Today's communications mix is vastly different from the traditional 'public relations' practices, which concentrated on the print and public broadcast media. Electronic commerce, the Internet and the
demand for more effective customer relationship management and one-on-one marketing are all drivers which change the way companies get their message to the market.

We are re-launching our marketing portal, theMarketingSite.com with a brand new look and feel and we chatted to Frank Heydenrych, MD of IT Public Relations firm FHC Holdings on public relations and media-centricity, which will form part of our integrated marketing communications program. As practitioners of measurable and accountable marketing, we asked Frank - how can we measure the return on investment (ROI) for our PR investment?

"This is a question posed time and again by clients and potential clients," he said. It is a question posed by marketers and PR practitioners around the world. The obvious answer is that it's impossible to quantify how much it's worth. In this sense it is truly priceless.

Marketing people and management accept this method of PR value measurement because they have no other way of proving its value; the reason is that they are still trying to correlate value with cost, and they have not created a seamless value proposition around the PR process.

2. The concept of cognitive dissonance. No amount of PR can undo a negative perception. Our banks tell us time and again in their advertising how important we are to them. But their systems are usually so fragmented, so shattered that it is all they can do to provide us with a basic service. So what do we think when we see and hear our bank's advertising? We feel scorn, contempt and frustration and we want to switch brands.

For an established brand, publicity is about reinforcing feelings, not creating new ones. If the market has gone cold on you - as it has with so many of the IT companies since 1999 - you are simply throwing good money after bad with PR.

Now, try and measure value in column centimetres; you might as well measure the value of bricks added to the dyke as the sea washes over it. If the company's go-to-market model is right, then strategically placed PR will more often than not see the value climb.

3. The impact it can have on your business: Well-managed, high-impact PR will stimulate the sales pipeline, shorten sales cycles, create market awareness and drive the market towards a company. We had the experience - one of many - where a start-up company was acquired for R14 million within eight months of opening its doors, turning management into millionaires. PR was the driving force behind this. You simply can't interpret that through column centimetres!

4. Disproportionate reach: Try and measure the value of a placement in the snippet column on the top left-hand side in the companies and markets section of Business Day by traditional means. The cost is insignificant, but we know every time we get a good one in Business Day for a client, their value leaps. Yet that much space is equivalent in cost to a smallish ad in a channel publication. The one placement saw our client's business change fundamentally; the other would be discarded as irrelevant. But it all gets lost in the wash of assessed column centimetres.

5. Finally, every relationship in life is based on both parties gaining equal value. If the client is gaining R1,5 million in value - as we showed one client, it was obtaining at a ratio of R15 for every Rand invested - then the value equation is skewed. We then showed the client we could easily bump this figure up to R30 or R40 for every Rand invested. Would they like to double, treble, quadruple our fee? Clearly, one party was benefiting excessively. The issue has never been raised again.

Feel it in your bones
There are many other spurious ways to try and measure the value of PR. They are all based on the assumption that value equates to cost. Please ignore them all. With great PR you feel the difference in your company. You feel things move; you feel it in your own step, in the way your people walk a little taller. You see it in your share price; in the way your salespeople close deals more easily. But you cannot - and you must not - try to see the value of PR in column centimetres.

On-going media exposure via print and electronic news services, niche publications and broadcasting is critical for establishing a company's identity and value offering in the markets in which it plays. Frank concludes by saying: "The media program is the foundation of the marketing and communications program." For more information on this interesting approach see Frank's contact details below.

Take care and remember that successful companies ensure that their marketing is closely tied into their business plans.

Winnifred Knight and Luisa Mazinter, email winn@themarketingsite.com or phone 082 575 9922

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