I think I may have touched on this in the past, but wanted to revisit the whole notion that “PR” agencies are shifting to more of a consulting business model, as I’m hearing more and more about it lately. Of course, not all, but it seems for larger firms in particular, that they’re beginning to position themselves more as consultants, rather than purely PR or MarCom agencies. (I’ve never used the word “more” that many times in two sentences—impressive huh)
For one, such companies can now compete with the Boozes and McKinseys of the world, which also offer communications services to their clients and are stealing our biz sharing the workload. But beyond that, it just makes sense. In our line of work, we tend to do a lot of the same thing for a lot of different clients. There’s much overlap among the strategies and tactics we employ, and—depending on the issue—the campaigns we launch follow similar processes. So why not start to capture those practices and can our offerings?
The more we can keep ourselves from reinventing the wheel with each new account, the easier, simpler and more efficient our implementations will become. I like this shift and am looking forward to fully getting onboard with this change.
So have you all noticed this movement at your companies or around the industry? Do you think it’s the right direction for us?
