By Mary Beth West, APR

“In the Profession” will focus this month on public relations’ bottom-line impact. 

Quantifying public relations results in financial / monetary terms remains a ceaseless point of interest in organizational and corporate management, and in fact, measurability has come a long way in the past decade. 

At its highest and most challenging level, managements often want to correlate public relations investments not only with sales and revenue drivers for their products and services but also with investor relations outcomes, i.e. market valuation / stock price. 

Businessweek carried a feature in July 2007 focused on corporate reputation metrics and stock price, even going so far as to say “it’s inevitable companies will one day manipulate their images with some of the same precision they use to optimize operating performance,” and quoting one source as saying, “Just as people reengineer corporations, they will reengineer reputations. The tools are becoming available.”

It’s at that implication where I start mashing on the brakes.  Make no mistake: our team is all for public relations measurement and readily embraces the tools of the trade.  A meaningful evaluation discipline keeps the focus of reputation management programs razor-sharp and the teams responsible for implementing them focused on producing bona fide business results.

However, it starts getting too easy to miss the holistic value proposition of public relations – and the more hard-core “fundamentals” of organizational character that it requires – when the concept of measurement dives headlong into the same level of modeling and forecasting as production, sales and investment chains for the garden-variety widget. 

The main problem with this territory is that it implies that corporate reputation can be manufactured to be anything a company wants it to be, simply with the right messages, tools and budgets.  “Spin” and “manipulation” tactics don’t fall far behind on this train of thought, which have been proven time and again to exact tremendous harm to reputations, and justifiably so.

For management colleagues out there who still thirst for a formulaic approach to achieve reputational value, however, we’ll offer up one for debate: PX ≤ OM + OA + OI (the combined outcomes of Organizational Messages (OM), Organizational Actions (OA) and Organizational Intentions (OI) must achieve a value equal to or greater than the overarching Public Expectations (PX) of the organization, where OI ≠ 0). 

Organizational messages and actions and their associated impacts / outcomes are indeed measureable in many respects.  The problem is that that’s where so many measurement programs start, end and basically are left holding the bag as to why a company’s reputation is as good or as poor as it is. 

What the majority of organizations out there fail to understand is that their intent – from the board room to the C-suite – is the critical driver of how a company is perceived and what type of reputation will follow.  That’s why OI can’t equal 0 or a negative value in the larger equation.  No messages or actions can make up the difference in meeting public expectations if an affirming organizational intent is non-existent. 

Organizational intent entails a lot of stuff, such as making money, increasing market value, achieving the organizational mission, etc., all of which are valid and legitimate aims.  But intent also tells a deeper story of what means-to-an-end the organization will engage to get from Point A to Point B . . . in short, what their values are.  And like it or not, the public cares about those character traits and is willing and – thanks to the transparency afforded by media and communications tools these days – perfectly able to detect major misalignments between what a company says, does and actually intends. 

Understanding and managing the drivers of this full equation is not just a public relations endeavor; it’s one of the most basic and critical – yet too often overlooked – management charges that impacts a company’s profitability as well as survivability. 

Many organizations might be well-served to consider a different form of public relations measurement – not one entirely focused on the revenue public relations helps generate, but instead on what their own OM / OA / OI misalignments cost the organization in lost sales, market share, market value and the ability to do business . . . and then start managing to change that equation for the better.