On 26th March 2019, we had our second consultancy visit to Value 360 at Khar west, Mumbai. It was yet another insightful experience as Ria Mukherjee, Business head of the office talked to us about Public relations and the functioning of the company. The office in Khar west was a twelve membered team working on different clients. The sessions were conducted by Ria Mukherjee.

As we began, she gave us a broad outlook about PR and the journey in the business so far. Having an experience of over 15 years in this field she was a pool of information on many aspects. It is a very rare opportunity to meet up people who are so passionate about what they do. Ria was one among them. One of the first point that we discussed was about what are the skillset that any PR professional should possess? To which she answered, being thick skinned and having the understanding of what are the challenges your business can make you climb the ladders of success. However, PR is the business of storytelling as per her definition. The variety of clients Value 360 deal with include startup PR, Education PR, Lifestyle PR etc. She stated that as a communication professional if you cannot gain the attention of the speaker in 30 seconds you have already lost the game. As a company, one needs to understand what is the need gap the new service or new product of your client trying to bridge. Value 360 works on understanding this and conduct perception audits whenever required. However, when we work for our clients it is important to create an awareness about the industry, understand about the competitors, build media relations and weave the best stories. Expectation bridging is a concept that every PR professional should work upon.

Towards the end, she mentioned about the dilemma regarding the outcome of PR. She agreed to the fact that clients still encourage to give them Ad value equivalent (AVE) to measure PR outcome. There are measures such as recall rate, client servicing rate and perception audits which can give a basic outlook of how effective PR campaigns have been. There is no doubt that Value 360 gave us a different outlook on how different PR verticals work and it was an amazing experience altogether.

– Anjana PV

Anjana is a part of Class of 2019 in the Post Graduate Programme in PR & Corporate Communications at School of Communications & Reputation, Mumbai. She is a Bachelor of English Language and Literature from Prajyoti Niketan College, Kerala. Her interest for communication and leadership skills took her to the world of Public Relations. She is open to learning and keen to work hard to reach her goals. Anjana completed her internship with Adfactors PR in 2019.

She can be reached at @AnjanaPV2 and as Anjana PV on LinkedIn