This could perhaps be termed as one of the biggest PR account shift in recent times. The news doing the round is that the Nokia account, which is being handled by Text 100, is up for grabs between leading PR giants like IPAN, ICPAR, Perfect Relations, The Practice etc. Text 100 has been handling Nokia’s global account for close to a decade now. But the real twist in the tale here is that it is not Nokia that has called for a pitch. It is perhaps Text 100 that’s itself decided to let go of the Nokia account. One Text 100 insider working on the Nokia account lets go off a shocker to us, “The corporate team of Nokia over a period of time has become very demanding and difficult to manage.” The problem could also lie in the fact that the Finnish giant, which has had a dream run in India, has upped the client benchmarks with Text 100 after noticing competitor Samsung rising in market shares in 2009 with its robust value-for-money touch phones apart from an onslaught from local handset manufacturers that were slowly eating into Nokia’s entry-level market. Nokia creditably has been looking at establishing itself as not just a handset company but a service company through its Ovi offering. And with higher PR service demands from Nokia, the result was that there were far too many Text 100 personnel getting involved to service the Nokia account – and as the juice goes, some key people in the agency over the last couple of years had started to feel that the returns were no longer good.
But one also gets information that the current move could be purely because recently, the public relations firm had signed up globally with the Samsung account (the entire consumer electronics division including the handset division), which was being handled by Integral previously. This also fits well with the ethical rules of the game in the PR industry, as Shikha Ghosh, President ICPAR shares, “It’s quite compliant in good corporate governance for a telecommunication giant to choose not to work with a PR agency expected to handle a competitor’s business – and vice versa too.” Well, it’s the PR industry, and everybody knows that there’s only a thin line between public relations and crisis management... and we’ve not even started talking about relations management, eh!
But one also gets information that the current move could be purely because recently, the public relations firm had signed up globally with the Samsung account (the entire consumer electronics division including the handset division), which was being handled by Integral previously. This also fits well with the ethical rules of the game in the PR industry, as Shikha Ghosh, President ICPAR shares, “It’s quite compliant in good corporate governance for a telecommunication giant to choose not to work with a PR agency expected to handle a competitor’s business – and vice versa too.” Well, it’s the PR industry, and everybody knows that there’s only a thin line between public relations and crisis management... and we’ve not even started talking about relations management, eh!
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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).
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