Our guests this week are the Reverend George Pitcher, Anglican priest and former national press journalist, who was co-founder of PR firm Luther Pendragon and then Jericho Chambers; and Jeremy Cohen, senior partner at Blurred, formerly of the National Grid, Salterbaxter, and Edelman, where he ran the global Business & Social Purpose Practice.

PRWeek UK’s Beyond the Noise podcast, which is published on alternate weeks, looks at some of the biggest issues affecting comms and PR. Download the podcast via Apple, Spotify, listen in the browser above or on your favourite platform.

We ask why business appears to be gaining trust at a time when trust in governments is collapsing. Our guests also examine whether PR misunderstands what trust is, and whether the industry is in danger of confusing trust with reputation management.

Pitcher expresses strong views on the latter, calling reputation management a "sell stock" that is "losing its own reputation".

"I'm hugely suspicious of reputation management," he says. "I think somewhere north of 90 per cent of all corporate spending on reputation management is wasted. That's largely because reputation is treated as an image destination... rather than accepting that reputation is a direction of travel."

On the topic of ESG, Cohen discusses the requirement to integrate it into business strategy.

"If it's about having an ESG team or department spending money over here so people don't look over there, that's absolutely the wrong way of doing it and people will be found out."

The question of whether PR has a trust problem itself is also debated, especially given Edelman and other major agencies have received negative press for working with fossil fuel and other clients.

We also identify PRWeek’s choice of Top and Flop of the past fortnight.

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