If You Don't Know, Get To Know: What It's Like To Work In PR

This month’s issue of Get to Know is unique, for the purposes of this interview the person I spoke to would like to remain anonymous. Having had experience working in both corporate and consumer PR, they gave us an insight into the differences between each industry. Currently working for one of the world largest Fashion, Beauty and Lifestyle PR consultancies with outreach in Europe, The United States and East Asia, we get to learn what PR is, the lifestyle that comes with the role and tips that could help you out if a career in PR is something that you’re interested in.

What is PR?

PR in a nutshell is public relations, that's what the P and the R stands for. As a consultant and as a PR consultancy you are often the bridge between a company and the public interest and their consumers. So with corporate PR, you work a lot with journalists to sell the ideas and the positive impact that your company would have in the world. In political PR again you’re selling ideas, that's where the term spin doctor comes from, selling the ideas of your political candidate to the press. This may involve taking journalists for dinner and talking about strategies in hopes of relaying a favourable message to the public. You really have to be friends with the press and also you have to be in tune with what the public thinks and what the public want. A lot of the time companies won't really have, in my opinion, boots on the ground mentality that they really need because they are successful and can afford a PR consultancy, this happens more so in corporate PR than in fashion PR, judging from my experience. They've gotten to a point where they might not realise what they do on a day to day basis will alienate their customer base or the people that would like to interact with their services. So that's where PR consultancy comes in, you work with the press, and you manage the public opinion of a company. There’s definitely a marketing side to it also through the management of the press and public. If you sell the ideals or ideas of a company well enough you can boost their profits and their revenues because people will start paying more attention to a business that has the best placements in a newspaper in a week, or they have the most in touch relationship with their customer base, or they do the most charity drives and things like that. That's where PR comes in and it's really a broad field. I mean it could be anything from sending out a press release for a company that has just released a new product, to reputation and damage control when a company does something wrong, for example when BP has an oil spill a PR firm must get all over that and it's just a really broad overarching industry.

You work in Fashion PR, people might associate that with a glamourous lifestyle. Could let us know what it’s actually like to work in Fashion PR.

It can be gritty at times and sometimes you have to see the back end of the company and the issues that have/will occur that they might not want the public to see. Now that I work in fashion PR, you have a lot fewer issues like this but when I was in a corporate PR world, companies that I worked with would create real humanitarian issues in different countries. It's really nasty when you have to work with that side of the company, and you try to control it. A lot of the time the press never hears about it, the public never hears about it because you know the PR person gets contacted by the local news team asking about what happened and they say “it was just a freak accident,” when in reality safety protocols aren’t being followed and it could be a huge lawsuit, but that never gets out if you understand what I’m saying. So, there is a very gritty and unglamorous side to it. Don't get me wrong there are the good days though. The press trips, there are the times where you take the journalists on sponsored holidays at the expense of your company and you will get to have a great time, you will get a booze up, you will get great food and, so there’s that. Other benefits include freebies, especially in consumer PR. I'm in fashion and lifestyle PR, so I get free alcohol, clothes, and shoes. I get discounted rates at hotels and at some restaurants and occasionally there will be a free event, a cool event that I can go to a day before the public get invited and I get served free alcohol. So, there is the glamorous side to it but I think that it's a lot of hard work and it's quite gritty at times.

What skills do you think you need to be successful in PR?

I think you have to be organised, you have to be hardworking, and you have to make a lot of sacrifices of time to get places. It is a time consuming job that has a lot of different layers to it. Some of the job requires a lot of creativity as well. Most of the people that I've worked with, in my fashion PR career have been to art school or they have a degree in English or fashion marketing, or they have degrees where they had to be creative to get good grades. Most of them did get good grades so people who stick around are very hard working, if you're not hard working, I don't think that you'll get very far. I say that because it can be a little bit unfair, the job always will demand more of you than it should. You will be contracted to work 45 hours a week or whatever but really, it's a little bit of a scam because you end up working 50 or 55 hours a week. The people who are going to do well are the people who don't complain about it and just put in the time. It is unfair because not everyone can do that obviously, you had the words of someone like Molly Mae recently who is super out of touch and doesn't know what it feels like to not have a team supporting them. There are genuinely a lot of people out there who will do the job, which doesn’t suit them because of life or family commitment or whatever the case may be. You have to be willing to make those sacrifices and accept the fact that I’ve got this at work so, I might have to miss that dinner, I might have to be late to that dinner, I might have to not go out when everyone tells me to go out or, I might have to work on a Saturday, I might have to work till 8, 9 PM tonight to get it done. I think that is really a deciding factor on how far you will go. I also would like to stress organisation and creativity. I want to stress how tough you have to be as well. Also, you have to be very friendly, very personable. You can't be afraid of speaking to clients because you're going to be speaking to their in house PR or their press office. You need to be able to be talkative, friendly, presentable, social, creative, and definitely organised. There will be so many things flying about you on a busy day and it's very easy to drop the ball. Once you drop the ball everything can go wrong so it's not just being organised, it’s also having a good memory. I think that those are the skills you really need.

How did you fall into this career?

Honestly, and it might be a bit of a disappointing answer, I took the job in PR because of covid which kind of killed my dreams of acting. It was a very difficult time, early 2020 March sort of thing. Lockdown had just started and no one knew what was going to happen to the future of theatre and film. I really revaluated the position I was in, I was almost 24 years old, I had this degree in journalism, I knew how to write, and I knew how journalism worked. I knew that all these things qualified me for a job in PR and because I’m not opinionated enough or rather I feel like my opinion is not one that I care about sharing, I realised that if I was going to use that degree I had to be in PR. I had to be on the other side and work with the journalist to have some success because I was in a bad place. I had no money coming in, I was on furlough from a retail shop that I was working at part time and I needed to make the jump into something better paid, more structured and just more supportive to the lifestyle that I wanted to be living. That's why I had to make that jump towards PR.

