PR practitioners tasked to be innovative, professional to grow, survive competition

Public Relations professionals in the country have been urged to be awake to innovative ideas that could resolve issues relating to the profession and their clients in order to attain the needed growth required as well as respectable position among their counterparts.

This was the submission of the Chief Consultant of TPT International, Adetokunbo Modupe, who was guest speaker at the December 2018 edition of the Lagos PR Clinic of the state chapter of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) under the theme: Ideapreneurship: The Nature of our Trade.

He postulated that PR practitioners are ideapreneurs who should be driven by intellectual ideas that are well tailored towards clients’ needs and their target publics for desired results, and not be inundated with business gains in the manner of entrepreneurs.

Modupe, a Harvard-trained ideapreneur with over two decades experience in PR, affirmed that since the profession is dynamic, practitioners should re-examine their business modules as ideapreneurs, think and develop ideas that would invariably translate to income generation.

“Don’t let the world drive you, drive the world with your ideas. This keeps us in a more respectable position before our clients who should not think that we are in the business just to make money. We should not see ourselves as entrepreneurs but there is nothing wrong in thinking about wealth” he explained.

Modupe described ideapreneurs as deep thinkers who create jobs, have a mind of their own; explore alternatives to the norms by fostering ideas and are not motivated by pedestrian or temporary success but enduring legacies.

He further stated that PR is about thinking and managing thought processes for the benefit of other people’s reputation, and likened it to innovation pentathlon, a structured process that removes the risk of failure as ideas progress.

According to him, great men like Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple; Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of Tesla Motors; and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon who have all made global impact in their various endeavours were driven by creative ideas.

“It is time we sit down and say to ourselves, what do we really do? If you do not know you are an ideapreneur, you will let yourself down. So let’s change the way we do our business, as we need to conquer our fears,” Modupe challenges his fellow practitioners.

He noted that the PR industry is hardly recognised, and it is partly responsible for the way clients rate practitioners.One of the reasons he identified as responsible for this is the proliferation of quacks, which is fallout of the porous entry barrier into the profession. “This has earned the profession a depressing image,” he added.

The TPT boss however called on the NIPR to take bold steps in checkmating the activities of these quacks in order to attain development in the industry.

Daniel Obi