Chapter Two The Communications Perspective

The Communications Perspective

Kate Magee Management Today

Tom Buttle MikeWorldWide

Paul Randle Sustainable Marketing Compass

When it comes to education, brands are rarely at the forefront of people’s minds.

“We live in a capitalist society, so brands – what they’re selling in economic terms, in political terms, in education terms – are a fundamental part of the fabric of our society. Now, we can argue in sustainability terms, whether that’s good or bad, but it’s the truth of the matter. […] And so I think we’ve got to the point where there is this recognition, across a large wave of consumer society, that brands need to be somehow participating in society.” Paul Randle

In its purest sense, education is supposed to confer something like objective fact, and a brand’s loyalty to its business objectives is understandably seen to compromise that capacity for even-handedness.

What’s more, considering the industry’s recent failures to predict several seismic cultural shifts, communications can seem like an echo-chamber with little bearing on the real world. But even if we – reasonably – question brands’ right to educate society, it’s almost impossible to extract them from the wider definition of education as experience.

Faced with 2022’s constant

connectivity, where our Twitter timelines are equally populated by limited companies as friends, brands sit on the peripheries of almost every conversation – even (or especially) those that affect us at both scale and depth. The recent death of the queen in Britain is a prime example – as brands from CrossFit to Ann Summers scrambled to react, it was easy to question the motives of companies for whom the situation bore very little relevance.

What’s more, conflicting causes and the counter-intuitive demand for ‘authenticity’ can see brands spreading their messaging and their morals too thinly. Even with a business’s positive public perception as the priority, saying nothing at all is often wisest – though easier said than done, especially for an industry with communication at its heart and in its name. “You need to really unpack […] why a brand is participating [in a given conversation]. Does it have an integrity to the purpose and values of the organisation, to the people who run it, to the people who work for it, the investors, stakeholders, the consumers it serves?” Paul Randle

“The minute we stick with asking for top grades as the ticket through, we limit education and limit what we can do together. So for me, the ask would be collaborating on alternative outcomes that are useful and interesting to us, that we want to see coming through the system.” Lucy Stevens

“Right now, if you got together the whole copper mining industry, and they were to sit down around the table and work out [how to adapt to the energy transition], they’d be in trouble with their own regulators about conspiring to fix the market, even though it’s probably what we need them to do as a society. And so actually, we’ve got legislation that’s an impediment to the direction that we need to travel on some of these issues.” Marshall Manson One Question Member

Despite its ostensibly creative core, communications can often revert to a default formula that feels safe but also staid. Much of this homogeneity is down to the people who make up the industry as a whole – even without considering the moral imperative to foster an inclusive workplace, a diversity of voices provides invaluable shortcuts to new perspectives in offices and the campaigns they produce.

While institutional education remains imperative in terms of arming the next generation for jobs in communications, the importance of diverse role models and clearer career signposting underscores once again the power of sharing experiential knowledge beyond the classroom.

As with so many industries, communications’ current predicament – same people, same ideas – is decidedly chicken-egg. It is only by breaking the cycle, applying the salve of education internally rather than projecting it outwards, that meaningful change can be facilitated.

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Are you looking at this as a moment to put a brand into the spotlight, or do you have a sustained commitment? We are MikeWorldWide, an independent global public relations agency. Creating authentic and lasting connections for our clients is why we exist.