Misconceptions About Comms That Your Head of Marketing Needs to Unlearn

In this piece, we examine how comms is distinct from marketing and why it is the infrastructure that holds your company together in front of your most cherished stakeholders.

More importantly, we make the argument that treating it like a marketing support function, which we’ve seen most fresh founders in Asia do, leads to waste and a weakened brand—ultimately giving rise to the misguided sentiment that comms is a superficial nice-to-have.

The confusion runs deep, and it shows up in nine specific ways that most leadership teams don't recognise until it’s too late.

The uncertain business environment we find ourselves in today means that marketing leaders are under intense pressure to justify every dollar with measurable pipeline and revenue.

While the focus is undeniably sensible for any company, it can also create a dangerous blind spot by misinterpreting the strategic role of communications, reducing the slow, complex work of building a company's reputation to a line item in a marketing budget.

We typically preface conversations on this with a fact—your communications is the company’s core infrastructure for building trust, credibility, and authority.

In an era where trust is at a premium—as the Edelman Trust Barometer highlights—and AI search prioritises credibility and authority, a company’s reputation is its most valuable asset.

It is precisely because of this that treating comms as a marketing support function is outdated, not to mention a direct threat to long-term growth.

PR & Comms is a Luxury for Large Companies

This is the belief that strategic communications is a discretionary expense, a "nice-to-have" for when the company is bigger. For early and growth stage companies, this thinking leads to the biggest startup killer of all—a lack of clarity.

You're competing for capital against thousands of other startups offering a similar product or service. You're trying to attract diverse talent from around the world to help you scale. You're also navigating complex regulatory and commercial environments.

A lack of understanding of strategic communications will lead to unfocused messaging, missed relationships and commercial opportunities, and reactive stakeholder engagement. It will also lead to a lack of clarity internally because every brilliant mind on your team has a different interpretation of what the company stands for, who they are serving, and what the product or service means to its users.

Take this from people who make a living helping companies stay clear and on-message—this is a recipe for disaster.

This is why it’s important to reframe comms from a cost to an investment in de-risking the business. Early investment in narrative development, stakeholder communications strategy, and executive positioning builds the credibility required to attract talent, secure partnerships, and navigate market entry, long before a large marketing budget is feasible.

Comms & PR are About Awareness

This is perhaps the most insidious misconception, conflating the job of advertising with the job of communications. Awareness is getting someone’s attention. Brand equity is giving them a reason to remember you and, more importantly, to trust you.

If you don't give people a reason to believe in your brand, it doesn't matter that you got their attention for five seconds with an ad.

True strategic communications is about building a defensible reputation that makes marketing more efficient. It ensures that when your marketing campaigns reach people, they are met with recognition and trust, not skepticism and shrugs.

In a world saturated with content, trust is an invaluable currency, which is why comms is so much more than marketing.

PR That Doesn’t Lead directly to Revenue is Useless

This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how B2B buyers make decisions. Communications rarely drives direct, last-click attribution. Its role is to create the conditions for sales to happen more easily. As McKinsey’s research points out, brand is a critical factor in B2B growth, influencing decisions long before a buyer ever speaks to sales or customer success, or sees marketing.

Think about the last significant enterprise purchase you made. You probably read articles, saw the company's CEO speak, and noticed it was named a top workplace. None of these are "leads," but together they build a powerful case for trust.

Elsewhere, research has also shown that a strong brand can create significant value, especially in B2B contexts, by reducing perceived risk for customers.

This is why it’s critical to take a broader view when measuring communications and looking through the lens of broad business impact and not just traditional marketing metrics.

Does it shorten the sales cycle? Does it improve your win rate against competitors? Did it help you attract the right talent? These are revenue-enabling outcomes even if they don't show up in a typical marketing dashboard.

And if you’re wondering how you should structure your comms success metrics for the best impact, reach out for a chat with us today.

Comms is a Support Function to Marketing

When comms is parked under marketing, it's often relegated to a tactical function, and in some cases even a simple "press release factory,” serving campaign goals rather than broader business strategy.

But that cannot be further from the truth, especially at a time when the information landscape has gotten so complex, and when trust in corporations and business leaders is at an all-time low.

The remit of communications is far wider than just the customer, and communications is a C-suite function because it manages the company's reputation across all stakeholders: investors, regulators, employees, and partners. Marketing owns the customer journey, but communications owns the company's entire universe of relationships.

A strong comms function provides the overarching narrative that gives marketing campaigns coherence and credibility.

