Brand PR: How to Increase Brand Visibility, Trust and Memorability

In crowded consumer categories, many purchases are shaped before anyone reaches a shelf or a search bar. Shoppers buy the brands that come to mind first, that they have heard good things about, and that they can picture clearly. Brand public relations is the discipline that works on all three at once: it builds visibility (being seen in the places your buyers already pay attention to), trust (being vouched for by journalists, creators and customers rather than by your own adverts) and memorability (being recognisable enough that the next shopping trip, search or recommendation goes your way). This guide sets out how that work is done, what separates campaigns that move sales from campaigns that generate a coverage book, and how to track the link between visibility and growth.

What brand public relations actually covers

Brand PR is often confused with product PR or corporate PR. They overlap, but the jobs are different.

• Product PR promotes a specific launch or range: reviews, round-ups, samples, listings support. It is tactical and usually time-boxed.
• Corporate PR protects the company behind the brand: financial results, leadership, policy, crisis response.
• Brand PR builds the long-term associations people hold about the brand itself: what it stands for, who it is for, why it is likeable, and what makes it instantly recognisable. It uses earned media, creator partnerships, owned content, events and experiences, and it is measured over quarters and years rather than weeks.

In practice the strongest programmes run all three from a single plan, because a product story is the easiest way to earn brand coverage and a corporate reputation is what keeps brand coverage positive. We built our consumer PR work on that basis: press office, campaigns, creators and content are planned together against one set of objectives rather than bought as separate line items.

Visibility, trust and memorability are three different jobs

Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow, from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, calls the third outcome mental availability: the propensity of a brand to be thought of in buying situations, built mainly through distinctive, consistently used brand assets. For a PR team the implication is simple: coverage that does not carry the brand's distinctive assets, its name, its look, its one-line idea, is coverage that builds the category rather than the brand.

Brand storytelling: one idea, repeated until it sticks

Storytelling in brand PR is not a matter of writing a nicer press release. It is deciding on the one idea you want to own in people's heads, then finding an endless supply of ways to tell it that journalists and creators will choose to carry.

A workable brand story has four properties:

1. It is rooted in a real audience tension. The research phase should surface something your buyers feel but nobody in the category has articulated. For Interflora, research-led storytelling framed Mother's Day as "the hardest job in the world", which gave the campaign a point of view rather than a promotion. The published case study reports a +9% like-for-like sales and +26% sentiment uplift alongside the coverage.
2. It survives translation. The same idea has to work as a national news story, a 30-second creator video, a shelf wobbler and a line in a buyer presentation. If it only works as a 1,500-word feature it is a feature, not a brand story.
3. It carries the distinctive assets. Name, colour, pack shape, character, strapline or sound. Whatever people use to recognise you must be present in the story itself, not added in the boilerplate.
4. It can carry a whole programme. Primula's "Don't Ask Why, Just Try" campaign ran one brand idea through research stories, a chef partnership and a cookbook, and the case study records a +62% increase in online mentions (it also records that total coverage came in below target, which is the kind of detail we would rather publish than hide).

We have written more on the craft of storytelling in PR, but the strategic point matters more than the craft: brands that change their story every campaign are paying to build memory structures they then abandon.

Share of voice: the visibility metric that predicts growth

Share of voice is your proportion of the total coverage and conversation in your category over a given period, measured against an agreed set of competitors. It is the single most useful visibility measure in brand PR because it is relative: a 20% increase in your coverage means nothing if the category grew 40%.

The reason share of voice matters commercially comes from Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis of the IPA Databank. Brands whose share of voice exceeds their share of market tend to grow, and brands whose share of voice falls below their market share tend to shrink. They call the gap "excess share of voice", and the commonly cited rule of thumb from their work is that every 10 points of excess share of voice is associated with roughly 0.5 points of annual market share growth for consumer brands. Their Media in Focus report for the IPA revisits these findings for the current media landscape, including the question of whether unpaid media makes paid redundant (their answer is no; the two work together). For a challenger brand, earned media is a way to add share of voice beyond what the paid budget alone buys.

Three practical rules for measuring it:

• Measure earned media and social conversation separately. They behave differently and are won with different tactics.
• Weight for quality. A national feature with your spokesperson quoted and a link is not equal to a passing mention in a listicle. Our PR audit framework sets out how we tier coverage and track message pull-through alongside raw volume.
• Fix the competitor set at the start and do not change it to flatter the numbers.

