From left: Sarah Walker-Kerr, Katerina Dixon, Derryn French, Sarah Omolewu, Vivienne Gan and Shona Mac Sweeney.
Where should the PR function sit within the hotel? Is it part of marketing or sales, or neither?
Vivienne Gan: A lot of the changes mean PR is merging more towards marketing, which I’m not certain is a good thing. I guess it depends where the boundaries are defined. To some of the directors of sales and marketing and GMs out there it’s one and the same — PR and marketing.
That’s a shift that I’m not too keen on but I also attribute it to the fact that I’ve been in this business for quite a number of years and because of that I see that people in sales start as sales executives, sales managers, director of sales and then suddenly, they become DOSM, so where does that come in? They look at the PR person and say ‘you’re the catch all-marketing person’. That is a little bit worrying.
KD: It’s still happening. All of us are doing PR, sponsorship, events, and marketing altogether, whereas in various blue chip companies you have much more defined roles. Here we pretty much do it all.
DF: At the same time I do think there’s a strong argument for having them combined. I would never do a marketing campaign without a PR campaign; I would never do a PR campaign without a marketing campaign.
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Everything I find in my business works hand-in-hand. I guess it depends on your business, there are some corporates that like communication to be completely separate from marketing, but I think that the way forward is very much a combination of the two.
KD: I think it depends on the complex of the property. The more properties you have obviously the more people you have to manage, you have to have very defined roles for online, social media these days — digital marketing overall.
DF: Absolutely, within there you need to have your e-commerce manager, potentially your PR manager, marketing manager, but I think the roles need to work hand-in-hand.
SO: I think it depends on what you’re promoting as well. For our F&B outlets it’s definitely hand-in-hand and the PR budget almost has more money or the equivalent as the actual marketing budget behind a particular campaign.
For the hotel, the focus is mainly on marketing with the support coming from the PR. They are becoming something that is one and the same.
KD: Do you think it is more focused on sponsorships as well? We have a lot of big projects with third parties involved. It’s about going out and not only talking to media but talking to corporate companies as well.
Almost you are overlooking a sales person because we are trying to speak to some of the same contact people as our sales team. We are trying to obviously leverage that partnership positioning and see what we can do together with our corporate branding opportunities.
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