Authored By : Varun Aggarwal, Associate Vice President, Business & Strategy, PRP Group
For a long time, PR was treated like plumbing. You called us when the pipe burst, or when a launch needed a press release pushed out by Friday. That version of the industry is gone, and good riddance. Reputation today isn't a service you hire. It's an asset you build, and like any asset, it has structure.
I've sat across the table from enough founders and CMOs now to notice a pattern. Most founders I've worked with don't treat PR as one thing you switch on before a launch and off after. Good PR looks more like a building: foundation first, then the load-bearing pieces, then whatever finishing work makes it all look effortless. The bad version usually traces back to one decision, someone bets everything on a single layer, usually media hits, and can't figure out later why nothing holds up.
The brands actually winning the trust war right now, the ones investors back, the ones journalists call back, the ones people defend in comment sections when things go sideways, have built out all five layers, not just one. Skip a layer and the rest starts to wobble no matter how much you spend. Get all five right, and the effort compounds in ways that are hard to fake and even harder to copy.
Start with narrative, because everything else depends on it. This is where most founder conversations begin, and where most of them go wrong on the first try. A narrative isn't a tagline or an “About Us” paragraph. It's the answer to a harder question: why does the world need you to exist, and why now? Nail the story, the voice, the positioning, and every layer after this gets cheaper to build. Miss it, and you'll spend years paying journalists to explain a version of you that never quite lands.
Once that's settled, the next question is where it should actually live. Coverage isn't a goal. Coverage in the right places, in front of the right people, at the right moment in your company's arc, that's a goal. A pre-IPO company doesn't need lifestyle features; it needs the financial press to understand its unit economics. A challenger D2C brand doesn't need a Forbes cover; it needs ten thoughtful pieces in the publications its customers actually read. Media strategy is knowing the difference, and having the discipline to pass on coverage that looks good but does nothing.
Underneath the media hits sits a layer most agencies undersell, and the one that does the quietest work: the content engine. Op-eds. Founder bylines. LinkedIn posts. Podcast appearances. Internal notes that never see the outside world. None of this belongs on a retainer sheet as a line item to tick off, it's what makes the narrative feel true rather than announced. I've seen smaller-budget brands outperform bigger-budget competitors on this alone, simply by publishing more often and thinking harder about what they put out.
Get this right for long enough and something else starts happening: influence. Not follower counts, something closer to pull in rooms you're not even standing in. An analyst quotes your data in a report. A founder you helped once vouches for you on a panel without being asked. A policymaker references something your team put in front of them months earlier. None of it is glamorous, and most of it looks like generosity long before it looks like strategy.
And underneath all of it has to sit measurement. For years, our industry got away with vanity metrics: AVE, impressions, clipping books nobody read. Boards have wised up. Measurement today means linking activity to shifts in share of voice, sentiment movement, inbound deal flow, recruitment signals, even valuation conversations. If you can't show the line between the work and the outcome, you don't have a programme. You have an expense.
The reason these layers matter is simple. Reputation isn't built in the moments people are watching. It's built in the long stretches when no one is, through choices that compound. A founder who treats narrative as a quarterly task, content as outsourced filler, and measurement as an afterthought will eventually run a campaign that flops, and won't understand why.
Modern PR isn't about being loud. It's about being legible to the right people, in the right order, with proof at every layer.
That's the architecture. Everything else is decoration.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and theprpost.com does not necessarily subscribe to it.
