Day: January 19, 2004

Richard Bailey points to some research from the UK IPR (they’ve been very busy recently I must check if the PRSA have been doing any interesting research) that found that 83% of PR undergraduates in the UK are female. Furthermore, on post graduate PR courses that figure rises to 92%.

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone working in PR that the majority of PR students and practitioners are female but the margin is staggering. It appears that my minority status in this business is safe.

Of course as Elizabeth Albrycht pointed out last November, this numeric superiority has yet to assert itself in the PR blogging world, where by my calculations nearly 90% of PR blogs are written by males. Hopefully that anomaly will be addressed in the near future.

“Undergraduates were well informed about the industry and were keen to make a change. A PR education, they thought, provides sound understanding of the practice, thus enabling them to do a better job than others. Several mentioned that they would like to use the knowledge and skills gained positively in order to contribute to society.”

Jeremy Pepper and Colin McKay have some very interesting posts about the growing diversity in the PR business and how many smaller and mid-size agencies are undertaking very successful and public PR campaigns.

I think this is a good example of the fragmentation taking place in the PR market.  As PR professionals, we are faced with an environment where people have become far more sophisticated in how they make decisions.  A single reference is no longer enough to drive the agenda or the sales process, instead PR folks are faced with the challenge of reaching out to a multitude of media (and non-media) sources.

This is accentuated by the fact that while on one hand media such as the Internet are making the world a smaller place.  It seems to me that the smaller the world gets, the more people are looking for relevant local information and content.  It’s a message the local US TV and newspapers learned a long time ago and explains their success covering local issues.  I think this trend will continue.

Finally, the PR business has never been as fragmented.  There are thousands of individual consultants, a growing number of smaller specialists agencies and then the usual mix of mid- and large-size agencies.

There’s nothing to stop larger firms successfully undertaking these campaigns – they already are.  But the fragmentation in the agency business provides clients with a much richer choice of services… and that’s a good thing.

The one downside to all this change is that it requires a number of things from PR practitioners.  Firstly it’s essential that PR people understand their client’s audience intimately.  Who are they? Where are they?  What are they doing and where are they going?

Secondly this change means that we need to understand practice areas that we might have previously considered outside our remit. These include Search Engine Optimization, Online Promotion (Overture), Direct Marketing etc.

On the one hand all this change presents great opportunities for everyone in the profession and on the other hand we have to make sure we’re in a position to take advantage of it.

Never a dull moment..