Earned Media is everything

There is definitely an obsession in certain circles with earned media coverage, and while we’re happy to see the work of media relations receive the recognition it deserves, we’re not going to pretend that like any obsession, it can get unhealthy.

For starters, companies’ obsession with media coverage ignores the reality of how audiences consume information today. While a single media hit could become a moment, a cohesive presence across multiple platforms becomes a narrative.

We’re huge believers that true authority is built by consistently sharing valuable insights through channels you control, and that a truly integrated approach across paid, earned, and owned is how brands should do that.

Use owned media (blogs, whitepapers, socials) to build your thought leadership foundation and engage your users, and paid media to amplify your message, all of which makes your earned media efforts more effective.

All PR Metrics Should Be Measurable Immediately

This fallacy stems from applying short-term marketing metrics to a long-term strategic function. Reputation, trust, and authority are built over years, not quarters. While certain activities like media coverage have immediate outputs, the most valuable outcomes are lagging indicators of sustained effort—for instance, becoming the go-to industry spokesperson.

Demanding immediate ROI from a comms strategy or activity is like planting a tree and digging it up every week to see if the roots are growing.

So how should PR be measured, if not immediately? For starters, implementing a measurement framework that distinguishes between outputs, out-takes, and outcomes, as advocated by industry standards like the AMEC Barcelona Principles 3.0, would be a good place to begin.

Track short-term outputs, but measure success by long-term shifts in perception, share of voice, and inbound interest from high-value stakeholders.

All PR Metrics should Be simple

The desire for a single, simple "PR value" has led the industry to the use of discredited vanity metrics like Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE). These metrics are misleading because they conflate the cost of space with the value of credibility. Effective measurement is often complex because it needs to be tailored to specific business goals, and measuring what matters is harder than measuring what's easy, although it's the only way to know if your efforts are actually working.

Our recommendation is to always work with your comms lead to develop a bespoke measurement dashboard that connects communications activities to specific business outcomes. This could include metrics like share of voice on key topics, message pull-through in coverage, or the percentage of inbound leads from target accounts who have been exposed to your thought leadership.

Again, if you’re having trouble figuring out how to set up success metrics for your comms function or activities, reach out to us today for a complimentary audit.

Media Relationships Get You Coverage

This one is absolutely wrong, and also damaging. We've seen more times than we care to count, founders who believe that because they play golf with an editor-in-chief, that their non-story is guaranteed front-page real estate. And it’s categorically wrong.

A journalist's primary obligation is to their readers and the public, not their sources. Pitching a non-story doesn't just demonstrate to them how little you respect their profession and integrity. It also damages your credibility as a spokesperson and business leader.

The real skill in media relations isn't knowing what a reporter’s favourite wine is or their children’s names, and no amount of “wining and dining” will help if you don’t know how to make a story out of your company’s news.

The real reason you hire PR professionals is because they put in the hours to understand what a reporter considers newsworthy, and tailoring a story angle specifically for their readers.

Great comms professionals don't "leverage relationships". Instead, they earn coverage by providing valuable, relevant, and timely information to reporters they follow and read.

comms must control the final story

Again, more times than we care to count, founders and executives have lamented the way they were featured in broad trend pieces or long-form features. We’ve always prioritised educating companies we work with on the nature of earned media, because we see such a massive misunderstanding of what it is.

A credible journalist's job is to provide an independent, balanced perspective, not to write you an ad on Bloomberg.

Expecting to control every detail of how your spokesperson’s quotes are used and how your company is positioned, is unrealistic and undermines the very third-party credibility you seek from media coverage. Reporters are also wary of such spokespeople and companies, and tend to withdraw from the relationship after as they perceive such behaviour, rightfully, as disrespectful.

What we can control is your message discipline and the clarity in your communication. Always be prepared to provide accurate, incisive information, compelling data, and articulate spokespeople that have been trained to represent the company and deliver its key messages across contexts.

Understand that your key messages will be one part of a larger story that includes industry context, competitive analysis, and third-party perspectives. Success here is earning the right to participate in an industry conversation as a legitimate thought leader, and is never about putting out an advertisement—for that, you’ll always have marketing.

A Partnership, Not a Power Struggle

When a company's leadership understands these distinctions, the entire dynamic shifts. Communications stops being a support function and becomes a strategic partner to every function.

Marketing is freed up to do what it does best—drive activation and growth—secure in the knowledge that it's building on a solid foundation of trust and credibility.

When these two functions work in true partnership, a core company narrative provides the strategic air cover for marketing's ground game. The company speaks with one voice, and the slow, patient work of building trust makes every marketing dollar, every sales call, and every product launch more effective.