Each year at Davos, communications leaders gather to reflect on where the industry is headed. One comment that stuck with me this year came from Michael Stewart, Unilever’s Chief Corporate Affairs and Communications officer, who noted how senior communications professionals are “delivering work, but that’s not the same as delivering growth outcomes.”
The tension he pointed out is probably one we’re all too familiar with.
As an industry, communications have always been drawn to the output. The press release is the clearest example that comes to mind – it sits under a website’s press section, it’s easy to reference, and is often the prerequisite for journalists to engage with company announcements. In practice, the press release (the output) is seen as proof of work done, box ticked!
The press release has existed for over a century, made for a time when people relied on far fewer media publications to get reliable information. Back then, attention was concentrated and impact was felt when a piece of news was published. In that context, the output and outcome were closely linked, but that relationship no longer holds in the same way.
Output as a proxy for progress
Fast forward to today, communications teams still need tangible ways to show that work is done. The quickest route is going back to familiar tools of the trade, like a press release, to support a sales push or to show momentum. You can see how this tends to play out when almost everything is “news”:
“We’ve shipped a new product feature...”
“We’re now available on X vendor’s marketplace...” + “…Can we send a press release about it?”
The press release itself isn’t the problem. But too often, communication tools are seen as a loudhailer repeating the same messages used in sales, product and marketing copy, reducing them to little more than output. This tendency has only accelerated with AI, where teams can generate content and press releases faster than they ever did before.
In making volume the benchmark and framing everything as news, the tools have essentially started cosplaying as the strategy. At that point, producing more press releases than competitors might even start to look like progress when it isn’t.
Why B2B amplifies the gap between output and outcome
Over time, the forces that shape perception and influence have changed - audiences no longer interact with brands right from the point a press release is distributed.
In B2B specifically, buying decisions are also rarely made in a single moment, by one person, based on the first message they encounter. Influence instead becomes cumulative, less anchored on any single piece of asset.
Taking an output-led approach can create this false sense of traction for brands. We see companies issuing “announcements” on the news wire every week, but struggle to demonstrate meaningful traction with key audiences or articulate the impact when the time comes.
B2B buyers are getting their information from different places – Reddit threads, Whatsapp groups, whitepapers, analyst forums and (most recently) large language models (LLMs). A communications strategy built solely on publishing X number of press releases is going to seriously limit the possibilities of what it is capable of achieving today - to shape perceptions and build trust.
Do we still need press releases?
For every observation made, it is tempting to suggest that the opposite is also true. So yes - there is still a place for the press release in your toolkit, especially when the news is genuinely meaningful - such as a major funding round, a groundbreaking piece of research, or a merger and acquisition announcement.
The better question to ask is if this is the right moment and vehicle for what you’re trying to achieve.
Strategy starts when we stop asking what we produced, and start asking what changed?
Outcomes in B2B communications look like an audience’s willingness to engage with brands over time, resonating with a point of view, or finding a research piece useful. These outcomes are built and nurtured through many touchpoints as people encounter your thinking in different contexts.
But in the moment, they are difficult to quantify and to account for. After all, how do you tell the sales director a customer has been influenced? Faced with that ambiguity, it's natural that we fall back into the comfort of pushing out as much output as possible to prove communications belong at the table.
But repeating the same action over and over again hoping for a different result rarely works. This way of working flips the relationship between strategy and execution. Instead of asking, “What is the strategic outcome we want from this moment?” We’re asking, “What can we publish to mark that it happened?”
A sound communications strategy operates at a much higher level.
It should be less concerned with documenting activity and more focused on using the output to influence perceptions. It doesn’t explicitly tell an audience what to think, but uses smart content to help them arrive at the right conclusions. The tools we use play a role in that, but each is only as part of a much broader, deliberate effort.