Putting Passion in Public Relations

The business of building and maintaining positive public perception rests on the fundamental pillar of Passion with Purpose. This article attempts to decipher the elements that go into the making of a successful public relations agency.

The Power of Passion

Passion is an extraordinarily powerful spring. Without it religion, history, romance, and art are useless. Likewise, Public Relations too becomes completely deflated without the essential ingredient of Passion. It demonstrates avowed belief, everlasting appeal and steadfast loyalty. So why does passion become so much more important in the business of public relations as compared to any other service industry?

To convert others to your way of thinking, being a believer first is essential. It is then that you can take a convincing stand with people of different attitudes, perceptions and sensitivities. It is necessary to have an obsessive faith in your client’s business & philosophy and your own organizational vision to be able to transmit it through written and spoken word such that its effervescence is delivered undiluted.

Whether it is body language of a PR professional is sitting across the table, or it is through a written document, or a presentation, it is passion which communicates. Without passion, there is no story to sell!

In a PR agency, passion must become a management mission — an everyday task taken on by the Organizational Head, Team Leaders and Managers — allowing it to spread infectiously throughout the entire organization. Percolating down the agency, passion must show even in the most mundane tasks that the organization does.

The Zeal of Purpose

Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. In a self-made organization, one that emerges from the grassroots, where the milestones for the first few years are just survival, the purpose often gets diluted with time. This usually occurs due to a lack of sound fundamentals, or the lack of attention to the basics.

For an organization to have common purpose, a vision of common destinies is essential. Common purpose is easy to maintain when you are a small organization working out of one office, but as the company grows geographically and numerically, this common purpose very often gets diluted.

To ensure that the organizational purpose maintains its purity, it is necessary that enough time be spent with each new inductee, to ingrain them with the organizational principles, beliefs and ethos. Revisiting this purpose frequently is also critical to ensuring an unadulterated sense of purpose over decades of organizational life.