#4 Irina Gushchina_Women in PR with Ana Adi

What do you think of when someone mentions “public relations”? What images come to mind: is it someone behind the scenes organizing an event, is it someone speaking with the press on behalf of an organization, is it someone deeply absorbed into research following complex dashboards and reports. No really, what comes to your mind? There is research out there that explores the portrayals of PR in movies and series or in the media. There is also research that investigates the perceptions that journalists and politicians hold of PR practitioners. There is also research inquiring what are the perceptions that practitioners themselves have about their profession…fair enough, the latter one is mine (is a paper I presented in 2018 at BledCom, a practitioner and academic conference hosted in Slovenia, based on a game with PR memes we play in my Applied Communications course at Quadriga). Anyways, there are some pretty persistent negative perceptions as well as a lot of hope and enthusiasm for the profession. But one of the images that sticks shows PR in a tactical position, reacting to whatever others do or say, trying to protect an employer or client no matter what… not a strategist, not a consultant, not a trusted advisor with access and part of the decision-making process. So instead of asking where do these images come from, I think the better questions to ask would be why do they still linger on and are they the same everywhere? With this episode we travel to Russia and quiz our quest about how PR is understood and done over there. Irina Gushchina started her career as a journalist of a business weekly magazine, and then has worked for several years in prominent Russian and international PR agencies including Edelman Russia. In 2007 she moved into the in-house world, first joining Pfizer Russia and then Abott and Uber. After almost 20 years in media and PR, Irina is running KFC’s communications and is responsible for Russia, Commonwealth of Independent States (or CIS), Central & Eastern Europe. She is also an alumna of Quadriga University.