The case
Why public relations, and why it is usually the thing that gets dropped
Sales marketing brings customers this month. Public relations decides whether there is a company here in ten years that people are glad to see.
The multiplier
One feeds the month. The other compounds.
Sales marketing is direct. An advertisement runs, a phone rings, a customer buys. The line from spend to revenue is short enough to see, which is why small businesses put almost everything there. A business has to eat this month.
Public relations changes what people believe about you before you contact them. It shows up as a cold call that gets answered, a supplier who takes the meeting, a town board that has heard of you, a hire who applied because they wanted to work there. None of it appears in a campaign report the week it happens.
The same sales campaign, run by a company the audience already knows and accepts, returns more. It starts small and keeps growing as long as the work continues.
A worked example
Coke sells to stores. That part is the smaller half.
Coca-Cola has always had to sell cases to distributors and stores. That is a sales operation, and it is the part most companies would build first.
A version of Coke that only did that would be a successful beverage company. Good product, good distribution, fair price. Nobody would collect the bottles.
What produced the second thing was public relations. Bottles flown to soldiers overseas, and photographed. Slogans built on a feeling, with no product claim in them. A mark put on lunch boxes, coolers, trays and signs until people paid money to own an object whose only function was to display it.
None of it sold a case on the day it ran. It is the reason people now pay money for the packaging.
Every social account a company owns is public relations already. The only question is whether it is run to a plan.
The pattern
Hired, connected, abandoned.
Public relations is hard to keep running without a team, and the teams available for hire are often light on the subject themselves. A package is sold. Accounts are connected. A batch of posts goes out. Then the invoices continue while the pages sit, and attention has moved to the next signature.
That is worse than doing nothing, because the audience can see it. A feed that ran weekly for four months and then stopped tells everyone who looks that something went wrong here. The gap says the opposite of what was paid for.
The businesses that would have benefited most are the ones that get hurt most, because they spent real money learning that public relations does not work, when what happened is that it was never run.
We do not think that is right, and it is the reason every account starts with a Nine Pillar Assessment. A graded objective, a mapped audience, named channels and agreed numbers make it obvious to both sides whether the work is being done.
The long game
Before, during, and after
Before
Planting
The work done ahead of arrival, so a business opens into a town and a government that already know who it is and are comfortable with it being there. Acceptance bought at this stage costs a fraction of what it costs to repair later.
During
Nurturing
Building the public image on purpose. Left alone one forms anyway, and it is seldom the one you would have picked. Presence, relationship, and a single idea repeated until it is what people think of first.
After
Persisting
The work that keeps the mission valuable once the founders are gone. A legacy is a public image that outlived the people who held it, and it only happens where somebody kept it up.
Start here
Trust the nine. We will work for you.
Tell us what you are trying to move and who has to move for it. If public relations is the wrong spend for you right now, we will say so.