PR will build awareness for us

PR is an attractive answer to a familiar founder anxiety: too few people know who we are. It sounds more sophisticated than simply wanting attention. It comes with publications, credibility, authority, links, expert quotes, conference panels and external proof.

So the assumption becomes simple.

PR will build awareness for us.

The same timing pressure applies: most buyers are out of market at any one time, so PR hits land mostly on people who are not buying yet.

Sometimes the assumption is dressed up a little. We need more coverage. We need external validation. We need a few strong media hits. We need to get our name out there.

The founder usually has a vague but understandable picture in mind: the company appears in the right publications, gets associated with credible themes, wins trust by being written about, and gradually becomes more visible in the market without having to pay directly for every impression.

There is a real idea hiding in there.

Publicity can matter. Credibility can compound. Borrowed authority from relevant publications, associations, experts or events can help a company feel more legitimate.

The problem is that businesses often bundle several different jobs into the same neat mental box and call all of it PR.

That box usually contains:

• traditional PR
• digital PR
• thought-leadership outreach
• founder profiling
• media relations
• commentary placement
• link-building dressed up as PR
• partner announcements
• customer stories
• trade press bylines
• podcast guesting
• press release distribution

Some of these can be commercially useful. Some are mostly SEO work in a suit. Some create social proof with little actual reach. Some create links without building memory, a problem I look at more directly in The attention bottleneck. Some create temporary visibility without leaving much retained meaning.

The business then says “PR” as though it were one thing, with one job, and one clear effect.

That is the first mistake.

The second is assuming that coverage automatically becomes awareness.

It does not.

When coverage fails to become awareness

Much PR may be seen by fewer of the people the business actually needs to influence than the coverage report implies.

Trade coverage can be read heavily by peers, competitors, advisers, vendors, and a small slice of already attentive insiders. Digital PR is often designed mainly to earn links, not to change commercial memory. Founder commentary is often thanked in the room and forgotten quickly.

Press release activity can produce the feeling of market presence without much market presence at all.

This is why PR is often overestimated inside companies. It looks like third-party validation. It feels more objective than self-promotion. It can generate visible logos and placements. It gives the founder something external to point at.

It flatters the company with the sense that the market is taking notice.

Sometimes the market is. Often, a much smaller and less commercially useful audience is taking notice.

That is the distinction this chapter needs to make.

The useful question is simpler and harder: good for what?

Good for reputational legitimacy? Good for direct awareness among buyers? Good for trade visibility? Good for partner credibility? Good for investor perception? Good for search and authority signals? Good for founder profile? Good for links? Good for creating a useful association in the market?

Those are different jobs.

Once you separate them, the tidy fantasy that “PR will build awareness for us” starts to wobble.

A company may win coverage in respected trade titles and still remain weakly remembered by buyers. In mental availability terms, the coverage has not necessarily linked the brand to the buying situations where it needs to be retrieved. It may generate strong backlinks and still not become easier to retrieve in a buying situation. It may secure a founder quote in the right story and still not strengthen the company’s commercial position much.

PR can still be useful.

The route from coverage to growth is uneven, specific and rarely automatic.

Three jobs that get confused

It helps to separate PR, digital PR, and link-building more cleanly.

Traditional PR is mainly about reputation, relationships, coverage, and third-party visibility in relevant media or communities. It can help create legitimacy, signal seriousness, and reinforce the sense that the company belongs in an important conversation.

Digital PR is often a hybrid. It may aim for coverage, but in many agencies and teams the real operating logic is partly SEO - earning links, third-party authority metrics, referral signals, and wider digital trace.

Link-building, at its bluntest, is search work. Links can help search engines discover pages and assess relevance. That SEO job differs from creating buyer memory.

Each can help in the right context. The trouble starts when the business expects one to do the job of the others.

Businesses buy link-building and expect awareness. They buy PR and expect search authority. They buy digital PR and assume every coverage report equals market memory.

Those confusions are common because all three can produce visible outputs that look similar from the outside - placements, mentions, links, logos, coverage. The commercial effect can be completely different.

This is why PR needs the same discipline as the rest of marketing. AMEC’s Barcelona Principles separate outputs from outcomes and potential impact, which is the distinction this work often needs. It cannot be assessed just by output volume.

Coverage, placement and publication quality each need a second question: what changed in the market?

