Most enterprise tech companies don’t have a PR problem. They have a strategy problem that PR is being asked to paper over.
We work with tech brands across the Middle East, and the same five mistakes show up again and again, different sectors, different sizes, same root causes. None of them are exotic. That’s what makes them worth naming.
1. Treating the press release as the product
The release is packaging, not substance. Too many teams pour their energy into wordsmithing the announcement and treat the actual story, the thing a journalist needs to justify writing about you, as an afterthought. If the release is doing the work the narrative should be doing, the narrative isn’t there yet.
2. Confusing visibility with coverage
Getting mentioned and getting positioned are not the same outcome. A brand can rack up volume, logos, listicles, roundups, and still be invisible in the conversations that actually shape buyer perception. Coverage quality and coverage quantity are different metrics, and most reporting dashboards only track the one that’s easier to count.
3. Briefing journalists on the product instead of the problem
Editors aren’t covering your roadmap. They’re covering what’s shifting in the industry, and your product is only interesting to them insofar as it’s evidence of that shift. Pitches that lead with features instead of the underlying change get politely ignored, and most teams never figure out why.
4. Measuring PR by outputs, not outcomes
Clip counts are easy to report up the chain and tell you almost nothing useful. They don’t tell you whether a customer’s perception of your category changed, whether a competitor’s pitch got harder to land, or whether anyone in the room actually remembers what you do differently. Outputs are activity. Outcomes are the point.
5. Bringing in comms after the strategy is set
By the time communications gets looped in, the positioning is usually locked, and comms is left translating a decision it had no hand in shaping. That’s a waste of the function. Comms should be in the room early enough to inform the positioning, not just package it afterward.
These aren’t new failure modes. They’re just the ones that keep recurring because they’re structural, not tactical, they come from where PR sits in the org chart and when it gets pulled in, not from a lack of good writers.
We talk through this kind of thing with clients regularly at Active DMC, if any of these look familiar, that’s usually the starting point of the conversation.
