Korea has a great potential as Asia’s public relations powerhouse with its people’s obsession with speed and human relationship and digital prowess, an executive of Burson-Marsteller, a global industry leader, said.
“In Korea, you have lots of people with master’s degrees and graduate level people who are passionate about communications. Speed, clearly that is a Korean characteristic, a Korean advantage. In Korea the face-to-face element co-exists comfortably with digital,” Bob Pickard, Burson-Marsteller’s Asia Pacific chief executive, told The Korea Herald.
He took the post in January after more than 20 years in a wide range of markets in North America and Korea.
“Korea has exported things very well but not so much in terms intelligent services but PR could be Korea’s next big export item.”
While Pickard thinks that the country’s PR industry will grow, he says that the industry is likely to experience some structural changes due to the large number of small companies operating in the area.
“There is a lot of price competition at the lower end of the spectrum and so you have small shops cutting prices and undervaluing their services, and that over time creates an unsustainable business model,” he said.
“So we will see more mergers and consolidations at the more commodity end of the spectrum, I think that is inevitable.”
In general, Pickard said that PR is a means to creating conversation about an issue and building relationships.
“PR is defined as public relations, but I think of it as public relationships; building peer to peer relationships with key opinion leaders, to educate and persuade by sharing information with them,” he said.
“PR can create conversation. Advertisements are authoritarian, vertical communications but PR is a horizontal relationship. We know the people we are in conversation with.”
As with so many industries, he said that digitalization has brought significant changes for the PR industry.
“In America the news conference is virtually extinct, you almost never get big press events any more,” Pickard said.
“So, world wide I think what we are seeing is the rise of digital as the new conversation platform. PR in the past was more of an art, the art of getting to know a journalist, finding out the interests of a journalist and aligning your story with the journalist’s audience. Now I think that’s changed. We have become digital story tellers.”
In addition, Pickard says that social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become the favored means for corporations to communicate with larger audiences.
According to a study conducted by the company, 79 percent of the Fortune Global 100 companies employ one or more social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
However, Pickard said that some constants remain unchanged for the PR industry.
One such constant is helping the clients to bridge the cultural gap between a company and its consumers in a particular market.
“We do that (bridge cultural differences) all the time. Especially for American multinationals that have U.S.-centric point of view,” he said. He added that Toyota’s situation reflects the cultural difference between Japan and the rest of the world, and errors arising from such differences have made the situation worse for the Japanese auto giant.
“Dealing with their subsidiary here for example, they may not understand the cultural imperatives here. If an American firm is about to make a cult mistake we have to speak up, even if it offends the head office, or else our reputation is tarnished.”

By Choi He-suk (cheesuk@heraldm.com)