Earned media and the ability to attract publicity

Earned media is still the core of brand public relations because it does something paid channels cannot: a third party chooses to talk about you. That choice is what transfers trust. The question for a brand manager is therefore not "how do we get coverage?" but "what about our brand makes a journalist, producer or editor want to cover it?" The ability to attract publicity is a property of the brand and its stories, not just of the agency's contacts book.

Brands that attract publicity consistently tend to have five things in place:

1. A point of view. Editors cover brands that say something. "We make great cheese" is not a story; a hypothetical "half of British households cook the same seven meals on rotation, and here is the data" is.
2. A steady supply of proof. Original research, sales data, expert spokespeople, customer stories. Mr Porky earned 202 pieces of coverage including 15 broadcast pieces by setting out to prove that pork scratchings make beer taste better. The proof was the asset; the coverage followed.
3. Speed. Reactive opportunities often close within hours. Taking them requires pre-approved spokespeople, messaging that has already been agreed and a team that is watching. Our media relations team runs this as a standing process rather than an occasional favour.
4. Something to photograph or film. Broadcast and social coverage depend on visuals. Black Sheep's Respire launch centred on a physical venue, The Breathe Inn, and the case study reports that 85% of social engagement came from non-core cask drinkers, the audience the brand needed to reach.
5. Consistency. A press office that is active every month compounds. Sealy's press office went from a quiet retainer to 224 pieces of coverage, up 115%, with an always-on programme rather than launch-only activity.

Earned coverage also has a second life. Linked coverage in authoritative titles supports search visibility, and the same articles can be the sources that generative answer engines draw on when someone asks which brand to buy. That is why our digital PR and generative engine optimisation work is planned from the same earned media programme, and why we track what AI assistants say about our clients' brands alongside traditional coverage.

Creators and content: extend the story, do not fragment it

Creator partnerships are now part of brand PR rather than an adjacent channel, and for good reason: a creator's recommendation can carry third-party trust much as editorial does, usually with a clearly defined audience. The common mistake is to run creators as a separate workstream with separate briefs, separate timings and separate metrics, so the brand ends up telling two half-stories.

Our approach is to run press and creator work as one campaign against a single set of objectives. The brand idea, the proof points and the visual assets are shared; what changes is the format and the voice. Primula's festive campaign is a straightforward example: it paired national press with creator content from Poppy Cooks, reaching 4M+ people through coverage and 229K through influencer content, with one brand idea across both.

Four things to get right:

• Select on audience fit, not follower count. We do not count follower numbers as a result, and we would not pick a creator on them either. Look at who actually engages and whether they buy in your category.
• Brief the idea, not the script. Creators keep their audience by sounding like themselves. Give them the brand idea, the non-negotiables and the proof, then let them make it.
• Track to an action. Tracked links, codes or landing pages, so creator activity can be reported in the same framework as everything else. Our influencer marketing work is set up this way from the contract stage.
• Make the content work twice. With rights agreed up front, creator content becomes owned social content, retail media assets and sales deck material. Our in-house video team, led by Andy Ireland, shoots with the same intent, producing assets that feed press, social and the brand's own channels.

Owned content: the home the coverage points back to

Earned and creator activity generate attention; owned content converts it. A brand that earns a national feature and sends readers to a thin product page has done half a job. Owned content in a brand PR programme should do three things: hold the full version of the brand story, give journalists and AI systems something citable (data, expert commentary, clear definitions), and give buyers a next step. The Primula cookbook, with 2,963 page views attributed to the campaign, is a small example of a destination built so that coverage had somewhere useful to land. Our content marketing work exists largely to build those destinations.

Tracking the link between visibility and growth

This is where most brand PR programmes are weakest, and where a marketing director should push hardest. Coverage volume and reach are context, not results. AMEC's Barcelona Principles 3.0 state plainly that advertising value equivalents are not the value of communication, and its Integrated Evaluation Framework calls for transparent, outcome-focused measurement. Our own reporting uses four levels drawn from that framework. We measure against it in-house, using our AMEC-aligned proINSIGHTS approach, and we do not include AVEs in reporting.

A few practical points on making the chain visible:

• Branded search is the cleanest early signal. If visibility is working, more people type your name into Google in the weeks after activity.
• Report sales alongside everything else that was running. Cartwright & Butler's Christmas campaign coincided with +8% sales in the key period, 78 pieces of coverage and 49 direct links; a figure like this should be reported as a contribution, with the other activity in the period noted, rather than claimed as sole credit.
• Describe listings as supported, not caused. Our Primula press office work supported a Morrisons listing for new product development. Coverage gave the sales team a story to take to the buyer; the buyer still had to say yes.
• Agree the measures before the campaign, not after. If the objective is consideration among a new audience, the sentiment and audience-composition data has to be set up from day one. Audience-composition figures such as Black Sheep's 85% non-core engagement only exist if the tracking is set up from the start.

