As we prepare for the India Communication Summit 2022, a special series has been introduced. “My Experiences with Public Relations” brings together the opinions and experience of senior marketing executives from various industries. It aims to bring our readers insights into how marketers view the PR industry and how to leverage communications to address challenges.
In this issue, we feature Deepti Karthik, senior vice president-marketing at Damensch.
What are the main public relations challenges your industry is currently facing?
Public relations is used in the D2C industry for product launches, funding announcements and working with influencers; however, as a apparel, we have not leveraged public relations mechanisms for brand building and long-term goals. A lot of fashion appeals to the style and entertainment section limited to “#spottedin” press articles.
However, PR is much more than that – to the listening ear, it can act as a good advisor providing recommendations and guidance on long-term goals.
The D2C fashion industry faces the challenge of going beyond entertainment news to lifestyle news. Fashion is not just style and appearance, it is actually a reflection of people’s mood and feeling – a perspective that remains unexplored.
How do you, as CMO, plan to leverage public relations as a weapon to meet these challenges?
As a marketing executive, PR is for me the communications strategist, a voracious participant constantly highlighting the right messaging notes, a disseminator impacting purchase decisions, and a facilitator of dialogue within the industry. and peers.
PR has an important role to play in organizational decision-making and we ensure that every strategy is shared and discussed with the PR team to truly create “one cohesive voice”. We’ve always used public relations to build our narrative as a brand that redefines the conventional view of masculinity by starting a conversation about being comfortable in your own skin.
Is public relations only there for crisis management or can it be used to achieve long-term goals?
For us, public relations is a long-term goal that has concrete results, including increased credibility. As a D2C business, the digital ecosystem is constantly generating content and to stay relevant while being authentic requires concerted effort from the content and PR team.
A truly integrated PR team and content team work in sync on articles, lists, and blogs in tandem to increase the domain authority of the website. While a monetary value can be assigned to the earned PR generated, the vocation of PR builds the blocks of trust one mention at a time within the consumer.
What was your experience with PR in your professional career?
Over the past 5 years, working with partner PR agencies has enriched me in thinking “Messaging first”, it’s not what you want to say but how you say it that makes the difference for the end consumer .
Public relations taught me to better articulate, to be concise, precise and to make my communication simple but effective. It really made me customer-centric by seeing every piece of information from the consumer’s perspective. As they say – “If you don’t tell your story, someone else will” – PR mostly taught me the art and seriousness of storytelling.
-Check out more details about India Communications Summit 2022 here
In the latest edition of the My Experiments with PR series, Sapna Desai said that the modern marketing landscape is becoming more and more complex and that to stay relevant we must meet both the needs of the customer and the marketing requirements of the company. company consistently with the help of PR…