Author: Femi Falodun

I worked for 12 years in a public relations consultancy. Throughout those years, a recurring source of frustration was the poor level of understanding, appreciation, and respect for public relations among many marketing managers. It often felt like public relations was just an afterthought. Advertising – the more flamboyant, better-known cousin of PR – usually came first, and ad agencies called the shots. Media-buying would swallow most of the campaign budget, and PR only got leftovers.

In most cases, PR would be allocated less than 5% of total marketing communications campaign budget, and PR people were barely involved in the planning of the overarching marketing strategy.

This fight for better understanding, respect and recognition by management is one that public relations professionals have been fighting for decades (see Stephen Waddington’s doctoral research).

Unfortunately, while PR practitioners are making efforts to raise the profile of PR, there’s still a huge gap in knowledge within general marketing practice. And if marketers don’t fully understand PR, they won’t give it its deserved chance in the Marketing Mix.

In my view, half the blame goes to business school educators for not shining enough light on public relations in marketing curricula (i.e. key concepts, principles and strategic role of PR in organisational management). The other half goes to PR practitioners for historically failing to do enough PR for PR. Compare and contrast with advertising where you have all the colourful festivals/prestigious awards like Cannes Lions, the Hollywood hype and inspiring storytelling (think ‘Don Draper’ and Mad Men), and larger-than-life personalities (Ogilvy, et al) who’ve glamourised the profession for decades.

What makes marketers’ underutilisation of PR particularly worrying for me today is not that PR will continue to lose out, but that marketing too will suffer for it. This is because marketing practice is now in desperate need of the principles extolled by public relations, and the skills PR practitioners excel at.

Marketing needs the weapons of PR for today’s warfare.

A quick assessment of the landscape gives one a sense of what marketers are up against: legacy media structure with gatekeepers and one-directional messaging is now broken. Public trust in institutions (big business, government, media) continues to collapse (see Edelman Trust Barometer). More and more people are tuning out promotional marketing messages (Kantar says 31% of UK adults use ad blockers; usage among 18-to-24-year-olds is as high as 50%).

Meanwhile, AI is simultaneously the leading source of some of the most useful content and most deceptive lies ever (50% of internet articles are now AI-generated– this one is not, LOL). Add an unhealthy obsession with social media influencers among teens, pseudo-philosophers spewing hate and ignorance on podcasts, normalised political extremism in mainstream media, and a news cycle that feels more like 24 minutes than 24 hours resulting in a population that’s overstimulated with information.

These are some of the realities of modern life that marketers and communicators must confront and navigate, and it’s not getting any easier.

Some interesting stats from the last few years suggest a shift might already be taking place.

The IPA Bellwether Report showed that PR investment hit a record high in Q3 2024, while advertising spend declined. A similar observation was made during the covid pandemic when businesses needed to be seen as ‘caring’ and empathetic, and not just all about the profit. An Edelman Study also found that 98% of corporate communication leaders now see their relationship with the CEO as being more important than ever. These would suggest that business leaders are beginning to pay more attention to PR and comms, as audiences lean more towards credibility, peer recommendation, and believable storytelling – areas where PR naturally shines.

More recently, a report from PRCA and the CBI puts PR’s contribution to the UK economy at over £7 billion. The report argues for PR to be approached as a strategic business function with significant measurable economic impact, rather than just communications.

Could it be that leaders are slowly realising how critical communications counsel is for organisations dealing with highly skeptical and vocal publics? If chief executives are now trusting their corporate comms and PR advisers more with strategic decisions, then marketers really need to pay attention.

Earned media, a key PR output, has definitely become more valuable in the face of mass skepticism driven by perceived corporate insincerity, and a wave of anti-establishment and anti-consumerist ideologies. In a low-trust environment, earned coverage and third-party validation carry such weight that paid placements simply cannot replicate. Think of the power of an honest testimonial on a trusted platform, a thought leadership piece signalling domain authority, an independent advocate with influence (real influencers, not ‘influenza’).

