My unplanned journey from Ukrainian marketing to German PR

The biggest difference between Ukrainian and German PR: Ukrainian PR agencies are fighting for big companies because small ones never do any PR. In Germany, businesses of any size can be a good client for a PR agency.

I lost my business within several minutes…

My name is Myra and I am from Ukraine.

Going on a business trip on February 19, 2022 from Ukraine to Madeira, I could not even imagine that after four days I would have no chance to return home.

Within a few minutes of the first day of the war in Ukraine I had lost my business, my plans, my projects, and my hope to hug my child in the near future.

I had to make a quick decision about where to go and what to do. That's how I ended up in Germany.

I had to start my life all over again. During my first month in the country I sent 224 resumes and the first interview invitation was from Laika.

After meeting Michaela Krause, the founder of the company, I really wanted to be in her PR team, I wanted to know how the business works in Germany.

The untold story of PR in Ukraine

In Ukraine, I was the owner of a b2b internet portal for travel business professionals, developed marketing strategies for travel companies, created training programs on copywriting, conducted master classes on building a loyal audience. I cooperated with PR agencies, hosted publications on my website, developed PR campaigns to help my partners and I always realized that most business owners in Ukraine don't understand the difference between marketing and PR.

In Ukraine, a PR person is a servant of many masters. Above you, there is a PR director and business manager who do not really understand what you're doing, but are constantly demanding things from you. Goals are often formulated as: "We want the media to write about us here and there.” So basically, no matter what you sell, a service or a product, your personal effectiveness is measured by the number of clippings you score. If your boss is completely clueless, they say, "And make sure that people come to us," and you can't explain that this would be a goal for sales people, not PR folks.

In Ukraine, the job of a PR specialist is extremely tiring emotionally: at the very least no one understands why they really need you, at the most they just don't like you. The reason is simple: you always want something from everyone and not many people like that. But the client is always right: a journalist who wants something from you is right, a designer or an art director is right, they are busy with important things and don't care about your tasks. And you always have to think about how to act so that no one is offended.

Not a single Ukrainian college teaches you exactly what to do. If you are a PR-manager, you gain experience by trial and error only.

No professor will tell you how to find the way to a journalist and convince them to publish your material. On the one hand there is an understanding that a PR manager is a trendy profession, on the other hand the client doesn't understand what your job is. A marketing specialist promotes products and increases sales… but a PR manager? 

In Ukraine, companies often save on PR, and I think it's because PR agencies can't properly communicate their value to the client.

Ukrainian PR service vs German work

Today, I am with Laika Berlin and have the opportunity to look at PR from a different, let’s say, German angle.

The first thing I realized is that the agency's job is not to convince the client that they need PR, and then to explain to them what a PR company does. This step is skipped, as clients (exceptions prove the rule) tend to have a slightly better understanding of what PR can and cannot do. That makes the start together easier. The German PR market seems much more mature and established compared to the Ukranian one, which means you can educate less and in some cases can start right away with the actual PR challenge. 

In Ukraine, PR agencies have to do double the work, especially for small and medium businesses: first, explain how PR works, and then propose the plan on how it can work for every given company.

The second thing that stood out to me was the ease of client-agency-manager communication. This makes the work more transparent and makes it possible to react quickly to changes. In Ukraine, in most companies, one single person is doing PR, marketing, social media marketing jobs all in one job role, so it takes a lot of time to get any decisions from them, they are just too busy and can lack focus.

And the third, and the coolest, is that Laika can turn down a client if the work conflicts with its values or ways of working. This is very valuable. They make honest attempts to manage the situation, but don't risk the emotional state of the team if something goes wrong.

In Ukraine, there are not many PR agencies, and the majority are based in the capital. The media landscape is not very big, so the working field is quite narrow. The main challenge for every PR company is to get a big contract from a big business. Why? Because usually foreign companies are more familiar with PR and not so long ago, they really pushed this service to develop in Ukraine. So, we can’t always be as selective as we might want to be. 

Big companies usually work long term with PR agencies, and such contracts make a basement for developing PR in Ukraine. Small companies are more ready for short projects and they take more time to discuss and start because they are searching for all opportunities to cut expenses. 

So, if a PR agency was lucky enough to land a good big client it would survive, if not, sooner or later it would quickly die.

As I see in Germany, small and medium businesses (SMBs) or start-ups are more active in the PR field. It is a new experience for me to study, and I'm very happy to have the chance to work at Laika and see it from the inside.

I love the way business is done here and I'm eager to learn.