Digital tech has increased PR’s relevance, effectiveness, impact: Abhinav Kanchan

In the last 10 years, PR has taken a different dimension, especially after the entry of social media and the rapid shift to digital, especially in the pandemic period. At the same time the industry has been facing stiff challenges, moreover client expectations have also increased, with more emphasis being given to digital and online reputation management. The industry has undergone a radical shift and the current times have pushed the industry to change gears.

In this interaction with Adgully, Abhinav Kanchan, Senior Vice-President & Head of Corporate Communications, Sobha Ltd, speaks about adapting to the new realities in the post-pandemic period, how the company has taken to technology to enhance customer experience, the Trust Triangle framework, being relevant with campaigns and outreach programs, and more.

The pandemic has shifted behaviour and trends across industry. What kind of shifts have you noticed in the PR industry? How has Sobha Developers adapted to this situation and planned its communication strategy?

The pandemic brought unprecedented challenges. It tested the resilience of businesses worldwide. Like other players in the realty sector, we, too, at Sobha Ltd were impacted initially. With scare all around, infections, deaths, flight of labour, lockdowns, poor health infrastructure, there was utter confusion and panic. Once the initial shock settled in, we decided to manage the crisis with empathy, common sense, and transparent communication. We kept our communication channels open; took all media calls, enquiries, continued feeding our social media platforms while working from home and helped keep our employees’ morale high and engaged.

As a company, we pivoted quickly to adjust the pace of construction at several sites and took to technology to enhance our customer experience – initiated virtual site visits and helped our customers buy homes online. We stayed committed to provide quality products at the best price with utmost transparency. And at the end, that is what matters most for the customers.

We renewed our contracts with our suppliers, including our PR agency. There was understanding all around. People were ready to accommodate and adapt. Our focus was on strengthening the supply chain further. On the communications front, we kept our messages simple and straight and brought in more efficiency in delivery and engagement for the earned media without losing focus of the big picture. We stayed committed.

Under the relentless pressure of new customer realities, the future came into sharper focus: the value of our company depended on how quickly we adapted to the new realities, how resilient we could become and how creatively we communicated with our internal and external stakeholders with authenticity and speed. When uncertainty looms large, trust becomes more elusive.

PR as an industry has evolved and forms an important communication tool for every brand today. With digital transformation happening, what has been the role of digital in your PR campaigns?

Digital drives a world of instant information and as our businesses are moving faster, it is becoming more challenging to communicate clear value to our stakeholders, who are already overwhelmed with information and change taking place rapidly all around.

Keeping the complex customer in mind, more so in the realty sector, where high value purchase is involved, we are making efforts to measure and strategise across all digital channels. This helps us understand the consumer journey little better and we can suitably add experiences that may prove beneficial.

Essentially, we look at the PESO model to create content and run PR campaigns. It is always the content, which may either be Paid, Earned, Shared, or Owned, that lies at the heart of these efforts. Studies reveal that consumers are exposed to at least 6 such touch points before they make a purchase. Besides owned (website, blogs, videos) and paid media, our focus is on earned and shared media. The news stories that highlight our brand value and talks about our strong processes and quality products are shared on social media platforms. When earned media is shared in this fashion, it not only captures a wider audience, but also increases the value to the business which is measurable. Digital technologies have not only increased the ambit of the PR role, but have also increased its relevance, effectiveness, and impact.

In the real estate business, building trust with customers is important. What has been the role of PR here and how do you go about measuring the trust factor for the brand?

We believe that trust lies at the centre of any business in order to succeed. For us at Sobha, building long lasting trust with all stakeholders (not only customers) is the core objective.

Listening is an important component of communications framework. Actively listening to what the world is talking about the brand has helped us gauge the level of existing positivity, negativity, and the trust in the brand. It broadly tells us whether we are going right or wrong directionally. We use social listening and engagement tools like Awario and Agorapulse to gather insights about stakeholder perceptionand measure the brand’s popularity and trust factor with built-in analytics for all our social media interactions.

In addition, we have developed an inhouse index (with necessary tweaks), popularly called Net Promoter Score (NPS), as a CRM tool that helps us measure the willingness of a customer to recommend our product to his friends and relatives. This gives us an idea of the trust that our brand has among customers. Furthermore, we have designed a customer outreach program, popularly called Sobha Connect, purely based on listening exercise where we capture customer feedback and her experiences on videos through direct interaction without conditioning her thinking. Besides these the analysis of the tonality used in the earned media segment also helps.

