Why One Size Doesn’t Fit All in Public Relations -By Ugochukwu Ugwuanyi

The one-size-fits-all approach to business is avoided in PR because not all audiences can pass for stakeholders. You don’t engage with one public the same way you communicate with the other. Until brands understand and integrate this intricacy, their messaging will be hitting the bull’s head and chest rather than the bull’s eye! As the renowned American motivational speaker and author, Zig Ziglar once said, “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.”

Although PR autologically translates to relating to the public, that relationship must be with a particular public, not the entire mass. The one-size-fits-all strategy (if we can call it that) hits as guesswork, which alienates some groups and misses opportunities. This explains why the father of modern marketing, Philip Kotler, quipped that, “Everyone is not a market segment… and if you try to cater to everyone, you will die slowly.”

Whenever someone receives a message – be it a press release, an ad or a social media post – they do not passively absorb it but first process the message to find out what it has to do with them. It’s to prevent their messages from being trashed or ignored where meaning is constructed that businesses would rather channel their communications to stakeholders instead of audiences. Stakeholders are invested in what the organisation has to say; audiences are not.

Reception via Uses and Gratification

The uses and gratification theory of mass communication, propounded in 1960s, posits that audiences do not simply consume content but deliberately select them to satisfy specific needs. To be heard, therefore, the organisation must direct its communications to stakeholders rather than audiences. They cannot understandably help this all the time because their stakeholders are in the audience. But before the critical task of mapping stakeholders, they must first be extricated from audiences.

There is also the reception theory, which emphasises encoding and decoding, à la the processes by which messages are crafted and interpreted. Audience members may react in different ways—either accepting the message as intended (dominant), partially agreeing while maintaining some skepticism (negotiated), or outright rejecting it (oppositional). It argues that audience reactions may vary drastically based on countless factors, including culture, time period, political atmosphere, and (we dare add) self-interest.

The key theorists – Hans Robert Jauss and Stuart Hall – also listed methods of communication as one of the factors that inform audience reception of messages. This conforms to the postulation that public relations doesn’t condone one-size-fits-all solutions. An audience of 100 people may have 100 disparate decodings of the same message, which will concomitantly elicit diverse effects.

Differentiating Stakeholders from Audiences

An audience is that identifiable demography of people that an organisation intends to reach, influence, and build relationships with through its communications. They receive information, consume content, and interpret messages through different channels. Depending on the organisation, an audience may include prospects, students, competitors, trade associations, community members, or the general public. Stakeholders, on the other hand, are anyone who has an interest or influence in your campaign, such as clients, media, customers, employees, partners, community leaders, regulators, and the public. Each stakeholder group may have different needs, expectations, and preferences; hence the imperative to research and understand them well.

Using the social media milieu to drive home the point, consider audiences to be as passive as impressions or reach, while stakeholders are as active as engagement. Worthy of note is the fact that stakeholders are a subset of the audience. Engaging purposely with all stakeholders requires a thorough audience analysis, followed by the tailoring of content based on their psychographics and psychometrics. This is because audiences now have the tendency to select news outlets and information that agree with what the Germans call their Weltanschauung.

Target Persona and Stakeholder Mapping

Stakeholder mapping has to do with identifying groups that affect or are affected by an organisation, analysing their interests, needs, and influence – as well as how they relate to the organisation’s goals. This differs from the target persona, which is a data-driven profile of a fictitious character representing one of your key target audience groups. This buyer persona is created to understand how and why people make decisions by highlighting their pain points, needs, desires, and expectations from your brand or industry.

The target persona has a name and photo with a bio that describes their role, goals, challenges, and motivations, demographics, and psychographics like age, gender, location, education, income, lifestyle, values, interests, media preferences, and habits. These would then inform the PR messages and stories. The communicator also gets to select campaign channels and tactics that correspond with the persona’s media preferences and habits in order to benchmark results and feedback on their creature’s expectations and satisfaction.

The number of personas you create will depend on the size and diversity of your audience – a good rule of thumb is to come up with between three and five personas, focusing on the most important and representative stakeholders. The essence of this exercise is to craft and implement campaigns that are more impactful while effectively connecting with audiences and achieving business goals.

Meanwhile, mapping comes as a visual representation of the organisation’s stakeholders and their relationships with one another. From the analysis matrix, the communicator defines what matters to each stakeholder group and determines how best to communicate with them. A general categorisation is as follows:

Ø Internal stakeholders: Departments in the company, employees, shareholders, and board members.

Ø External stakeholders: Customers, partners, and the media

Ø Government stakeholders: These are public functionaries with the authority to regulate your industry or organisation.

Ø Community stakeholders: People who live in the community where your organisation operates.

Ø Industry stakeholders: People who work in your industry and have a vested interest in your success.

When stakeholders are properly mapped, businesses make more informed communication decisions. Frame messages around what matters most to each audience. Select the most appropriate channels, messengers, and timing. Concentrate time and resources on the stakeholders deserving the most attention. Identify potential supporters, blockers, and communication gaps. Evaluate how communication influences stakeholders over time.

The Dress Rehearsal before Grand Performance

This is what an initial testing of the campaign represents. The standard practice is to first experiment with the message on a sample of the audience you are trying to reach. This is to find out if the communication ticks the boxes for accuracy, clarity, consistency, and relevance before a rollout. It also entails getting feedback from a true representation of your stakeholders or a third party for an inkling of how your messages will be ultimately received or perceived.

Apparatus such as focus groups, surveys, or A/B testing can be used to test messages and measure their impact. Through this assessment, you’ll be able to either confirm that your messaging will have the desired effect, or discover areas of opportunity and improvement. This enables you to skip the “spray and pray” and be guided on the best ways to communicate the right message to the right audience.

Testing the message before dissemination is also crucial because it establishes the clarity and consistency of the message with specific groups, such as customers, third parties, or a sample taken from the stakeholders. The procedure ensures the effectiveness of an organisation’s message in addressing the stakeholders’ needs. With the unique effects among a niche group that testing throws up, one-size-fits-all messaging won’t have to rear its ineffectual head.

How About When Campaigns Must Work Multiple Markets?

There’s perhaps nowhere else that the limitations of one-size-fits-all messaging are as bare as when multinationals or NGOs run campaigns that cut across countries. Here, a gesture is bound to convey a different meaning. A joke easily gets misconstrued. And a cultural reference may not resonate. This necessitates the question: How do you create a story that is universal enough to connect globally without making it feel generic?

This comes with the quandary of creating something everyone understands without making it feel like it was made for no one in particular. Too local, and the campaign loses its ability to travel. Too universal, and it loses its identity. Even when they try to be technically international by making fewer cultural references, reducing specific details, using fewer accents and less personality, communicators in this context risk the campaign becoming completely forgettable.

While the identity of the story (central idea or personality) remains non-negotiable, the Hail Mary is in finding something within that theme that can be recognised in other cultural contexts. To achieve this, don’t look too far from an emotion, a conflict, a relationship, a desire or a human tension. Indeed, a campaign can be local and global at the same time. You don’t have to do away with the local when you can find an aspect of the local that speaks to something global.

A universal brand doesn’t have to speak to everyone in the same way but must remain recognisable to everyone. Imagine a commercial built around a young mom preparing her child for their first day of school. The emotion this evokes will definitely move audiences whether they are in Nigeria, Brazil, Russia, Japan or Australia. While a good story mustn’t necessarily capture every place, it should be meaningful in most places!

Ugochukwu is a branding specialist, storyteller and media trainer who can be reached via nmiringwu@gmail.com