‘Good strategic communication is critical for business success’

Last week, e4m hosted the 4th edition of the annual e4m PR & Corp Comm 40 Under 40 Summit and Awards 2022 in Gurugram. At the conference, Atul Ahluwalia, Founding Partners, First Partners, delivered the keynote address.

Ahluwalia opened his address by talking about the challenges that millennials of today will be facing going forward when they take up leadership roles in the industry. He said, “The first challenge is the fact that India is a shining star today - therefore the big task at hand is to take Indian PR global in terms of the standards of our practice. I do not completely agree that PR is a lot of media and hence we need to elevate the function of PR itself. Besides reputation building, we must work aggressively in helping build our client’s business. We have to be a CXO function and thus you need to play a very important role. Good strategic communication is absolutely critical for business success and that is something you have to prove.” 

Further speaking about the challenges for the next set of PR Leadership, Ahluwalia talked about addressing the PR industry’s role towards climate change. He said millennials need to take climate change seriously.

Talking about the importance of the surroundings and the conversations happening, Ahluwalia said, “Don’t be blinkered about what your organisation has to say, also look at what are the other conversations happening around and the key chatter. Look at how your narrative can be more elevated. More critically, you have to have a more elevated track that will add to nation-building and not just organisation-building. That is when PR is going to be taken very seriously and you have the onus to take ahead.”

The final set of challenges that lie ahead for the millennials in PR today, according to Ahluwalia, is going to be the adaption of evolving tech and the lack of good talent. He elaborated, “My generation was more tuned to traditional media and we have tried to adopt digital as well, but you will have to take up more technologies like metaverse and many others. And the last one that is necessary is talent. How is Indian PR industry can take global centre stage? That is going to take more support and talent. You can only attract the best talent if you are doing great work yourself.”