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By Anya Cooklin-Lofting

Ironically, the public perception of public relations is inaccurate. For an industry so concerned with the positive reputation of its clients, its own image in the mainstream has been warped, defined by uproarious recalcitrants like Samantha Jones, Malcolm Tucker and Edina Monsoon. The reality of PR has less to do with shambolic Champagne receptions, ludicrously late nights and even later mornings, and more to do with strategic planning, creative, critical thinking and compelling storytelling. 

At its most basic, PR is the framework for the interaction between companies and their customers via the media. When you instruct a PR agency or a consultant, you are trusting them to tell your brand story to the right journalists at the right time to help position your brand, services and products in the magazines your audiences read. This generates awareness in your key demographics and, eventually, commercial gain. 

PR holds sway. It is an effective way to authentically spotlight your company from the respected position of third-party endorsers – the press. Unlike advertising, the only financial exchanges should be between you and your PR expert, and the journalist and the media house they’re writing for. In other words, your PR coverage is earned based on the integrity and value of the story you are telling; no money is exchanged between you and the journalist. In this way, investing in PR is one of the most genuine approaches to implementing a meaningful media campaign. It is also one of the most economical: your monthly spend with an agency or a consultant will almost certainly be much lower than if you were to consistently buy media space, especially from high-circulation magazines or websites.

However, high circulation coverage won’t always be a marker of success, as the kind of media coverage you are aiming for will differ greatly depending on the audiences you want to engage. There is no one-size-fits-all option and key performance indicators vary greatly between campaigns and from business to business. More often than not, titles that boast high circulation and a global reach might not be right for your business. For example, a huge, glossy, double-page spread in Vogue could be less successful for your company in terms of conversions or website traffic than a great piece in a niche magazine with a readership that’s more responsive to your services or products. 

Despite the distinct qualities and nuances of different campaigns, the uniting ingredient of each is a solid understanding of target audiences. Your PR agency must fully understand the behaviours, passions and pastimes of your existing and prospective customers, such as the magazines or websites they read, their finances, their geography and whether they shop online, in-app or in-store. It would be counterproductive, for instance, to run a print-led campaign for an e-commerce business with an expanding social media following. Similarly, for a company whose target audience subscribes to a specific mix of print newspapers, it would be far more effective to reach out to the editors of the relevant supplements or desks at these titles instead of pursuing influencer PR opportunities on Instagram.

A great example could be a company selling beautiful, handmade handles for kitchen cupboards and drawers. They might hand-craft each product and may not have the facility to ship internationally, choosing instead to focus on their UK customer base, easing pressure on their craftspeople. For this business, the PR campaign should respond to and facilitate these commercial goals, positioning its products in British design magazines read by home renovators, or trade publications read by kitchen designers. They could also look towards home-interest social media accounts with a high engagement for gifting opportunities in return for exposure, tags and mentions. The big brand story in Forbes or in the internationally poured-over FT How to Spend It can wait until the CEO is ready to take their business to the next level, adjusting the objectives of the PR campaign to support this. 

Your PR agency or consultant will be able to guide you seamlessly through the process of increasing your share of voice in the right media, be it locally, nationally or internationally. They are often the source of the most creative, dynamic ideas when it comes to storytelling, product launch proposals, events, photoshoots and collaborations. A good agency will support and advise you based on wider industry trends from their vantage point at the centre of the communications world, always at the ready with your brand’s name front of mind. Of course, they’ll be the first to raise a glass to your Absolutely Fabulous successes, too. 

By Anya Cooklin-Lofting

For many, investments of passion are a welcome balm to the complexities and intangibilities of more traditional investment categories like stocks and bonds. At their most basic, passion investments involve the purchase of items you love that tend to be defined by their rarity, quality, cultural or aesthetic value and of course, their demand. It is all about investing in alternative kinds of assets that bring you more than just a return on your investment should you choose to sell. In other words, such investments offer investors the chance to enjoy the items under their care. 

Typical passion investments include art and furniture, jewellery, coins and cars, which generally demonstrate an increase in value over time, or at least tend to hold their value. Because passion investors aren’t guaranteed a return, it’s important to look at how different passion investment categories have performed over the last couple of decades to help inform their purchases. However, investments of passion do tend to perform well during periods of economic uncertainty because the value of passion asset classes doesn’t undulate with the rise and fall of potentially unfavourable stock markets. In this way, passion investing proves to be a sensible, enjoyable and rewarding way to diversify your investment portfolio. 

The best part about investing, and investing in passion asset classes more specifically, is that you don’t have to be an ultra-high net worth individual to get involved. While there are some categories that demand a certain amount of wealth due to the nature of the assets (such as classic cars), the majority offer entry-level investment opportunities for every budget.

Fine art is the best example of a passion investment that feels at once democratic and exclusive depending on the financial commitment you’re happy to make. Although there is no guarantee that your investment will pay off, you’ll be able to enjoy the art while you own it and bide your time while tastes and demands fluctuate. 

The same principles can be applied to antique and designer furniture or jewellery. Our collective, quickly changing tastes and preferences adversely affect the valuation of these kinds of assets. The best thing to do over and above enjoying your purchases is to keep them safe, clean and out of direct sunlight.

The more progressive, experimental set of passion investors, however, are turning to other asset classes. Designer trainers, for example, have come into their own as an investment category, hence the £22,783 price tag attached to the Kanye West X Louis Vuitton collection. But one of the most headline-grabbing passion investment options is in Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs, which allow passion investors to own digital assets. 

In the midst of the pandemic in March 2021, market tracking revealed a collective spend of US$200 million on NFTs including artworks, memes and gifs. Fundamentally, an NFT is a non-interchangeable, non-replicable asset, making it more similar to a piece of art in the physical world than the cryptocurrency one would use to buy it. 

This is well summarised the popularity of ‘Bored Ape’ NFTs, a limited edition of 10,000 artworks with different unique traits and qualities, owned largely by super-rich musicians and sports personalities and created by the application software developer, Yuga Labs. The very human act of art-buying is driven by aesthetics; we buy the art that speaks to us, and this is also how passion investors pursue their NFTs, and Bored Apes in particular. But on a wider, slightly more psycho-sociological level, Yuga Labs has created a brand-led community in the same way that other luxury brands have done, giving wealthy participants in the community a sense of belonging and prestige. They have successfully built a digital community that uses a heady cocktail of ‘hype’ (as celebrities publically invest in their NFTs) and new technology to charm an audience and persuade people into passion investments that serve to express their digital identities. 

In the same way a passion investor in physical fine art might collect works from a narrow artistic movement, era or style to say something about who they are in the world, NFT investors are investing in works that inform their digital presence. All of us with any disposable income have those things in our lives that feel like part of the collage of ‘stuff’ that makes up our curated personalities. NFTs are just an extension of that phenomenon but in the digital world.