PANIC: A common language for branding?

Building sustainable relationships in PR is hard.

Clients like shiny objects. They grow addicted to media hits at the expense of substantive brand development. Even when media coverage is bountiful, the measurement tools we use are irrelevant, symptomatic nonsense like “clicks” and “ad-value.”

That makes PR seem like hocus-pocus, while it obscures an ugly secret: There’s no real ballast steadying most client-agency relationships other than glossy graphics of bad data and the fear inspired by the old PR-client mantra—”What have you done for me lately?”

To build lasting relationships and create potent media campaigns, communicators must begin with a keen understanding of a brand.

That might sound obvious, but there’s a vast gulf between knowing that branding is important and actually comprehending how it works. Branding seems relatively unstructured, chiefly because so much of it is about feel—hard to quantify, even harder to harness. A common language to validate branding as a discipline has for too long remained elusive.

A solution: PANIC (Purpose, Aesthetic, Narrative, Influence and Craftsmanship).