Why Most PR Doesn’t Work - And What To Do About It
Recent brands Roar Studios have supported from left to right : Jo Vodka, Lights4fun and Megadeth Beer
Ask most brand owners what they think of PR and you'll get one of two answers. Either it works brilliantly and they can't imagine running a marketing programme without it, or they've tried it, found it underwhelming, and quietly deprioritised it in favour of channels they can measure.
The gap between those two experiences almost always comes down to the same thing: structure.
The Version Of PR That Doesn’t Work
Most brands that have been disappointed by PR have experienced the same pattern. An agency is appointed. A retainer begins. Press releases go out - product launches, seasonal announcements, the occasional thought leadership piece. Coverage appears occasionally. The monthly report documents placements. And then, at renewal time, someone in the business asks the question that the agency dreads: what has this actually done for us?
The honest answer, in this version of PR, is: not much that we can demonstrate. Visibility is hard to attribute. The placements haven't obviously moved anything. And the relationship with the agency has gradually become a reporting exercise rather than a strategic partnership.
This is not a PR problem. This is what happens when PR is treated as a tactical broadcast channel rather than a strategic programme.
What PR Is Actually For
When PR is built properly, it operates across the full customer journey - not just the top of the funnel.
At the awareness end, it builds the kind of brand recognition that paid advertising struggles to generate: the sense that a brand is genuinely present and credible in its category, rather than just buying attention. At the consideration stage, editorial coverage in trusted publications provides third-party validation that no amount of owned content can replicate. And at the conversion end (an area most people don't associate with PR at all) product placement in gift guides, seasonal round-ups and editorial recommendations drives direct purchase intent in a way that feels organic rather than promotional.
Effective PR also connects to every other part of the marketing mix. Media placements generate high-authority backlinks that compound SEO performance over time. Editorial coverage provides content that fuels social and email programmes. And the authority that consistent PR builds makes paid media more effective, audiences who have already encountered a brand in credible editorial contexts convert at higher rates.
The Structural Problem - And Its Solution
The reason most PR underdelivers is the absence of architecture. A programme without structure looks like this: visibility that spikes and disappears, media relationships that never deepen, a narrative that shifts depending on who last sent a release, and no way to demonstrate commercial contribution.
The solution is a two-layer model: an always-on foundation that maintains consistent media presence week-by-week, running alongside campaign moments that create the bigger spikes of visibility when they're commercially and culturally appropriate. The always-on layer means that campaigns land into a media landscape that's already warm, rather than having to build from cold every time.
This is the model we've built our practice around at Roar. It's the approach that's generated over 5,000 editorial features for a single client in three years, earned three consecutive industry awards, and produced work for brands ranging from a leading UK home retailer to Jo Malone CBE's Jo Vodka.
PR that works isn't complicated. But it does need to be built. If you'd like to understand what that looks like in practice, the full guide is below.