Internal communication and external communication with stakeholders are very important in any business. What process and framework do you follow to continuously stay engaged with both your internal and external stakeholders?

We have 3,000+ employees with Sobha. Besides, regular group messages, company news magazine, offline events and sports, which helps us stay connected. We have started an interesting podcast series (Sobha Originals) which will help bring all employees closer to each other and share their stories. It is primarily the interesting content that keeps our internal and external audiences engaged. We are consistently making efforts towards creating engaging content and use the PESO model to share it among our stakeholders depending upon the suitability of the content and the nature of the delivery platform.

We firmly believe that all our communication and PR efforts should continually strengthen the brand and help it sell better and build immense TRUST. Towards this, we have developed an easy to understand and implement communications framework – the Trust Triangle. We broadly use 3 simple process checks of Authenticity, Empathy and Logic before pushing out our communication to build Trust for the brand. These 3 nodes help us stay on course and serve as our moral compass in our communications journey.

The Trust Triangle:

This trust triangle framework has held us in good stead. Especially due to the pandemic and the uncertain climate when trust is waning, transparent communication about our self-reliant business model, timely project delivery and unmatched quality product has helped the process of keeping our internal and external stakeholders engaged immensely.

Finally, what is the theory that you follow when it comes to ROI on PR campaigns? There are still no standard formulae designed and endless debates keep happening on this subject. How do you work with your PR partner on measuring PR campaigns?

There was a time till the early 2000s, when I was working at FICCI – the apex chamber of commerce & industry – when Internet was slow and digital platforms were not that relevant. We only had AVE or the Advertising Value Equivalency to measure the earned media coverage. We used to multiply the column centimetre of each coverage clip by the ad rate for that publication and multiply it by an arbitrary figure of 5 to assign a value to the earned media and compare it with the competition in similar fashion. It worked well in those days, especially when there was nothing much evolved to gather an insight about the quantity and quality of coverage one garnered.

But now, with the evolution of several PR and web analytical tools, we are better prepared and can measure our output in a more meaningful manner.

Most of our earned media gets featured on social media platforms as well. When we share our earned media in this manner, we can also measure the value of it to our business. Using UTMs it is easy to know how many people are visiting our website after reading these posts. Form fill-up by such prospects gets further translated into allocations, site visits, possible conversions, and revenue for our business.

To illustrate, let me tell you about our first digital expo that we did before the pandemic struck. We called it Click2Buy. It was pure play PR campaign, where the purpose was to create a positive buzz globally around Sobha, celebrating 25 years of TRUST. It threw up interesting numbers. We created more than 20 engaging video stories from within the Sobha fold talking about our strong processes and pushed our narrative through all credible platforms digitally. We were careful to measure the impact and showcase it.

There were 29 posts and 23 videos published altogether in a span of 4 weeks, which reached 436,905 people, engaging 15,539 of them. There were 132,955 video views with 4,726 clicks. Though our target was primarily to create a buzz and strengthen the brand, we managed to generate 601 high quality leads, with almost 9% of lead conversion ratio (the existing ratio was only 1%) and landed up selling 54 apartments worth Rs 45 crore within 4 weeks. The cost per conversion came to a measly Rs 74,613 (inclusive of the offers) against the existing Rs 400,000. And we were still left with 304 high quality leads to work upon!

So, the short point I am trying to emphasise on is that there is huge potential for the PR and Comms teams to measure their output digitally using smart suitable metrics, calculate and showcase the ROI. Having said that, there will still be some huge intangibles that may get left around, which is not truly measurable, but the goodwill that the efforts will generate will have its own fragrance which will last for a long time. I believe that the true ROI emanates in both tangible and intangible forms. We should try and measure that are measurable. And showcase those attributes as huge intangibles that are difficult to measure at times in other intelligent ways.

As a PR leader with a wide industry exposure, what would be your advice to the PR leaders and Managers of tomorrow in today’s communication world?

Today’s world of communication is getting more complex by the day. Learning on the go should be a daily practice. Align the true strategic value of communications with the overall business objective. Focus on being relevant with your campaigns and outreach programs. Be a true resource person so that friends in media seek you out for new information, for data, images, and expert views. And lastly, try and expand your role – add value to the customer base, employee engagement, developing the business, sustainability, ESG, digital marketing, training communication skills and other areas of business interest.