If in recent times sustainable companies achieved better growth and financing possibilities, these days corporate reputation and the growth of industries demand going beyond the social and sustainable part and paying attention to other exogenous factors that in one way or another can influence the smooth running of a company.
These factors can be of a political, economic, legal or technological nature, among others, and are usually beyond the control of the company in terms of their generation, but not in their prevention and management. Hence the importance of identifying them, analyzing them and understanding how they can influence the operation and growth of a company, in order to plan how to deal with them and even take advantage of them as new business opportunities. This work is a challenge for Public Relations agencies in support of the internal communication area, given that the company must continue on its own.
Among the political factors is the way in which certain government actions without legal or technical support can have an effect on certain industries or companies in particular. An example of this could be the counter-reform proposals for the electrical industry in Mexico; since it began to be insinuated, it was desirable to calculate how it could affect companies that had already invested in that sector.
It was up to the Public Relations agencies of the companies possibly affected, to give timely follow-up to the issue, detect the actors involved for better or for worse, and initiate the work of relations with said publics to try to influence decisions and seek to lessen the technical effects. and economic once the counter-reformation took place. That is what they are currently at.
In parallel, the work would also include detecting the economic variables that could have an impact on the operation of said companies, such as: financial losses, disinvestments, unemployment, inflation rates, exchange rate, impact on consumers, commercial policies, and possible damages. in the production chains.
Regarding the technological factor, it should be considered that advances in technology can generate crises of different dimensions. It is worth remembering that, among several cases, in May 2020 the official procurement site of the Ministry of Health was intervened externally with a message that said: “Your system has some failures, human failures above technical ones. The administrator does not learn from his mistakes, nor does he correct them”. It is desirable that the respective PR agency do preventive intelligence work to warn of any problem of this type.
Given that in any case an event that occurs in a company could eventually become public domain, another of the external factors to be constantly evaluated is the trends of comments from columnists and ‘reviewers’ relevant to the subject of business and companies. , as well as the topics of interest and writing style of the reporters in the respective sector.