The Power of Public Relations

"Good morning, Palo Alto!" chirps Bob Finlayson, the staffer who has just that moment been chosen to lead this meeting. "Good morning, Bob!" the others respond. For the next 20 minutes, people talk about their latest accomplishments. The Novell team has gotten today's San Francisco Chronicle to run an article on the network that Novell has set up at COMDEX. A long-time client that had threatened to cut ties with the agency has seen the error of its ways, and the account team has just received a peace offering of chocolates and fruit.

If Alexander is a well-oiled machine, Cunningham is a finely kept garden. The firm prides itself on having values that go beyond chasing after the next media "hit." Visit the Cunningham Web site, and you'll see a carefully articulated statement of the company's purpose. Attend a Cunningham meeting, and you'll see that purpose lived out in the way people talk and work together - and in the way they discuss their responsibility to clients.

Later that week, a group of Cunningham's senior executives meet to craft "messages" for AlphaBlox Corp., a new company whose launch is a few weeks away. The challenge: How to position a product that has to appeal both to IT managers and to line managers? A half-dozen Cunninghamers gather in Sesame Street, a conference room equipped with croquet mallets, a hula hoop, and a huge toy box - all surrounded by a circle of cushy chairs that sit low to the ground. But while this is a creative space, the work done here isn't child's play.

As the Cunninghamers work the problem, the inherent conflict becomes clear. Positioning AlphaBlox as a way to give line managers the information they need to operate more independently might lead IT professionals to fear a loss of their power. Language is critical: Business and technology types use the same words to mean different things. So the Cunninghamers argue the nuances of "customization" vs. "personalization," "made to order" vs. "custom fit," "just in time" vs. "time to market."

What's most notable, however, is what isn't discussed: No one talks about analysts and journalists. The focus stays on the customer: The firm sees little point in worrying about reaching the right "influencers." Its job is all about direct contact with the client. There's a lot at stake for AlphaBlox, says Ron Ricci, a member of Cunningham's executive staff: "This boils down to how this company will spend $5 million or $10 million in venture money. This company is counting on Cunningham to figure that out."

In one corner of Andy Cunningham's office is what passes for an ancient artifact in Silicon Valley: a squat Apple Macintosh, circa 1983, its plastic discolored, its design familiar yet odd. It's one of the first prototypes, a rough-draft machine that was never released. As manager of the PR team that helped launch the Mac, Cunningham was at ground zero of an explosion.

The vintage computer is a fitting memento, since the Mac unleashed a powerful trend - desktop publishing - that turned public relations into an entrepreneurial cottage industry, wide open to new ideas and new players. In 1985, Cunningham celebrated her own launch and, with just $4,000 in startup capital, began working solo out of her house.

Thirteen years later, she employs 130 people at Cunningham Communication, which has grown by an average of 30% annually since that first year. And she's so well known that her business card gives her name as just "Andy." The firm's annual revenues rose by more than 40% in 1996, to $16 million, and in 1997 hit $17.5 million. But Cunningham now says that the old ways of doing PR are as obsolete as the old economy - and that it's a good thing.

The job of public-relations consultants, Cunningham says, is to tell a company's management what its many constituencies are thinking. The PR person needs to out-report the best reporter - to talk to journalists, analysts, stockholders, and customers in order to understand the marketplace better than any of those audiences possibly can. The payoff comes when the PR person can convey the constituents' messages to executives at the highest levels of the client company - and then demonstrate to those constituents how their input has helped inform top management's decisions. "You can get all of your stakeholders to participate in your success - but most companies don't involve them," Cunningham says.

PR people have another new function: To be the bearer of bad, but always honest, news. "If the shareholders aren't buying the stock because they don't like the new CEO, or if the products are really good but the service really sucks, we're the people who bring that information to the table," says Cunningham. "We keep people honest. I run a company myself - a small company, compared with our clients - and I know that people lie to you when you're the CEO. Nobody tells you the truth. I pride our senior consultants on having the ability and the guts to tell CEOs the truth."