Even though the
first dedicated department or agency for public relations (PR) in India was
started in the 1940s by the Tata group, PR as an industry still finds itself in
an adolescent stage in India. It’s said that PR in India started evolving as an
industry in the 1990s, even after almost two decades it seems that the industry
or rather the agencies in India have a long way to go before they can compete
with the agencies across the globe.
So, instead of
getting too much into the history of the sector in India let’s directly jump to
where the industry finds itself today. ASSOCHAM
has given an estimate that there’re roundabout 1000-2000 agencies in India
which boasts of a manpower of almost 30,000-40,000 employees in all. Sounds
like a good set of numbers doesn’t it? But as the cliché goes numbers usually don’t
tell the whole story, the same applies here.
For most of the
people working in the industry in India PR is just media relations, which in a
way has resulted in the slow growth of the sector. Though the silver lining
here is that the professionals and the agencies have opened their eyes to the
fact that PR isn’t just about co-ordinating between the clients be it your corporates
or individual and the media. One of the reasons for this change of attitude of
the agencies is the awareness level going up amongst the clients and the advent
of new media like social networking sites has made companies and individuals to
go full throttle on building and enhancing their brand image. As people have
accepted that PR isn’t just about media relations the growth prospects of the
industry has increased manifold.
If we go back to
some of the statistics it’s found that the industry is growing at an annual
rate of 32%, which is a piece of statistic to be proud of. It’s this growth
rate which has made many International PR companies/agencies to look at India
as a goldmine ready to be exploited. To reiterate this point it can be observed
that many big agencies in India have been taken over by the Big Boys of the
west, for e.g. Hanmer & Partners acquired by Publicis Groupe and Ketchum
acquiring Sampark PR. So does this trend of acquisitions by foreign companies
spell doom for the Indian agencies, maybe or maybe not, let’s dedicate a
separate post for this.
Moving forward,
for any industry to grow the people entering the industry have to be well
qualified and apt for the profession, when it comes to PR the people entering
at the executive level are either graduates or post graduate diploma holders who’ve
done their studies in fields which had nothing about PR in their curriculum.
Thus, giving the entrants a myopic view of the industry, this in turn hampers
their growth as a professional and the growth of the industry as well. So, if
PR has to grow at a much more rapid pace in India, the education system of the
country has to look at it in a big way because just post graduate diploma
courses teaching the students about how to write a press release won’t help neither
the students nor the industry.
Not to make my
first post a drag let me stop here and keep the other points that need some
discussion for another time.
No comments:
Post a Comment