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Letter from Warsaw, Part 2

Colin Farrington's Eight Trends in European Public Relations

This is the second part of Katie Delahaye Paine's three-part report on the 4th Warsaw Congress on Public Relations.

• In Part 1, she discusses her general impressions of the conference,
• in Part 2 (this article) she reports Colin Farrington's take on trends in European public relations, and
• in Part 3, she reports on Phillip Dewhurst's view of the new European public relations environment.

You can read more about the Congress -- and see plenty of photos of Warsaw -- on Katie's Measurement Blog.

Colin Farrington, Director General of CIPR, the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, kicked off the 4th Warsaw Congress on Public Relations by reviewing a few current trends in European PR. Most of these sound very familiar to those of us in the States...

Trend #1:
CGM is coming on strong.
As an example of the growing importance of consumer generated media in Europe, Farrington cited the story of the posh, conservative London haberdashery John Lewis. The head of communications at John Lewis had told Colin that she really wasn't into Web 2.0, because it was too difficult, too hard, and required too many resources. Then one day she found her store suddenly surrounded by 100 elderly ladies and the target of vigorous protests -- an event entirely driven by social media.

Apparently an elderly lady made her annual visit from the countryside into London to buy gloves. She always went to John Lewis because it had the largest selection. Instead of finding her usual choice of 50 styles of gloves, she found only a handful of choices. Infuriated, she went home and wrote a blog posting about it, and within days she'd attracted 100 other similarly glove-hungry and outraged ladies into the conversation. Those 100 agreed to meet and march on John Lewis to protest what they saw was an arbitrary disregard of customer wishes.

Of course, the last thing a bastion of British shopping wants is pictures of hundreds of ladies with picket signs outside the shop windows. Needless to say, John Lewis' head of communications now places a much higher priority on listening to what is being said about her brand in social media. Proving that even the most conservative environment will change.

Trend #2:
All media are social. This is something KDPaine & Partners has been emphasizing for awhile, and it's always nice when the head of CIPR agrees with you. As is true in the States, every European media outlet also has a website, and more and more have the ability to leave comments and post additional information. Colin cited radio stations providing photos, and newspapers offering video as an extension of the normal printed news.

Trend #3:
More choice of media. Here in the States, we're almost used to the explosion in the number of media outlets. But in Europe it's still a relatively new phenomenon. When Colin was a child there was one TV station, and he recalled the excitement just a decade or so ago when that ballooned to three or four. Now, more than half of households have 900 channels to chose from.

Trend #4:
Traditional messaging systems have declined in value. Advertising has declined in value in Europe, according to Farrington. It used to be that half the population would watch the same TV program, and there was a sense of community because everyone saw the same thing. Now more and more people are only watching specific channels of interest to them, so that common bond is gone and ads are correspondingly less broadly effective. So, for example, 75% of Muslim men in the UK only watch Muslim channels.

Trend #5:
Brand loyalty is becoming less important because you can find what you need more easily. As in the US, Google has replaced the Yellow Pages and advertising as the prime way people find products and services. So people, now armed with far more information regarding prices and options, are much less brand-loyal.

Trend #6:
Measurement is worthless!? Farrington declared that he felt that the vast majority of measurement is worthless, bad or meaningless. Needless to say, as someone who has been measuring PR for 22 years, I have a hard time agreeing with him.

But he has a point. He compared PR measurement to the old story of the doctor talking to a woman whose husband he had recently operated on: "The operation was brilliant but the patient has died."

Farrington and I share the view that far too often in PR measurement the wrong objective has been set, or the metrics don't line up with the objectives. He cited the example of an award program he judged in which most of the prizes were going to go to a food chain for brilliant work which had been properly planned and evaluated. They used every gimmick you can think of to effectively get the message across, but, as he tells it, "The evening before we were to present the award, the company went bankrupt." It seems that the food chain, known for selling to working class people, had made their food too expensive. While they were way ahead of the game in terms of going organic, the fundamental measures of success were wrong. Yes, they got headlines, and messages out there, but consumers weren't prepared to pay more for their product, so ultimately they lost market share and collapsed.

(Editor's Note: Wait a minute, that argument has faulty logic: You can't claim that bad business strategy proves PR measurement is useless. The measurement was not the cause of the problem. Still, it's an interesting story.)

Trend #7:
The New Europe: Diversity is more complicated than just language. In many ways the "New Europe" that Farrington described is similar to the new America -- far more culturally diverse, far more ethnic, and far more influenced by immigrants than ever before. He suggested that all European companies need an EU Communications strategy. Farrington pointed out that diversity is more complicated than just language. And one-size-fits-all communications plans don't work:

• For example, in the UK, hunting and fishing are very closely regulated, but not at all in Poland. So incoming Polish immigrants were having a great time fishing and hunting illegally. They'd been given a leaflet explaining the rules, but that didn't mean the regulations were understood.
• Another example was of a company that was expanding, and really wanted to have a conversation with community members. They held a meeting, but no one showed up. As it turns out, the vast majority of the community were Muslim, and the meeting was held at a place called "The Old Brewery Conference Center."

Trend #8:
Ethics are a problem both here and there. Another area in which major brands are stumbling as badly in Europe as they are in the US is in ethics, particularly in the area of social media. This example sounded all too familiar: A recent flogging incident involved L'Oreal cosmetics that had a blog featuring a fan who posted daily about the improvements in her skin. The blogger turned out to be a man. And, just as in the US, there are ethical issues about what you can and can't blog about from within a company.

For more on the 4th Warsaw Congress on Public Relations, read Part 3 of this report, on Phillip Dewhurst's view of the new European public relations environment. Or read Katie Delahaye Paine's Measurement Blog post, complete with many photos.

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