1

WHERE WE ARE TODAY

When I first mooted this book with friends and associates in the marketing and PR profession, a common thread emerged in response. Although it was expressed in many different ways, it boiled down to this: there’s change fatigue.

The marketing and PR professional has had to get to grips with quite a lot during the past decade, and this section aims to provide a whistle-stop tour of that journey and where we find ourselves today, but in that response lies the answer.

Change in business should never be for the sake of change. Change has been demanded of marketing, public relations, customer service and other aspects of business by social, technological, environmental, legal and economic factors, and the marketing, PR and other professionals have reacted with varying degrees of success – reactive change.

This book, however, is championing proactive change – proactive in consolidating the multiple adaptations made reactively, and proactive in restructuring, repositioning, regearing and empowering the influence processes as organizational lifeblood, delivering competitive advantage for the organization and the individual practitioner.

Of course, laggards to this opportunity will find themselves having to react. Such is life.

Let’s look a bit more closely at where marketing and PR are today.

Get The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.