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The key to successful PR? failure
May 24, 2021
Like most of the Pumpkin team, I have a TBR pile – a collection of the (far too many) ‘to be read’ books I’ve accumulated over the years. So, I’ve been using a year’s worth of lockdowns to finally make a dent in the seemingly endless pile.
And despite my attempts to stop thinking about work as soon as my laptop shuts off for the day, my most recent read from ‘The Pile’™? has been a business book which has had me reflecting on work even as I wind down in the evening. It’s probably because I’ve just finished Matthew Syed’s Black Box Thinking, a fantastic book about how we can – and should – learn from failure.
As an industry, PR is typically about success – securing that opportunity, getting the client in that publication, hitting that KPI. But Black Box Thinking really made me consider how our industry reacts to failure.
So here are what I think are the most important learnings from the book:
- Have the right mindset – Failure is often perceived as a negative, rather than an opportunity to move to something better. We’re lucky at Pumpkin that while failure is never the goal (we do have a business to run) it’s not something any of us look to hide from our colleagues – whether it’s something as small as addressing a journalist by the wrong name, or bigger like an unsuccessful new business pitch.
- Test assumptions – We often share our clients’ news with the press. We aren’t journalists but the Pumpkin team has considerable pitching experience. However, that doesn’t stop us talking to journalists to see how a piece of news might go down in the media or to see what else they’ll need to publish a story – be it a case study or a specialist’s quote.
- Pre-empt failure – As I said, at Pumpkin we don’t aim for failure, but sometimes it can be a useful tool for considering how to optimise a project or activity. This might mean knowing that a press release isn’t going to have an impact if it’s scheduled for Christmas Eve (obviously there are exceptions) and highlighting this at the planning stage. Looking at what might go wrong in advance can help us guide our clients to something which is ultimately more successful.
- Develop a mastery (the 10,000 hours rule) – Some back-of-the-napkin maths shows I’m a few years off hitting 10,000 hours of PR myself, but I know more now than I did when I started in the industry five years ago. And if I keep going at the same rate for the next five years, I might get my PR-Black Belt. As a team we all try to build our skills, learn from each other and push beyond our comfort zones regularly to keep getting better at what we do every day.
It also helps that at Pumpkin we’re extremely lucky that we work with some amazingly creative clients. As Syed points out: “creativity is often a response [to failure]”. Working with creatives, we see this all the time – from the reactive ads that pop up in response to something that doesn’t quite land or even goes completely wrong, to the social media hilarity that ensues when a brand missteps.
We need to accept and embrace failure – however uncomfortable that feels. I’ll leave the final words on the matter to Matthew Syed: “If we edit out failure, if we reframe our mistakes, we are effectively destroying one of the most precious learning opportunities that exists”.
Pia Jensen