Is PR Important? Why Public Relations Matters

Part of EPR's Public Relations coverage. Canonical pillar by Ronn Torossian: What Is Public Relations? · Master hub: Public Relations: The Definitive Guide.

Yes. Public relations is the discipline of building, defending, and compounding the way a company is talked about — by reporters, customers, investors, employees, regulators, and the public. Companies that treat PR as a business function compound brand equity over decades. Companies that treat it as a discretionary marketing line lose the narrative the moment something goes wrong.

Edited on Jul 1, 2026.

The Fact Block

• What PR is: The earned discipline that builds reputation, manages crisis, and shapes public understanding of a brand, person, or institution.
• What it produces: Press coverage, third-party credibility, narrative continuity, crisis resilience, and standing relationships with reporters, editors, and analysts.
• Why it matters: Buyers, talent, investors, and regulators trust third-party endorsement in a way they never trust paid advertising.
• The cost of not having it: Lower valuation, weaker recruiting, slower sales cycles, and no relationships to call on when a crisis hits.
• The mistake most companies make: Funding PR as a campaign expense instead of a continuous investment.

Why PR Matters More Than Marketing Alone

Marketing buys attention. PR earns it. A paid ad reaches the audience the company pays to reach. An article in a credible outlet reaches the same audience and arrives with the endorsement of the publication that ran it.

That endorsement is what companies cannot manufacture. It is the reason a feature in a major business publication still moves valuation in a way ten times the ad spend does not. The two functions sit beside each other. They are not interchangeable.

The Five Things PR Builds That Nothing Else Builds

• Third-party credibility. A reporter, an analyst, or an editor saying it carries weight a brand cannot say about itself.
• Narrative continuity. A consistent story across years, told the same way in good cycles and bad. The companies with continuity weather crisis. The companies without it get rewritten by whoever shows up first.
• Crisis relationships. The reporter who takes the call at 11 p.m. is the reporter who has been called for two years on quieter stories. Relationships are not built in the middle of a crisis. They are spent.
• Talent and recruiting. Candidates read about the company before they apply. The companies in the press attract the candidates in the search. The companies that are silent compete on salary alone.
• Valuation and investor confidence. Public companies and pre-IPO companies trade on narrative as much as on numbers. A clean press footprint is part of the diligence story. So is the absence of one.

Define the Audience Before Spending a Dollar on PR

PR can capture new leads. Those leads mean little if the brand audience has not been defined. The audience is the inheritance the brand builds on every quarter — the people who already understand it, defend it when it is attacked, and spread it without being asked.

Companies that use PR purely as an acquisition channel underperform companies that use PR to deepen the relationship with the audience they already have. Both matter. Define the audience first.

Diversify the Content

A reporter at a trade publication does not want the same pitch as a national business editor. A podcaster does not want the same pitch as a wire reporter. Each outlet has its own beat, its own audience, its own format. The PR program that pitches one message to every outlet is the program editors notice for the wrong reasons.

The discipline is to know the outlet, know the reporter, and shape the story for the audience that outlet serves. The companies that respect the outlet get covered. The companies that do not get filtered.

Build a Steady Cadence of Positive Content

Critical coverage is part of business. The answer is not silence. The answer is volume.

Every company that has been through a sustained reputation issue has experienced the moment when search results return a few negative pieces near the top. The fix is not to argue with the negative pieces. The fix is to build enough original, factual, useful content that a balanced picture of the company is what a buyer encounters when they search.

This is not about silencing criticism. It is about building a sufficient body of legitimate content that the company's actual story is part of the record.

Treat PR as an Investment, Not an Expense

PR does not produce a line on the P&L the way ad spend does. That is the most common reason it gets underfunded — and the most common reason companies lose the narrative when something goes wrong.

Companies that fund PR as an investment compound brand recognition, talent acquisition, customer trust, and crisis resilience over years. Companies that fund PR as a discretionary expense run sharp campaigns when they have budget, lose continuity when they don't, and discover during a crisis that the relationships needed to manage it were never built.

The companies that get this right do not have to scramble. The ones that do not get it right never realize what compounded against them until the gap shows up in valuation, recruiting, or a news cycle they cannot bend.

The Bottom Line

PR is one of the cheapest forms of long-term equity a company can build. The cost of doing it well is small. The cost of not doing it at all is large, deferred, and almost always invisible until the moment it shows up.