Updated June 8, 2026 · EPR Editorial Team. Originally published March 2016.
Part of EPR's Reputation Management coverage. Related: AI Communications · Crisis Communications.
Public relations is undervalued by most organizations for the same reason — it does not produce a clean, attributable line on the P&L the way paid media does. The companies that get this wrong treat PR as discretionary. The companies that get this right treat PR as core business strategy and compound the returns over years.
The signal that separates the two is simple: who in the company owns PR, and at what level does it report.
The textbook definition is the management of an organization's communication with its publics. The operating definition is broader. PR builds and protects the asset every other business function depends on — the way the company is understood by the market, the press, the analyst community, recruiting candidates, regulators, and increasingly the AI engines that now answer buyer questions before any product is searched.
When PR is treated as core business strategy, the function works closely with leadership to develop and deliver the company's message across the channels that matter most — earned media, owned channels, social, analyst briefings, speaking opportunities, and the search and answer-engine layer. The result is not a campaign. The result is a steady-state asset that shows up in customer trust, recruiting quality, valuation, and crisis resilience.
Most organizations are surprised to learn that PR is cheaper than the marketing functions it sits alongside. Direct mail, paid search, programmatic display, sponsorship, and event marketing all carry ongoing media cost. PR carries time and relationship cost — and produces earned coverage, third-party validation, and citations that paid channels cannot buy.
The cost differential is large. The trust differential is larger. A favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal does work no paid placement can replicate. The same is true for industry trade press, for analyst reports, and now for citations inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. AI engines weight earned sources far more heavily than paid placements when answering buyer queries.
Three reasons PR must be a board-level discipline, not a marketing tactic.
The audience overlaps with every other strategic function. PR's audience is the same audience recruiting, sales, investor relations, regulatory affairs, and crisis response are all trying to reach. A unified narrative across those audiences is a multiplier. A fragmented narrative is a tax.
The asset compounds. A reputation built over a decade is not duplicable by a competitor's marketing budget in a quarter. The companies that have invested consistently are insulated. The companies that have not are exposed the moment something goes wrong.
The risk is asymmetric. Crisis response, regulatory inquiries, activist short reports, executive transitions — all of them land on the company that has not built standing communications infrastructure. The cost of not having PR is invisible until it is enormous.
Three patterns repeat. PR reports to leadership, not to marketing — either a chief communications officer or a senior communications lead reports directly to the CEO or chairman. There is a calendar and a discipline — press relationships, original research, editorial cadence, speaking opportunities, and earned coverage managed with the same rigor as quarterly revenue. The function is funded through cycles, not just at peaks — companies that pulse PR up and down with the budget lose continuity, and discover during a crisis that the relationships needed to manage it were never built.
PR is one of the only business functions where the cost of doing it consistently is small and the cost of not doing it at all is large, deferred, and almost always invisible until it shows up in valuation, recruiting, or a news cycle the company cannot bend. Companies that treat PR as a line item watch competitors pull ahead in coverage, in recruiting strength, and now in AI engine visibility — and conclude they need to spend more money. They usually do not. They need to reorganize the function so it is not a line item at all.
Related coverage on Everything-PR:
A business strategy delivered through marketing channels. Companies that treat PR as a marketing tactic optimize for the next campaign. Companies that treat PR as a business strategy build narrative, reputation, and crisis resilience across years and at board level.
Paid channels carry ongoing media cost — direct mail, paid search, programmatic display, sponsorship, event marketing. PR carries time and relationship cost, and produces earned coverage and third-party validation that paid channels cannot buy.
To the CEO or chairman, through a chief communications officer or equivalent senior lead. Not two levels below marketing. The audiences PR addresses — investors, regulators, recruiting candidates, the press, AI engines — overlap with every other strategic function and require leadership-level coordination.
AI engines now answer buyer questions before any product is searched. The engines weight earned sources far more heavily than paid placements. Companies with earned coverage at scale are cited. Companies without it are invisible. PR is now the primary driver of AI engine visibility.
Invisible until it is enormous. Crisis response, regulatory inquiries, activist short reports, executive transitions, and AI engine misrepresentation all land on the company that has not built standing communications infrastructure. Related coverage on Everything-PR: Reputation Management pillar AI Communications Crisis Communications The Importance of Public Relations
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
Modeled Citation Share across 25 pet brands and 5 AI engines. Chewy #1. The Farmer's Dog #2. Mars Petcare brands cluster in the top 10. BarkBox the strongest creator-driven brand. The 2026 baseline.
The U.S. pet economy crossed $150B in 2024. Chewy, BarkBox, The Farmer's Dog, Petco, PetSmart, Mars Petcare, Nestlé Purina. EPR's coverage hub for the pet industry — categories, brands, AI-engine citation dynamics.
Sidemen, Dude Perfect, Barstool, Unwell Network, Morning Brew. Five creator holding companies indexed against the integrated vs distributed framework — the follow-up to the Beast Industries case at $5 billion.
EPR publishes the data every Wednesday.
Free. Wednesdays. Unsubscribe anytime.