Public relations tools like media relations, human-angle storytelling, brand journalism, thought leadership, third party advocacy, community relations: these can no longer be seen by marketers as ‘soft extras’ or ‘add-ons’ at the end of an integrated campaign. They are fundamental legitimation tools that help organisations earn the permission to speak, to sell, and to shine within society. They should be integral parts of the long-term strategic marketing programme.

As more and more people struggle to distinguish credible information from disinformation (no thanks to the ubiquity of AI slop), organisations will have to lean more on their brand equity, brand trust, reputation, and goodwill, beyond paid visibility.

There’s another broader point worth making here. As generative AI continues to commoditise aspects of the marketing and communications workflow (like copywriting and creative production), and as media buying gets increasingly automated and programmatic, some of the activities that will remain out of the reach of algorithms are the primarily human-led endeavours. Think stakeholder engagement, relationship marketing, community relations, public affairs, perception management, issue management and crisis communication, navigating cultural and political disruption, and telling stories that connect humans to humans.

These are some of the things that public relations people are really really good at.

Marketers need to recognise that today’s chaotic world is handing public relations a moment that advertising or media buying cannot fully handle, and they should do more to embrace the core principles and practices of PR. Marketers who recognise this opportunity will win. And if PR fails to meet the moment, then the profession will only have itself to blame.

Happy World PR Day!

On Friday, 05 June 2026, I spoke at the Kent Business College London Masterclass held at the Cumberland Hotel near Marble Arch. The event was a great opportunity to indulge in three of my favourite things: talking marketing, teaching marketing, and thinking about marketing. The room had over 60 marketers who had travelled in from as far off as Bristol, Birmingham, and Manchester. It was great to finally meet in person many of my learners from the Level 6 Marketing Manager Apprenticeship Programme and their line managers after weeks of Teams calls.

My goal with the session was to equip our learners (marketing managers and executives) with useful operational models and simple frameworks that can help them develop well thought out content strategies, and help them manage effective content campaigns. I chose 10 frameworks sourced from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM)’s content and strategy curriculum, management scholarship, and from my own experience working in PR & comms consulting.

The 10 frameworks were synthesized into a content strategy stack, presented in the style of architects and builders – with layers of ‘foundation’, ‘structure’, ‘craft’ (piping & wiring, facade & design), and ‘prove’.

I began by making a case for why marketers should use more frameworks in their day to day practice.

Why do frameworks matter?

Frameworks give the marketing team a shared language, they speed up the work, they stop you scrapping a campaign after one nervous week, and they keep your daily tactics tied to an actual strategy. There is also, I’ll admit, a little razzle-dazzle to them, giving off that vibe of professionalism and ‘McKinsey-ness’ that the c-suite loves.

Building The Foundation

For me, the first step in content planning is to think strategically. And what does this even mean? It means to be goal-oriented and purposeful, to be proactive and to think long-term; to connect the work you’re doing with the corporate mission and with customer needs.

This means starting out with an analysis of where things stand as of that moment (what have we done, what are we doing, what’s working, what’s not, what’s competition doing, what do customers want, where are we headed). After getting clarity on the current situation, we then set SMART objectives (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).

The implication of this is that every piece of content, even a thirty-second TikTok dance, has to trace back up a chain to an organisational goal. If you cannot explain how that post helps your chief executive hit a revenue target, it has no reason to exist. This is where a planning framework like SOSTAC comes in handy. It works for the overarching marketing strategy and for content too. For content planning, you just need to keep asking, at every level, how does this ladder up?

Setting Up The Structure

Now that the foundation is set, we need to develop a structure. The Hero-Hub-Hygiene (3H) Modelsorts content by ambition: the Hero piece you can only afford once or twice a year (e.g. a major event, original documentary shoot, etc), the regular Hub content that keeps the lights on (e.g. your weekly newsletter), and the evergreen Hygiene material that quietly answers what people type into Google or ChatGPT (e.g. basic explainers, fact sheets, and FAQ-type blog posts).

Then you have The Content Purpose Matrix, which queries the purpose of every content idea: what is this actually for? The matrix maps content type against two axes: emotional vs. rational appeal on the vertical axis, and awareness vs. purchase intent on the horizontal axis. Here, your content purpose could fall into one or more quadrants: to entertain, to inspire, to educate, or to convince. One thing I did stress is that entertainment is not the exclusive preserve of consumer brands. B2B is allowed to be interesting too!

