reputation for being inconsistent and having no point of view.

But is something that comes and goes in a month, or a week, even useful to call a trend?

Even if it is, that’s not how people shop. We don’t redecorate our homes monthly, replace our wardrobes weekly or renew our skincare regimens daily. Even if we wanted to, could we really afford to? Most purchases take a bit of saving, a bit of shopping around, and a bit of thinking and comparison.

A post costs nothing. A purchase means parting with hard-earned cash.

Research suggests a new habit takes 66 days on average to form. Wouldn’t it be cool to put that sort of behavioural psychology front of mind when developing PR campaigns, instead of joining a doom-scroll race to the bottom?

The clue’s in the name. Public relations. Public first.

We should be thinking about when, where and why people shop, and what influences those choices. Strategies that follow consumer behaviour, not the algorithm.

But what role has the PR industry played in this? How responsible are we?

We think part of it is how agencies bill and report for their time. Monthly billing leads to monthly reportage, which leads to a push for monthly wins. Pitches go from playing the long game to chasing whatever lands fastest. The cycle can become a frantic rush for more quick wins, more microtrend inclusions, and more reports full of coverage that comes and goes with the wind.

Everyone’s working in overdrive, but is anything meaningful happening? Is this really building brands?

At Lobby PR we bill monthly too, like most agencies, because it allows continuity of service. Monthly fees aren’t the issue. The mindset that this month’s invoice bought this month’s coverage is.

That’s why we’ve launched custom reportage dashboards for our clients. They track results and activity on an ongoing basis, giving clients a live view of our work and their cumulative progress over time. PR work grows and builds. It never resets to zero, so neither do our reportage dashboards.

Not everything fits neatly into calendar months. Giving clients that visibility lets us work together on sustained PR with real flow to it, not broken up stop-start month to month. It connects our work to the way things really are.

As an industry we talk a lot about trust, reputation and authority, but somewhere along the road we got distracted by what can be delivered in the 20 working days of any given month before the next billing and reportage cycle is due.

The more we thought about all of this, the more we realised what the thread running through everything on our minds this month was: time.

Amazing things take time to build. More than 20 days, at least.