PR professionals demonstrate resilience in 2021, boost business outlook
By Ibidunni Banjoko
Public Relations and communication services are used by a wide range of organisations across the corporate, non-profit and public sectors. Demand for industry services has fallen during the pandemic, as business confidence plunged in 2020-21, while businesses continue to cut spending.
As the economy recovers from the pandemic, demand for industry services is expected to pick up, aided by rising business confidence and spending. Additionally, large events that were due to take place over 2020 but were postponed amid the pandemic, are taking place in the current year, which is expected to support industry demand.
The past 22 months have been an object lesson in just how quickly and dramatically market conditions can shift. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, some businesses saw demand collapse to almost nothing in just a few weeks, while others faced an unexpected and sustained surge.
In PR profession, operational resilience has become a key strategic issue for professionals, who are adding an extra layer of complexity to their already crowded agenda. In addition to the traditional focus on controlling costs, maintaining quality, and meeting delivery expectations, companies now want to ensure that their operations are robust and flexible enough to deal with unexpected shocks.
Speaking to MARKETING EDGE, Ololade Bangbola a PR expert said the pandemic clearly led to different ways of doing public relations, as the lull in economic activities impacted business output in different ways such as reduced revenue for agencies, budget cuts by clients and consequently culminating into cost-effective business operations.
“Compared to last year, business outlook was better for PR practitioners. The pandemic threw up novel ways for PR practitioners to operate and this saved a lot of operational costs. For the first time, many realised new product launches, ground-breaking ceremonies, even events could be held virtually with the same results realized.”
Ololade tasked PR practitioners to come up with creative and innovative ways to achieve more impactful results during and in post-pandemic times. She averred that creativity has and will always be the way out of any crisis.
In the same vein, Samuel Adeyemi, Lagos State NIPR Public Relation Executive stated that the business outlook of PR professionals has gathered a lot of steam in the year 2021.
“As fallout of the pandemic crisis, more and more businesses and public institutions are seeing reasons to invest more in getting better image.
“In 2021, a lot of PR pros are becoming versatile, jettisoning the old ways of servicing their clients and moving with the times,” he revealed.
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