Then there’s the ACPRA Framework– Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention, Advocacy – which reflects the various stages of the customer journey map. This tool helps marketers map their content inventory against customer journeys, to ensure that no matter which stage of the process a customer is, they are being targeted with relevant communication.

The next framework is the PESO Media Framework – Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned channels – which is mostly used as a planning tool. I encouraged attendees to design their content strategy to work across all four types, with Owned as the foundation since that’s the only channel that they have absolute control over. Ideally, Paid should be used to amplify Owned, to generate Earned and Shared, and content strategy should be designed to work across all four types, with Owned as the foundation.

I also pointed out the owned-media trap, which catches almost everyone. Social following is not really ‘owned media’, it’s Shared. Mark Zuckerberg owns Instagram. Elon Musk rewrote Twitter’s rules overnight. Organic reach is never guaranteed since we’re all at the mercy of algorithmic changes that we have no say over. As a marketer, what you actually own is your website and digital assets, your contact list. Everything else is rented property.

Crafting The Content

For crafting effective content, I shared The BEST Framework (Behavioural, Essential, Strategic and Targeted) which is referenced in the CIM Level 6 Content Strategy module as a key quality filter for content approval. A practical application is to use BEST as a creative brief checklist before any content goes into production.

One of my favourite frameworks for crafting communications is one I first heard about from my former boss who was a journalist before becoming a PR consultant. That is The 5W+H framework (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How) which traces its origins to classical rhetoric, and was later adapted by journalists as the cornerstone of newswriting and editorial judgment. This ancient wisdom still works on any piece of content, be it written or filmed. For PR professionals, the framework maps directly onto how journalists evaluate stories. If you can answer all six questions compellingly, then you have a press-ready narrative on your hands.

One other framework that I’ve used a lot is the Four Narrative Perspectives for brand storytelling. It reminds you of at least four ‘angles’ to explore while building a content bank for a campaign. You can tell the story of the brand itself (product or corporate), of the beneficiary (customer, user, etc) whose life it improved, of a third party through their testimonial (voice of the user, advocate, influencer), or of the whole ecosystem you operate in (sectoral or market impact). That last one is a quiet gold mine that many marketers don’t think about. Market leaders own the conversation in their sector simply by being its loudest, most generous voice. By being the voice of your corner of the world, you quietly suck the air out of everyone else’s (competitive advantage).

Reporting and Proving Impact

Before, during and after doing the work of content marketing, it is important to think deeply about how to show and tell the story of impact. This is where The AMEC Frameworkcomes in. The model is quite well known in PR practice, but I’m not so sure how well marketing managers are embracing it.

The six stages of the framework move from resource (Inputs) through activity (Activities/Outputs) to communication effects (Out-takes/Outcomes) and finally to business results (Impacts). This model is useful because it prevents marketing teams from measuring only Outputs (impressions, views, volume of posts) and calling it success. It reminds us that Outputs are mere inputs to the rest of the chain.

A practical application would be to use the framework as a measurement planning template. This way, before launching any campaign, you can already identify how you will measure each stage, from what it costs (Inputs) to what business change it drives (Impacts).

The model pushes you to tell the full story of your work, from the team level inputs all the way to the board level impact (think revenue generation, profit growth, share price increase, sectoral policy change, etc.)

Case Study: Quick Look at Red Bull’s Content Strategy

I closed the session with a short video on Red Bull’s approach to content. The brand became a media company by pointing the camera away from the product, and at people doing extraordinary things, inspired by the product. One takeaway from this was that, even without Red Bull’s multimillion pound budget, we can all turn the camera away from our brands (for a minute) and shine the light on the more interesting, relatable people and places that we serve.

A few months ago, a mentor asked me a question I had never been asked before: why do I have all these marketing qualifications? I was actually caught off guard. People had expressed admiration before, but nobody had ever questioned the reasoning behind my love for marketing education. When I collected my thoughts, I told him my story. A biochemistry graduate who found himself in sales (banking), then worked his way into marketing and communications consulting, I spent years deliberately building formal marketing knowledge to close the gap between what I was doing professionally and what I actually understood at a strategic level.