You’ve worked for both a boutique and global PR consultancy, what do you think the benefits are when it comes to working for the larger consultancy?

So, the benefit of working in a large firm is probably having a multitude of large clients. You can work in a small firm and have some big clients; my last job had around 15 people working for three or four big clients that paid 10s of thousands of pounds a month in retainer and then you split your time across either two of those. It was a very centralised team and very on brand for clients to be a little bit similar because we were specialists for that service. Whereas, if you work for a bigger firm you’ll have 20,30 or 40 clients all of the same size, all billion-pound businesses and you need 100 people in each office to look after them. I think it definitely exposes you to everything, which is great. It means there are more perks, more freebies going around on the base level but then there's also is more experience to be had at a more senior level. In my opinion, this is because you can have days where you did this deal in the morning with this company, and then did this deal or did this activation with another company in the afternoon, which is in an entirely different industry and then did this thing the next day or attended an event with someone else. I just think that a bigger firm allows you more freedom to specialise in what you want to specialise in if anything, as well it sort of allows you to, in a “bad way” do what you want sometimes. Everyone is so busy; they're all doing their own thing and sometimes you can kind of just get away with saying "hey want to do this or that." This might just be my company where this works, I'm not saying that's a management problem but, if you come as the most junior person in the company and you're driven you can say “hey look I know this guy I think he's got a great business let's do something with him, let's do a campaign or try and get him signed as a client.” If everyone else in your team gets behind you then you're leading that, you're in charge despite the fact you're right at the bottom and I feel like that's where the huge company will work out. When you're a smaller company those decisions to take on more work or do other things can be a bit tricky. I think that the power lies within a few people at smaller companies in my experience. There isn't a bigger one you can make a lot of decisions and if you come correct about it, I feel like you almost have more power to play with more decision making because everyone's got so much going on. It's just like okay yeah great you know we'll leave you in charge of that for five minutes and see how you do that's really the way that it could work sometimes.

Having had experience from both the smaller and larger firms, what would you recommend for someone who’s trying to get their foot in the door?

I would say that if you're just starting out and looking for experience, take a good opportunity when you see it. When you feel like “oh this is something that I want to do” it might not be the biggest firm in the world or it might not be international, I'd say that you should really just go for it for a little while and see if you like it. There's no shame in knowing when something is beneath you but that might be me personally. I've always been the mindset of I'll take this opportunity if it comes my way just for a little bit to see what it's like because you can always walk away from these things, it's not the end of the world especially when you're at the beginning of your career. So, if you can work for a larger company with an international route fine, take that option. If you, can't it's not the end of the world just get a local firm to see if they need an intern. It might be tough because they won't pay interns and if they do, they’ll pay you in expenses which I think really should be illegal. I think the word internship should be banned and it should be you become an apprentice because that weeds out a lot of the nepotism that goes on. It is a shame but, I think that if you're just starting out you need to send your CV around to any company that's within 10 miles of your house. Somewhere you can get to easily and not spend a million years getting there because then that's going to be tough on you. However, if you don't live near any PR firms maybe try and do something online. Now, with the pandemic everything's on zoom, everything is accessible and is done by email anyway that's one way to do it. That said, I do think a lot of people prefer seeing interns daily if you’re just starting out, my advice would be there's no right or wrong option, it's about what you make of the role and it's about whether you can commit to it because at the end of the day if you’re an intern and you don't impress they're going to let you go. That’s the reality because there's going to be another intern who they're going to like and they’ll give that person more of a shot. You have to assimilate into the working culture that you’re in, and you have to learn more than they are expecting you to which is difficult when you're not getting paid. I mean so many people can't make that decision because they don't have the money, it's brutal but if you can, do it! If you can maybe get supported by someone for a little while, maybe work a Saturday job then it’s worth the shot.

What tips can you give our readers who might be interested in this as a possible career?

Depending on the industry you’re going into you have to read the news, you have to know who's up and coming in that industry, doesn't matter if it's corporate, fashion or politics. It really does not matter you just need to know not only who the large players are in that industry, you need to know the best publications whether that’s FT or The Times etc. it really depends on the industry. Also, it really doesn't hurt to know journalists as well. Who's your favourite journalist? Who do you like to read? Who's to look out for in the paper? You have to demonstrate a keen interest in knowing a bit about the topic or subject that you're going to head into but, the rest you really could learn it on the job and you learn quite quickly. I'd say if you're looking for something to do to be prepared is to find out a little bit about that company. Try and find out who the main clients are, read about the clients and find out some more information like who's the CEO? How much money did they make last year? Have they had any scandals recently? What's the latest product that they dropped? Who writes about them? Who has the best coverage on them? Who has the most positive coverage on them? Who has the most negative coverage? Little things that you can have a look at before an interview that actually doesn't take that long, you can figure all that out in an hour or two if you spend your time well. Another thing that I think really impresses people as well is writing. If you are a PR person and a journalist, firms love that because then you can almost play a double agent role. This is something which I saw at my last job, where people would write political stories or political pieces that were in no way connected to the businesses that we represented. However, they were looked on positively by those in charge, they seem to like PR people who can write.

Thank you to this person for taking the time to provide insights into a career in PR. Although this interview wasn’t as fashion focused as previous Get To Know’s, I truly believe there are gems throughout the interview that will help anyone pursue a career in the Fashion industry, whether that’s PR or journalism. I also believe that there are learnings that could be applicable to other forms of PR, outside of Fashion, if that is what you’re interested in.