Do You Love Me? A romantic critique of PR evaluation...

The best lectures are spontaneous, when students take the topic off into interesting new areas and start to teach me things I hadn't realised before. That's why Wednesday's Level One session on evaluation was great...

I always begin a powerpoint with a picture... usually something silly. This time it was a couple of rabbits, rom a children's book...

I had actually forgotten where it came from but somebody recognised it, saying it was something about love.

How do you measure love, I wondered? Just as clients want to evaluate PR, we all want to know whether that special person loves us (are we getting a return on our investment?!?)... Perhaps predictably, the first suggestion was "Count how many times you have sex." Good start - this is something quantifiable and countable - and probably at least as useful as Advertising Value Equivalence.

But straight away there are problems. In fact, it is a very good example of how you can collect apparently useful statistical information which turns out to be misleading or irrelevant. The general feeling was that you have usually have more sex at the beginning of a relationship, and after a while it tails off - even though the couple may well be grow more and more in love as the years go by. And, of course, you can have sex without any suggestion of love being involved.

(More troublesome for the counting measure was my observation that I loved my Mum but...).

So counting may provide some interesting results but it is not a very useful measure of a relationship - and isn't that what PR is all about, relationships?

We could try simply asking our partner, or whoever it was we trying to find out about. As Nick Cave sings "Do you love me..... like I love you?" These are hard questions to quantify, and harder still to be sure that the answer you get is honest. Benchmarking is tricky - "I love you a lot, I love you very much..." but is my "a lot" the same as her "a lot"?

So the questionnaire approach can be tricky. Perhaps we are better to observe behaviour? How many times does he touch you, how often does she look into your eyes... etc. Here we need to identify certain criteria for assessment, and try and quantify our variables. Instead of just counting column inches, we need to do some sort of content analysis - we need to identify words or actions that seem to suggest love - or lack of it? It isn't just about mentions of love, or of our loved one, it is about the context in which these mentions are achieved.

Likewise, we could draw up a list of statements about our partner, about our own state of mind.. a bit like those magazine quizzes: mostly Bs - deep down he would prefer to be in the pub with his mates....

This went on for quite a long time... and I hope it gave a few insights into a tricky area. PR is lazily characterised as being about creating an image, telling stakeholders that our client is wonderful, and fooling ourselves into thinking that the more we say they are wonderful, the more chance that we will be believed. But in real relationships, whilst it is always nice to hear nice things, what really matters are actions... does your partner listen to you, are they considerate, do they make you laugh, do they make your life better or worse? Likewise for PR, the real value of an organisation is reflected in its actions - it is not what you say, it is what you do, and deep down PR can't escape this truth. If our organisations aren't lovable, they won't be loved...

And we laughed quite a lot in this workshop.. which I suspect means that the students will remember it for a little longer than if I had stuck to the script.

Comments

[Heather Yaxley]

Interesting approach and it does raise some of the questions that relate to evaluating PR. But, don't we normally set objectives in PR that facilitate evaluation, whereas love is more organic and unplanned?

Do we set out to gain love - or is it a byproduct of our actions, in the same way that maybe a positive reputation is earned and relationships built on the basis of trust?

If we need to be worthy of love, good reputation or positive relationships - is it right to set out objectives for these?

[Philip]

Setting out to gain love is a bit like corporate social responsibility...