And, just as with social and content, companies often overvalue the visible symbol of success: a headline, a logo strip, a quote in a known outlet, a link from a major site, an invitation to comment, an interview.

All real.

Still too thin as a theory of growth.

Publicity needs accumulation

There is also a timing issue here that businesses routinely miss.

Much PR is episodic. It clusters around announcements, launches, reports, funding, partnerships, regulation, or commentary moments. Those spikes can be useful, but awareness tends to build less through isolated flashes than through repeated, coherent presence.

That matters because much of the category is not ready to buy when the coverage appears. The work has to leave usable memory for a later buying situation.

If the company is absent most of the time and then briefly appears in a publication, that may create a moment of visibility without much commercial residue.

PR often disappoints founders at precisely this point.

The desire for more legitimacy and visibility is reasonable. The harder question is whether the publicity creates reach that can be recognised later, which is a related version of the problem in The reach tax. The problem is expecting PR to substitute for broader consistency, repeated market presence, and the work of becoming easier to know over time.

The difference is clearer when you compare two operating models.

Company Coverage treats PR as a shortcut to awareness. It chases announcements, commentary opportunities, founder interviews and media hits. The work is active, visible, and occasionally impressive. But the stories are only loosely connected. Coverage comes in bursts. The audience is mixed. Success is measured mainly by placements and reach estimates.

Company Signal uses PR more selectively. It knows what associations it wants to build, which audiences matter, what topics it wants to become linked with, and where third-party credibility might actually help. Some of the work is traditional PR. Some is thought leadership. Some may overlap with digital PR or partnerships. But the purpose is disciplined.

From the inside, Company Coverage often feels busier and more exciting. From the market’s point of view, Company Signal is usually building something more coherent.

The difference is whether the publicity adds up usefully.

That is the standard most companies miss.

Four questions before doing more PR

A practical way to assess PR is to ask four questions.

First, who actually sees this? The real audience in practice. Buyers? Partners? Industry insiders? Search engines? Investors? Existing customers?

Second, what commercial job is this meant to do? Legitimacy? Reach? SEO authority? Trust? Category association? Founder profile? Sales support?

Third, does the coverage reinforce something the company wants to be remembered for? Or is it just generic visibility with nothing buyers will retain?

Fourth, what would still matter if no one inside the company got to feel pleased about the placement? That question strips away a lot of vanity very quickly.

This is also where founder profile needs careful handling.

A founder can become much more visible than the company, especially on podcasts, panels, media commentary and social-adjacent PR. That can be helpful, but only if the founder’s visibility strengthens how the market places the business.

Otherwise the company ends up with a known voice and a weakly remembered commercial position. The founder becomes visible enough to flatter internal confidence while the brand remains harder to retrieve than it should be.

Useful, but incomplete.

The same caution applies to thought-leadership articles and bylines.

Smart pieces in the right places can support credibility in complex B2B buying groups, especially in categories where trust, expertise and interpretation matter. But a thought-leadership programme is only commercially useful if it accumulates around a recognisable point of view tied to the company’s position.

Otherwise it becomes another library of respectable material that signals intelligence without shaping memory.

The better assumption

The problem is lumping.

The company needs to stop pretending that all publicity-shaped work is one thing, and that all visibility from third parties does the same commercial job.

Some PR supports reputation. Some supports search. Some supports sales confidence. Some supports founder profile. Some supports actual buyer awareness. Most does a mix, but not in equal proportion.

That leaves a better founder question:

What role could third-party visibility usefully play in our growth, and which form of it would actually help?

That question is harder because it forces the business to choose. Do we need credibility in a sensitive market? Do we need links and authority? Do we need category association? Do we need broader reach? Do we need founder legitimacy? Do we need sales-supporting proof?

Once you answer that, the programme gets clearer.

The wider pattern should feel familiar by now. The business is being offered a visible, respectable, externally validated answer to a deeper growth problem. The risk is that the answer sounds more complete than it really is.

That is the pattern the whole book has been following.

PR can be part of market presence. It can support credibility, search, trust, founder visibility, sales confidence and buyer memory. Each job needs a clearer brief than “good PR”.

The useful question is harder than the original assumption.

What kind of presence are we trying to build, what mix of signals will actually create it, and what assumptions have been making that harder than it needed to be without anyone saying them aloud?

That is the question the rest of the book has really been circling.

It is also the right question to carry into the ending.