Why are so many PR people wary about brand fame? One Plus One senior account executive Kate Yule says it’s time to rethink the F-word.
Mention fame in a room full of communications professionals and you’ll feel subtle discomfort. We prefer to talk about trust, engagement and narrative. We build relationships, shape perceptions and drive conversation – not fame. Fame feels frivolous. Reputation feels serious.
But why? That defensiveness is worth interrogating.
In his book Why Does the Pedlar Sing?, Paul Feldwick draws on the wisdom of the humble travelling pedlar, who sings to be liked, remembered and to create a positive feeling that lingers long after he has passed. He represents something fundamental: people engage with, trust and recommend what they recognise.
This matters because familiarity remains one of the most powerful forces in our fragmented media environment.
We live in a fragmented media culture
Today, we live in what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff describes as a distracted present. We move through a culture of constant updates, endless feeds and compressed timescales. As a result, audiences have become highly efficient at scanning content – not necessarily at absorbing it, but at determining whether it deserves their attention at all.
The result is a shift in how audiences are reached. Increasingly, people are encountering brands through disconnected fragments: a social post here, a news article there, a podcast mention, a LinkedIn update, a recommendation from a friend. Brand perception subsequently emerges from a collection of these mosaic moments.
Reach ≠ influence
We can access enormous amounts of surface area with a big enough budget across these streams – but just as easily still leave no meaningful impression.
This is because influence is not simply a function of exposure alone, but also receptivity. People in PR have always understood this: not all reach is equal and, in practice, who delivers the message matters as much as how many receive it. A recommendation from a trusted intermediary carries a fundamentally different weight to a message delivered directly by the brand.
This situation is far more complex than whether the right people, at the right time, saw your message. The challenge today is to consider whether they recognised it, understood it and connected it to something they already knew. In other words, whether it landed not as an isolated impression, but as part of an existing web of familiarity.
Fame underpins all of this: the coffee shop everyone in the neighbourhood knows by name is famous. The founder people recommend without being asked is famous. And the brand that instinctively comes to mind when an industry is mentioned is famous.
Familiarity is key
In many ways, this quiet (yet extraordinarily valuable) familiarity is the entire reason PR exists. Yet, many have been swept up by misinterpretations of the attention economy, employing a dangerous mindset that assumes if we can interrupt people effectively enough, we’ll influence them. That if we can target the right audience at the right moment, perhaps we can trigger the desired behaviour.
But studying what someone just clicked, bought or searched for tells us very little about desire, context or meaning. Behavioural data can tell us what happened but struggles to explain why.
Attention is fleeting because the moment it is captured, it begins to disappear – arguably more than ever before. Familiarity works differently, binding disconnected encounters together into something meaningful. It accumulates over time, compounding interest as each touchpoint adds to a growing sense of recognition rather than starting from zero.
It creates fluency – the feeling that something is easy to process because we’ve encountered it before. This has profound implications for creativity in PR.
The best “creative” work is often assumed to be the most surprising, disruptive or unexpected. However, surprise alone rarely creates enduring value. Truly impactful work gives audiences something recognisable enough to process and something distinctive enough to remember.
Brand: a system of coherence
People assemble meaning through pattern recognition, connecting disparate encounters into a broader impression. In this context, brand functions as a system of coherence.
It provides the connective tissue that allows hundreds of fragmented interactions to feel like they belong to the same organisation, helping audiences identify the pattern – because if an audience is fluent in your brand, it doesn’t matter what order they’re getting their content.
Which brings us back to fame.
Reclaiming fame
Perhaps those in PR shouldn’t be so reluctant to talk about fame. After all, we understand better than most that being known matters, and fame is exactly that.
Brands need to be both understandable and unforgettable. When you study successful brands, you see the ones that thrive are those who connect deeply with their core competency – and invite their audience to share in that passion.
In PR, the goal of creativity isn’t to reinvent, but to create something that feels both familiar and distinctive – something people can process easily, and more importantly, remember.
The pedlar was trying to be remembered. In an age of endless content, that may be the most creative ambition of all.
