As PricewaterhouseCoopers shakes out the remaining kinks of its Price Waterhouse/Coopers & Lybrand merger, a new trend in the management consulting arena looms on the horizon: PR firms are edging in on territory of firms like Price Waterhouse, Andersen Consulting and Ernst & Young.
This frontier provides an attractive landscape for a profession desperate to shed the media relations label. Expect more PR agencies to butter up potential clients with new management lingo and better skill sets for a shot at directing executive and management development programs and organizational overhauls, for instance.
Although billing themselves as management consultants undeniably allows PR firms to jack up their prices and find new ways to mount a business sortie, what does that mean for corporations today?
Fortune 500s may find that PR firms can do the job of a management consulting company (and perhaps at a lower cost) if you bring them to the table to help define a corporate problem, not just at the message development stage. Stage two is where PR firms have traditionally found themselves called in, and it's a salty reason for their failure to excel in an area where MBAs, not communicators, have been privy to the inner workings of clients.
PR agencies can promote to potential corporate clients that MBAs, while good at number crunching, often lack communications savvy. But using a PR agency to handle change management means providing its principals and charges access to information on a range of levels, including research and development, engineering, manufacturing, administration, marketing and sales.
So Say the Naysayers
It's too soon to tell whether an IBM or AT&T would regularly choose a PR firm or communications pioneer over a deep-pocketed consulting firm such as PricewaterhouseCoopers. But there is no question that PR agencies are showing up on the the management consulting menu as corporations consider their change-management options.
Sprint PCS, for example, used Orion Consulting Inc. to handle organizational change initiatives and relationship building when it launched its digital wire phone service in the Cleveland market. Although Orion is hush-hush about the scope of its work, it did involve behind-the-scenes strategizing, the veiled stuff big consulting firms have earned a reputation for doing so well.
In fact, this PR business model is how Diane Fusco, an Orion principal and former PR agency CEO, plans to make a living in the future.
About a year ago, her company, Silverman PR of Cleveland, folded its operations. Fusco became a principal with Orion, a company based in Cleveland that began nine years ago with a dozen people and now employs 200 in 11 markets and serves more than 300 clients.
"Generally, when corporations know they have a communications problem, they hire a PR firm, but when they want to solve a problem, they hire someone in management consulting. [So] management consultants are breaking down the silos," Fusco said. "When we talk about being at the table, (those in PR) aren't necessarily at the right table."
If they aren't, it's because they don't ask, added Fusco and Fendler Communications principal Sven Lee. What has given his Portland, Maine, firm the same entree as management consulting firms is relationship building and early commitment from a client.
"You have to have the balls to ask to have access to the data," he said.
PR vs. Management Consulting
PR firms and management consulting houses use different selling points, with PR often seen as the "soft" side and management consulting seen as contributing to the bottom line. Here's a quick look at just some of the differences in the selling approaches and how the two are typically leveraged:
| PR | Management Consulting |
| Audience | Bottom line |
| Concept | Models |
| Hits | Market share |
| Source: Diane Fusco | |