For a longer treatment of the method, see how to measure the success of your PR activity.

What to look for in a brand PR agency

If you are briefing an agency for this kind of work, the questions below separate brand-building programmes from coverage factories.

1. Do they start with the audience or with the media list? Ask what research they would do before proposing a single idea. Our Create, Engage, Convert framework begins with defining the real challenge using data and audience insight, and we would rather spend the first weeks on that than on a launch stunt nobody remembers.
2. Can one team run press, creators, content and video together? Separate agencies for each produce separate stories. We keep PR, social, content, creative and video in one team of around 25 to 28 people in Leeds, which is what makes a single brand idea practical to execute across every channel.
3. How do they report? Ask to see a real report. If the headline number is reach or AVE, keep looking. If it shows share of voice against named competitors, branded search, referrals and the commercial measures you care about, with honest caveats where attribution is shared, that is the standard to hold them to.
4. What does their work look like over 12 months, not 12 weeks? Brand PR compounds. Our Growth Catalyst programme is built for sustained awareness and demand in crowded consumer categories, with a six to twelve month roadmap, while Launch Ignition handles the tease, announce, amplify and sustain phases of a new product so that launch visibility is not wasted.
5. Can they protect what they build? Visibility raises the stakes of a reputational problem. Ask who handles a crisis and whether they have done it for consumer brands. Our crisis work is led personally by Chris Norton, and as a Worldcom Public Relations Group member we can bring in vetted partner agencies if an issue crosses borders.
6. Have they been recognised by peers for the kind of work you need? Awards are not results, but they are a reasonable proxy for craft. Our CIPR PRide Gold for Best Use of Content for Black Sheep and the PRCA Dare Grand Prix Digital and Social Media Award both came from integrated consumer brand campaigns of the type described in this article.

A short checklist for the next planning cycle

• Write down the one idea you want the brand to be remembered for. If it takes more than a sentence, it is not ready.
• Audit your distinctive assets and check they appear in your coverage, not just your adverts.
• Set a share of voice target against a fixed competitor set, measured for earned and social separately.
• Build a 12-month calendar of proof: research, data releases, spokespeople, seasonal hooks and reactive opportunities.
• Brief press and creators from the same document.
• Agree the four levels of measurement, including the business impact you will report, before any activity starts.

Frequently asked questions

What is brand public relations?

Brand public relations is the use of earned media, creator partnerships, owned content and experiences to build what people think and remember about a brand over the long term. It differs from product PR, which promotes individual launches, and corporate PR, which protects the company. Its three outcomes are visibility, trust and memorability, and it is measured against business results such as share of voice, branded search, sentiment, distribution and sales.

How is brand PR different from advertising?

Advertising is a message you pay to place and control. Brand PR earns third-party endorsement: a journalist, broadcaster, creator or customer chooses to talk about you. That choice is what builds trust, and it adds share of voice beyond what the paid budget alone buys, which is why challenger brands lean on it.

How long does brand PR take to show results?

Output measures such as coverage and share of voice move first; outcome measures such as branded search and referral traffic follow; impact measures such as awareness, consideration, distribution and sales take longest. That is why our Launch Ignition programme measures the first three to six months of a launch and Growth Catalyst plans against a six to twelve month roadmap.

What is excess share of voice and why does it matter?

Excess share of voice is the gap between a brand's share of category voice and its share of category market. Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis of IPA Databank cases finds that brands with positive excess share of voice tend to gain market share and those with negative excess share of voice tend to lose it. Earned media is one way to sustain a positive gap without relying on paid budget alone.

How do you measure whether brand PR is working?

Use a four-level framework aligned to AMEC's Barcelona Principles: outputs (coverage by tier, share of voice), out-takes (sentiment, recall), outcomes (branded search, referrals, enquiries) and impact (sales, listings, consideration). Agree the measures before activity starts, report sales uplifts alongside other activity in the period, and leave advertising value equivalents out entirely.

Should creators be part of a brand PR programme?

Yes, provided they are briefed on the same brand idea as the press work and tracked to an action. Creator content carries third-party trust in the same way editorial does, and with rights agreed up front it becomes owned social and retail content as well.