Brian Dolby: Chinese companies are growing with the help of sustained PR and their messages are being hammered home to service providers throughout the world

Difficult times mean difficult choices for organisations at all levels of the telecommunications food chain. And when survival is the name of the game, companies — often ruled by accountants with spreadsheet mentality — cut budgets without often considering all the implications.

Our industry is littered with spectacular declines and disasters. I personally lived through and ultimately lost — like thousands of others — in the Marconi crisis of 2000-01 and today we are seeing major upheaval everywhere: Nortel, Siemens and BT to name but three.

Slashing budgets and introducing cost cutting measures are obviously preferable to losing good people — especially in an industry where there still exists a real family community.

The people you let go today can easily turn up tomorrow influencing purchasing decisions at one of your major customers.

In such times, an easy target for the faceless mathematicians — who, let’s face it, are also trying to protect their own jobs, mortgages and families — is PR.

Public relations is a discipline which has perhaps not helped itself in the past; a little bit like the plumber having the leakiest taps at home, it has not often highlighted its own importance as part of the marketing mix. In times of crisis, PR should perhaps stand not for public relations, but promoting reputation.

Absolutely Fabulous

Whatever you might think — and television programmes such as the UK comedy Absolutely Fabulous have hardly helped — PR is a critical part of the marketing mix. Again, contrary to public opinion perhaps, PR is also about telling the truth and being honest to your audience, usually via the media.

There are those who say that if Marconi had admitted it was in trouble when everyone else was doing so, it might be around today. An arrogant attitude to the City hardly helped and as the analysts and media began to round on the company the witch hunt began.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I am not saying that increased PR would have saved Marconi — but turning on the media, reducing news and generally not being available hardly helped when everyone else was acknowledging the bubble had burst.

My argument is that in difficult times organisations which can look beyond this month’s figures should see PR as an investment towards better times.

Let’s face it, in our own lives we want to buy from large, successful organisations that we believe have a good reputation. Whether you are buying a fridge, a car or a metropolitan ring network, the purchase decision is the same.

Winning and losing

That is where PR comes in and can make the difference between winning and losing.

Now, you might say that, being a PR professional myself, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

So let’s look at the telecoms market over the last five years. While the traditional vendors of the west have struggled to recover from the dotcom crisis, two unknowns — backed by aggressive marketing and PR — have arrived, become established and are now conquering many areas of the market.

Who are they? Well, if they have done their job and if you are reading this as someone in the industry yourself, you’ll already know I am talking about ZTE and Huawei of China.

Yes — they are backed by unlimited reserves of support from the Chinese government. Yes — they are offering prices made possible by that support and by Chinese manufacturing costs.

But they are also doing it with sustained PR and their messages are being hammered home to service providers throughout the world.

Both of them have shrugged off the image of sub-standard equipment with no local support — Huawei is now an integral part of BT’s NGN project — and both companies are expanding throughout the world while many of the incumbent vendors look on, aghast, as their market share swindles away.

Key messages

PR has helped the market believe in Huawei and ZTE. Having worked for ZTE in the early days of the company’s arrival in the UK and across Europe, I still recall a key messages document stretching to 13 pages.

It split into subsets for each market and such was the drive and the ambition of the company that somewhere in each news release those messages were conveyed.

Their PR push was relentless — banging home the high percentage of graduates, the high percentage of profit turned back into R&D, the company’s involvement in ITU committees and organisations such as the Broadband Forum.

Orders themselves were scarce in those early days. They began in places such as Algeria and Tunisia and then moved closer via Eastern Europe. A network of offices sprang up — backed by a technology roadshow to every major city.

When they arrived in town, service operators turned up in their droves — influenced by all they had seen and heard about this Chinese new kid on the block.

PR had delivered. PR had proved that old newspaper adage that people believe what they read. Over time, they believe what they are told. But the key thing is that they must be told and they must be told regularly and consistently.

The ZTE example is a great one for companies which think they don’t have the ammunition to run a PR campaign. ZTE had very little to start with — but it had belief in its mission and a desire to make it in Europe.

PR opened doors and got people talking — and today a lot of the well known brands of the vendor community would probably offer to walk barefoot to China just to get their hands on some of those contracts.

So what should you look for as fuel for a public relations drive? How can you quantify the value of PR? I will be offering some simple tips to both in the next issue.

Brian Dolby is managing director of BCS Public Relations and was previously media and public relations director for Marconi; he has also worked in PR for Siemens, GEC Plessey Telecommunications and BT


This was the first in a series of articles. The second and third articles are here: