The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

The Business Context

The marketing and PR professions remain relatively unscientific. They are almost the last business disciplines to be transformed by information and communication technologies, and are now going through the same technology-fuelled convulsions that accounting, manufacturing, logistics and retail, for example, underwent in previous decades.

The structure, processes and too frequently blinkered specialism of its practitioners hold back most marketing and PR teams from recognizing that their objectives, activity and associated measurement and evaluation, must work in orchestrated harmony with other disciplines to deliver specific business outcomes. It is still too common, for example, to hear a practitioner or senior manager say that PR and customer service are two separate functions, or fail to gel marketing and PR with product development. If that’s not frustrating enough, even getting marketing and PR to work together beautifully can be difficult.

This disorder is increasingly recognized as such, particularly as newer digital aspects bring new types of personality into marketing and PR roles (which is how I, a Chartered Engineer, came to be in this position). The more adaptable practitioners and informed management are beginning to look for new ways to define and synchronize these essential functions and interweave them more closely into the human and informational fabric of an organization.

And not a moment too soon.

The information and communication technology ...