By Anil Sharma, Founder, ThinkQue Consulting
We built ThinkQue on a deliberately unfashionable idea, that press coverage is the smallest part of what communication is for.
People sometimes assume a communications firm is really a media firm. Get the coverage, count the clips, send the report at the end of the month. For a long time that was much of the industry, and honestly a good deal of it still is. When I started ThinkQue, I wanted to build something with a different centre of gravity.
Media matters, and I want to be fair to it. Placement, relationships, timing and judgment about the press are real craft, and we take pride in doing them well. But in almost every engagement I have led, coverage is maybe a fifth of the value we actually create. The rest is judgment. What position should this business take. Which stakeholders genuinely decide its future. What should it say when the stakes are high, and just as often, what should it be disciplined enough not to say. When to move, and when to wait.
None of that is media work. It is strategy work that happens to express itself, some of the time, through media.
This is why we built ThinkQue across domains rather than around a press desk. Reputation, brand, marketing, sustainability, social impact and advisory sit together, not because a longer list of services is a better business model, but because a leader’s real questions do not respect those boundaries. A reputation question is usually a sustainability question is usually a stakeholder question. Advise on one silo in isolation and you will miss the picture that connects them.
The clients who get the most from us are the ones who bring us the business problem rather than the press brief. What are we trying to become. Whose trust do we actually need. Where are we quietly exposed. Answer those questions well and the coverage tends to take care of itself. Answer only the question of coverage and you can spend an entire budget without moving the business an inch.
Media is 20 percent of the work. The other 80 percent is the reason the 20 percent is worth anything at all.
Bring us the business problem, not the press brief. That is where the value has always been.