I’ve always believed that if you love what you do and take it seriously, you’d want to get as much education and training to become great at it. The best way to show respect and honour to a profession is by immersing oneself in a well rounded, broad and deep knowledge of it. This entails having an understanding of the profession’s purpose and role in society, awareness of its origins, history and those who helped shape it, mastering the fundamental principles underpinning it, studying its contemporary leaders of thought, and paying close attention to current trends and emerging themes.

Also very important is a critical awareness of the powers and limitations of your practice, like a trained warrior with their weapons. At the end of the day, not everybody will get a chance to develop a cure for cancer or save lives in their day jobs. Having this in mind keeps you humble and clear-eyed, preventing an overstated sense of self-importance which leads to hubris. Ultimately, the purpose of knowledge acquisition should be to hone the skills necessary for performing your job well, to adopt behaviours essential for success in that field, and to add value to yourself and other people.

For me, the quest for marketing knowledge eventually led to what I do today: working as a marketing consultant (and researcher), tutor and skills coach, helping to train marketing managers from diverse sectors across the UK. It is from this vantage point, more than anywhere else, that the case for formal marketing training in today’s world has become clearest to me.

According to the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and Hays Recruitment, nearly nine in ten UK marketing employers (88%) experienced skills shortages in the past year, and over half lack access to the skills they need for technologies including AI. Meanwhile, Marketing Week’s 2025 Career and Salary Survey found that more than 60% of marketers believe their organisations have a marketing effectiveness skills gap, making it the single biggest core skills concern in the industry. I’ve also seen the real-world consequences of this gap in the work I’ve done as consultant and tutor over the past decade in Africa and the UK.

Essentially, the argument for formal marketing education goes well beyond skill gaps, and it certainly goes beyond the AI topic that dominates so many industry conversations nowadays. Yes, AI is changing marketing significantly. Yes, over 70% of marketing professionals are already using AI in their roles. Yes, execution-level tasks like content production, reporting and basic campaign management are increasingly being absorbed by AI tools (even as AI-generated ‘Workslop’ grows). But framing marketing qualifications purely as a defensive response to automation misses the bigger point.

Marketing at its core, is a strategic management discipline. The CIM defines marketing as the management process of anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer needs profitably. That is a broad, complex, intellectually demanding mandate. And yet so many people in marketing roles operate with only a partial, often functional, view of what the job actually requires. Many are excellent at running ads or producing content or managing a CRM, but struggle to contribute meaningfully at the strategic level because they were never trained to think that way. This is a key structural gap in how marketing recruits and develops its people.

Formal training closes that gap. It provides the theoretical grounding, the principles and frameworks, the breadth of thinking that day-to-day work alone simply cannot give you. The CIM Level 6 curriculum and the UK Marketing Manager L6 Apprenticeship Standard, which underpin the modules I teach at Kent Business College, cover strategic marketing, brand management, integrated communications, customer behaviour, stakeholder management, marketing research and analytics, martech, AI, and more. More importantly for apprentices, the curriculum is not taught in isolation from the job, as apprentices get to apply their learning directly to real business challenges within their organisations. That combination of knowledge and practical skill application is what builds real marketing capability.

The marketing generalist, when properly trained, also becomes more commercially valuable. With AI handling an increasing share of specialist execution tasks, the marketer who understands a broad range of strategic functions and can coordinate human and machine (artificial) intelligence, becomes a more critical asset to a business. The Target Internet and CIM Digital Marketing Skills Benchmark, which analysed over 10,000 marketing professionals across 32 industries, found significant skills gaps in data analytics, digital strategy and content marketing; all areas that formal training directly addresses.

There is also a confidence argument. When you have rigorously studied marketing at a high level, you carry a different kind of authority into client meetings and boardrooms. You are not guessing or hoping your instincts are right when you have a professional foundation to stand on.

Most definitely, the tools will keep changing. The platforms will keep evolving. But the principles of marketing – what they are and why they matter – are far more durable than any single piece of technology. Formal qualifications teach you those principles. And in a profession that has always in the long-term rewarded strategic clarity over tactical noise, that matters now more than ever.