Why every PR professional must possess psychological skills in their career

Why every PR professional must possess psychological skills in their career

Every profession that deals with people, the public, or third parties must have psychological skills and not only PR professionals. Humans cannot be studied and that is why there is no theory to predict human behavior. Humans can change at any time and this is the problem most organizations face all the time. If you do not study how humans think, how they act, and how they react to circumstances, you might tend to give up or become upset with them especially when you are a PR professional for a firm. 

Being a PR for an organization, one of your roles is to be able to persuade the public to buy into the thoughts and ideas of the organization. You should relate with the public in a way that your words, your writings, and your communication with them would also achieve the purpose you intend for your organization. This is why you need psychological skills for this profession. Even I who didn’t not specialize fully in public relations but just strategic communication, had to read psychology and human development in one of my semesters.

As a PR, you are not just there to connect the organization to its public but also to manage a crisis when it comes up. That is crisis management and that role requires a lot of psychological skills. Assuming a mistake from your organization that is into food production has caused food poisoning through some of their products and that everyone knows is accidental. How would you go out there to defend and maintain the reputation and integrity of your organization? Is it just by writing press releases, going to the media houses, or what? All the mentioned are recommended solutions but if you do these things without applying psychology, trust me humans would not be moved to trust whatever you are saying. Your organization has already caused harm to the public and all you can do is to say sorry and that the products have been withdrawn from the market and investigations are being conducted? That is an average PR, to be frank. I am going to give some reasons why you need psychological skills in the PR career.

The first reason is to be able to craft compelling narratives that would easily persuade the public. Just like journalism, public relations is also about storytelling. How would you tell your story to persuade some group of people as compared to what other PR professionals would do? Some PRs think once they deliver what their organizations expect them to deliver to the public, they are done with their roles but that is a big no! You must make sure whatever message you are carrying achieves its purpose before you can regard yourself as a successful PR. This is achievable when you integrate psychology into your storytelling. Read the minds of the people, read their next reactions, tell them their thoughts and there you are, having the public at your side. If your message is psychologically and persuasively crafted, it will resonate with the public. This could be time for defending your organization or building your brand’s reputation before the public.

Another reason is to have mastery over behavioral insights. Knowing how your audience behaves, their attitudes, and reactions is key to creating campaigns, messages, and tactics that can easily resonate with the public or audience. It is through psychology that you would know the behaviors of the various demographics of audiences. Your target audience would fall into a category of demographics and once you have used psychology to study their preferences and attitudes, every message you carry to them would have an instant effect because you have been able to figure out everything about them and you use that to communicate with them. If you don’t study psychology, you cannot use an ordinary study to know these things about people, it takes psychology to expose you to the behaviors of people. Even within your organization, if you do not apply psychology, you would not understand why some people behave in a certain way and that could irritate you or give you a different mindset. So, you see, you cannot do away with psychology in public relations.

Finally, the reason why every PR professional should have the abilities of a psychologist is to be able to relate professionally with stakeholders. Stakeholders are people who or someone “has a vested interest in a company and can either affect or be affected by a business's operations and performance. Typical stakeholders are investors, employees, customers, suppliers, communities, governments, or trade associations” according to Investopedia. So, when you are deployed to negotiate with a potential investor and you fail to read between the lines as to why he or she may be portraying certain traits to you, you might end up losing an investor for your organization. Everything about psychology is the study of human behavior, if you know how and why humans behave in a certain way, you won’t be surprised when you witness it. So, having psychological skills would aid you build good relationships with stakeholders of your organization as a PR professional.

You relate with people outside your workplace, people who are strangers, people you have no business with but for the sake of your organization, you need to be in touch with them. That is your profession and to execute this role ethically and morally right, it is always important to study the behavior of humans and that is why every PR professional must possess psychological skills.

Image made with canva.com