Traditional PR shifting toward building trustable connection

Ben Boyd, president of Edelman’s Practices, Sectors and Offerings

Edelman stresses communications marketing

By Park Jin-hai

Ben Boyd, Edelman’s president of Practices, Sectors and Offerings, said that he has been living through the most fascinating and challenging time in the public relations (PR) sector.

Coupled with using a hoard of different media channels, the role of PR firms has been evolving fast.

“The pace of change is so fast. It feels like it’s changing almost daily,” he said during a recent interview with The Korea Times at Edelman’s Seoul office during his stay.

Communications marketing

For decades he said the PR was largely transactional — a company launches a product and a PR agency creates a tactical plan to publicize the product.

What stand at the center of that change is the move away from PR to “communications marketing,” he said. “If PR was transactional, communications marketing is behavioral in terms of how we work with our clients,” Boyd said.

Today, PR companies create connection paths between a company and its product in a way that drives customers’ desire and purchases, he said.

“The best is about solving clients’ needs. Communications marketing is relevant today because that is what the client needs,” he said.

“The clients need the rigor of marketing driven by creativity and the engagement of customers in a way that creates a relationship.”

He said the notion of creativity is also changing.

“Content is so critical in today’s world, and what drives the connection through content is I think creativity,” Boyd said.

“Not the creativity that is always funny or witty, but the creativity that is cleaver or unique in the way it reaches its audience. These are all new constructs in terms of the traditional sense of the creative world.”

In that sense, he said Samsung Electronics April Fools’ ad for the Galaxy Blade Edge — where the company featured an imaginary smart knife, containing the internal structure of the Galaxy S6 with a super sharp edge for cutting — was a brilliant and creative example that permeated through all channels.

“Creativity always trumps and crosses so much. Samsung’s April Fools idea has been featured on Mashable, CNN, Time and the BBC. When they are creative, and compelling, you get the coverage. The power of creativity should not be underestimated,” he said.

Trust Barometer

Boyd said that there is nothing more important than relating to the public and trust, thus it should be managed like an asset.

“They are completely interwoven in today’s world. If you do not trust a brand and a company, you are not going to buy its products and you nor going to advocate them,” he said.

“We manage supply chains, employee engagement and production line quality. All of those elements go into how trusted you are, but there are also other elements — the behavior of the leadership, behavior of the enterprise in the community in which it operates, all of these elements go into the trustability of that company.”

The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer research, which measures the trust levels of 27 countries and 33,000 respondents in the four areas of government, business, NGOs and media, showed Korea’s overall trust level slipped four points to score 47, entering the pack of distrusters, from the neutral status of last year.

In comparison, India and Poland both gained 10 points this year.

“The government’s trust level dropped year-over-year by 12 points. In terms of the world stage, the ferry disaster had a bigger impact. But also, the low trust in business is in this ranking,” he said.

Korea ranked the last among 26 countries in terms of the trust level of businesses.

It scored 36 points, way behind the global average of 57.

“Clearly the Korean government has disappointed the Korean people. So there is no tactic that government can do to restore that trust. It must behave differently,” he said.

“I encourage them to look at why the trust level is where it is in terms of the behavior of business and what the Korean people expect from Korean companies that they are not giving. Only if behaviors change will we see trust dramatically go up in the market,” he added.