Do PR pros have their finger on the pulse of ordinary working people?

OK, I have a bit of a problem with the headline of this blog. Although countless journalists and politicians are very fond of the phrase “ordinary working people”, I’ve yet to hear a clear definition of exactly what an ordinary working person is.

Reading between the lines, an ordinary working person must have a clearly defined role in life. They can work in a factory or be involved with manual labour or they can be a highly skilled professional like a teacher, a social worker or a nurse.

The line between ordinary and, I hate to use such a polarising word, elite is blurred by prejudice and ignorance.

Most of the people I know who work in industries like Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing and, dare I utter the word, Banking are fairly ordinary people with staggeringly ordinary (dull) problems like paying the mortgage, struggling with an expensive and uncomfortable commute into work and having enough money left at the end of the week to put aside for a rainy day (and sometimes it feels like it is always pouring).

Of course, there are a handful of people in the PR industry who earn huge amounts of money and live extraordinary lives but these are few and far between.

Note: It should also be said there are also people who work in industry, retail and any number of other occupations that do very well for themselves without being tarnished with the word “elite”.

So do the majority of PR professionals have their fingers on the pulse of the ordinary working man and woman? Of course they do because at the end of the day we are ordinary working people.

But and it’s quite a big but – we do have a habit of cloistering ourselves away and perhaps living in ivory towers. When you surround yourself with people just like you every day, it’s easy to lose touch with issues that impact on other ordinary people.

Francis Ingham, a director at the PRCA has some great tips to reach out to ordinary working people in a recent article in PR Week.

Ingham’s tips include:

• Spend more time outside of London
• Read a wider range of media
• Follow people on Twitter you think are self-evidently wrong.

Perhaps in 2017, we should break out of our PR bubbles and spend as much time on the factory floor as we do in the board room and re-claim our ordinary working person status.