Our Managing Director, Andy See and Executive Director, Tan May Lee, spoke to The Star on what’s next for Perspective Strategies. Boutique public relations (PR) agency Perspective Strategies Sdn Bhd wants its clients to become its long-term partners and will focus on few key growth areas that will help achieve its clients’ goals.

Managing director Andy See Teong Leng says the agency wants to engage closely with its clients to build a strong partnership with them as media relations alone in not workable in today’s competitive world.

He says the agency does not want to be a mere service provider by just helping clients to communicate but instead help clients to also attain their business goals.

The growth areas of focus for Perspective Strategies in its bid to carve a stronger foothold in the communications business include strong emphasis on financial communications, stakeholder engagement and internal communications.

Stressing on financial communications, the agency’s executive director Tan May Lee adds that it is important for a company to communicate the relevant information more effectively, especially so for listed entities.

“As partners to our clients, we work with companies to communicate their future directions, prospects and other relevant information that will help them reach their target audience and achieve their business goals,” she tells StarBizWeek in an interview.

According to See, stakeholder engagement and internal communications are the two growth areas for the agency, both of which are expected to be the “game changers” of the PR industry.

By engaging clients and understanding their business needs, he says the agency will be able develop more strategic communications programmes that will build meaningful relationships between brands and their stakeholders.

Towards this end, he notes Perspective Strategies will deploy various communication channels, be it face-to-face, digital, social media and others to see which one suits best for its clients.

Close engagements with clients to develop communication programmes has helped the agency bag the coveted gold award for the second consecutive year − 2012 and 2013 − for the best campaign at the Malaysia PR Awards (MPRA).

The latest one was the campaign for Durex Malaysia (2013). Its internal communication work for AmBankGroup in the wake of the merger with MBF Cards also grabbed the highest honour in the previous year.

Commenting on the Durex Malaysia campaign, See says the objective of the campaign was to educate the youths of the dangers of sexually transmitted infections caused by unsafe sex. It also serves as a platform to showcase Perspective Strategies capability and diverse skills.

“We need these skills as the reality is stakeholders today demand meaningful engagements with companies and brands. This means, straightforward media relations campaign alone may not work effectively today. It demands that brands and companies work with stakeholders directly.

In the case of the Durex campaign, it was all about engaging youth on a peer-to-peer mode,” he adds.

Given Malaysia’s largely conservative sentiments when it comes to sex education, he says, the agency conceptualised the campaign using the peer-to-peer education as a strategy to break down communication barriers and engage youths on this important yet difficult subject.

The effort yielded tremendous results. Since August 2013, Durex and its group of peer educators have reached out to more than 30,000 students nationwide and this figure is expected to further rise, See notes.

Speaking on the industry challenges, Tan says, “Talent remains an ongoing challenge for most agencies, especially so for our industry which is sometimes misunderstood and rarely fully understood.

“However, with the broadening scope of communications, we are looking outside the traditional talent pool and actively seek multi-discipline talents who are able to deeply understand clients’ businesses and provide strategic counsel. Essentially, the end result of all communications is about achieving business goals.”

This article was originally published in The Star on 27 September 2014.