Managing reputation is Africa’s biggest challenge, says Badejo-Okunsanya
President of the African Public Relations Association (APRA), Yomi Badejo Okusanya, has observed that how to achieve effective reputation management was one of the biggest challenges against Africa’s quest for social and economic development.
Similarly, the veteran Public Relations practitioner is of the view that several multinational clients and leaders of corporate organisations were battling with lots of issues bordering onreputation management and to this effect, he said public relations practitioners across-the-board have major responsibilities to device enduring solutions to challenge.
Speaking recently at MARKETING EDGE on TV platform featured by TVC, Badejo-Okusanya who was the personality guest noted that the need to address the Africa reputational challenge informed the decision by the APRA’s executive, under his leadership, to align first and foremost, to the African Union (AU).
According to the former APRA Secretary General who doubles also as Group Managing Director/CEO at CMC Connect Limited, a frontline public relations consultancy firm in Nigeria, a major challenge militating against the growth and development of the PR profession was selling the business value of PR to the critical stakeholders such as the African Union and CEOs of organisations.
He noted, however, that the challenge was strictly not only a Nigerian problem, but rather it was a global challenge to which both local and international interest groups were putting heads together already to find a solution.
Answering questions as to the current challenges facing the PR practice both at local and international fronts, the renowned Public Relations expert said: “The value of public relations is the same across-the-board. When I became president, I was initially the Secretary General, one of the things that I did was led the team to be integrated to the African Union because, if we are talking about Africa, we cannot do that outside the African Union. The biggest challenge that Africa has is the issue of reputation and who is better equipped to help fix that reputation than the reputation managers themselves?
“Reputation is a major challenge that a lot of our clients or our principals have. So, we’ve got to build that reputation using various tools. Perhaps we can use things like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We’ve got to use things like Corporate Communication, Internal Communication, Sponsorship and so on. But nowadays, we also use things like content building and digital. So, it’s a wide gamut of tools that we can use to deliver what we want.”
On the insinuation that the unfolding digitalisation process was fast eroding and replacing the functions of PR, the APRA boss refuted the argument, suggesting rather that what had happened over time was the fact that PR as a larger discipline deployed digital tools in a bid to achieving better results, especially in areas of impact measurement and precision, far and above the traditional and analogue means of doing things in the past.
“The greatest challenge we have is the value that it places, and that is, how can we justify the value that we bring to the table? Many times we find a situation whereby people don’t seem to know what we bring to the table.
“I think that the future of Public Relations is specialisation. I cannot call myself a generalist anymore, or a jack of all trade. What it means is that I could be in education, I could be an Oil and Gas PR Specialist, I could be in Media, I could be in Corporate Communications and I could also be in Crisis Management,” he explained.
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