When I first started at P&G over 20 years ago, I was taught the mantra of successful marketing strategy: Who is your audience? What is your product? And how will you communicate it? In PR, we used this approach too but added context and built stakeholder and landscape analyses.

This model provided a clear, linear logic for planning PR campaigns, compartmentalising our thinking and requiring us to revisit stagesA when earlier intelligence changed. Frameworks like these, the labels we use, and the metaphors we adopt can greatly affect how we work and how society at large responds to challenges.

As a university professor, I still see examples of the power of metaphors and underlying assumptions. They have a distinct impact that goes beyond our professional fields. For example, in the 1950s, conceptualising the brain as a computer shifted psychology away from behaviourism, bringing in concepts such as 'working memory' and 'retrieval', and fundamentally creating the field of cognitive science. However, it also has detrimental effects.

When molecular biologists prematurely dismissed 98 per cent of our genetic code as useless 'junk DNA', they accidentally blinded themselves to the sophisticated regulatory mechanisms that make us uniquely human. This monumental scientific error reminds us that the labels and metaphors we invent can distort our understanding of reality and hamper progress.

The business of relationships

Just as cognitive science and biology were guided by their guiding metaphors, public relations has been constrained by viewing communication as a linear information-processing machine. To correct this, we must pragmatically refocus on what all experts already know: public relations is fundamentally about relationships. These cannot be created instantaneously. They cannot be bought. They function within a specific context, involving dialogue among all parties, frequently mediated by journalists, influencers, or experts. While traditional media relations consider these characteristics, they often overlook them when understanding today's audience needs and expectations.

Traditionally, PR has focused on identifying active publics, which are groups that hold consistent views on specific issues. This has driven efforts to create unique content that triggers issues important to relevant publics.

However, this traditional model is being challenged by the growing division we see today. While the tendency to categorise others as 'us versus them' is firmly embedded in our social makeup, it is the sheer abundance of content that has triggered this modern crisis.

When we're confronted with too much content, our cognitive filters become overloaded. When we receive this endless stream of information, we first assess it for novelty, and then a rapid process of social evaluation begins. To cope with the immense amount of information, our minds rely heavily on quick judgements to identify others as in-group or out-group members based on even the most trivial criteria.

This overloaded cognitive reflex drives phenomena that are harmful to social cohesion, including support for conspiracy theories, extremism, and nationalism. These result in deep divisions and polarisation.

Too much content!

The abundance of content has facilitated the creation of super-divided micro-publics. The more content that is created, the more micro-publics emerge.

Generative AI is now accelerating this fracturing of public discourse. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), PR professionals have gained a powerful new tool for building relationships. LLMs gather and integrate available information to provide answers that seem less biased. Some people mistakenly treat AI as a stakeholder, creating human-like expectations of tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. However, AI environments are merely predictive instruments that provide answers based on existing content.

The danger of using AI for content creation and landscape analysis lies in this. When drafting a press release with AI, a PR professional is essentially looking at their own past work. This can lead to 'narrative foreclosure', where an organisation becomes anchored to a past version of itself and prematurely concludes its reputation based on past events. By becoming heavily anchored to a past narrative, organisations can become trapped in a loop of maintaining an outdated image instead of looking towards future growth.

In addition, when GAI is treated as the only information provider for the public, the trust landscape flattens because traditional markers of credibility, such as the source, seem to lose their predictive capability. Consequently, organisations can no longer rely on sheer informational output.

For PR practitioners, scaling automated content is ineffective as, in an oversaturated environment, audiences do not reward mere volume. While AI can advance the industry by accelerating data analysis, considerable concerns remain about content quality and the changing relationships between organisations and their publics.

Audiences have become more passive and less adept at using cognitive filters to evaluate source reliability and calibrate their epistemic trust. The solution lies in returning to the profession's essential principles: collaborating with stakeholders, experts, and opinion leaders, while consistently retaining the strategic message and preventing content duplication. Rather than acting as relentless knowledge providers, PR communicators must therefore help publics filter information based on authenticity, transparency, and reliability.

Vulnerable audiences and the role of PR

When PR practitioners view their role merely as content creators, they risk not only becoming obsolete but also harming their audiences. In a relevant vein, the spread of fake news should be seen not only as a crisis of knowledge, but also as a direct result of the abundance of obscure content that creates epistemic ghettos. It is also a symptom of unmet relational needs, specifically loneliness and narcissism. When members of the public experience social disconnection, fuelled by a lack of engagement and dialogue from organisations preoccupied with creating more distinctive content, they commonly exhibit pathological digital behaviours.

Sharing false content is a prime example of this behaviour, which is either a desperate attempt to regain a sense of personal agency or a way of performing as a 'digital peacock' seeking external validation. To counteract this epistemic pollution and support a cohesive society, the PR field must move beyond superficial messaging and firmly adopt an ethos of authentic, dialogic care. Organisations can no longer see mitigating social isolation as a missed opportunity; it is now a fundamental societal safeguard and an urgent professional responsibility.

Translating this to daily practice requires a fundamental adjustment in how public relations manages communication spaces. If the profession intends to build cohesive, undivided publics, practitioners must actively assume a duty of communicative care. This means abandoning the unremitting push to churn out isolated articles and unending streams of content merely for visibility, as these fragmented bursts often serve only to further polarise vulnerable audiences.

Rather than manufacturing new talking points, we must shift our focus to building dialogue. This requires actively joining existing discussions, answering questions, and co-creating communication with consumers rather than broadcasting to them. We must abandon defensive digital tactics such as ignoring critical feedback or blocking followers, as these only serve to deepen an audience's sense of alienation. This promise to engagement means reviving the infrastructure of genuine dialogue by reinstating direct communication channels, including unscalable touchpoints such as dedicated customer phone lines, where authentic human interaction can take place.

On content, communicators must urgently move away from messaging based on consumer uniqueness and superiority, as these appeals directly fuel the alienation that drives the digital peacock phenomenon. The way forward calls for inclusive communication that shares knowledge, emphasises similarities, and champions shared community values. By prioritising active listening and authentic human connection over relentless content generation, the PR industry can bridge the gap between superficial digital metrics and true societal responsibility, shifting from an engine of digital clutter to a necessary societal safeguard.