Being better is rarely enough.

Being recognised as better takes time, discipline, and consistency.

In a world where AI Searches mean content is king, PR influences what is said about an organisation long before a sales conversation begins.

‘The difference for us now,’ said a Meantime client responding to our annual client survey last week, ‘is that when we arrive to sell, we no longer have to explain who we are, and what we do.’

In the world of transport and logistics, reputation is shaped less by noise, and more by consistency.

All the clients Meantime has worked with over the last 20 years want to be known for a relatively small set of fundamentals, and place them in any order you prefer; price, reliability, resilience, geographic reach, sustainability, digitalisation, being a good place to work.

The worry has been, or should have been, the negative commercial impact when these themes are consistently associated with a client’s commercial rivals rather than their commercial selves.

It’s that association which influences who makes the shortlist, who gets invited to tender, and who is trusted with long-term contracts.

This is where companies turn to public relations to deal in the dark art of perception management.

There is perhaps no better single example of this than Avis’ ‘We try harder’ slogan from the 1960s.

Losing money and trailing in the wake of much larger rival, Hertz, it turned its ‘also ran’ status into a strength, speaking not of its product offering but rather of its company culture, leaning into the fact that everybody likes an underdog.

The campaign was cited as the reason Avis went from losing USD3.2m to earning USD1.2m in a year.

Brand perception is particularly critical in transport and logistics, where buying cycles are long, switching costs are high, and decisions are made by multiple stakeholders with different risk thresholds.

However, currently, we operate in a troubled world, and this means growing pressure for direct return on investment accountability.

This is understandable and quite right.

The problem for public relations is that it rarely operates in straight lines.

Public relations works in influence, confidence, permission, and trust, all of which shape commercial outcomes long before a sales conversation begins.

The communication strategies Meantime creates with its clients often pivot from messaging pillars that incorporate the list above.

These messaging pillars form part of a long-term strategy, driving perception of a given company or association towards its strengths, associating it with a culture that others will understand long before the RFP arrives back, the sales pitch is made, or the associate member pays their annual membership fee.

Meantime is set to upgrade its reporting in 2026, reflecting the way that audiences now discover and consume earned content.

Alongside professional, shareable reports, we are building a new dashboard that brings together social performance data and visibility of earned content, from engagement signals through to audience exposure.

This matters because traditional web traffic tells only part of the story, particularly as AI driven search and summarisation increasingly sit between content and clicks.

The aim is not more data, but clearer evidence of whether consistent communications are building recognition over time.

But, and I’m addressing accountants and marketeers directly, it pays to remember for all the evidence of continuous mass coverage, the most important element of a company’s communication isn’t how big it is but how consistent it is.

The slogan ‘We try harder’ was retained from 1962 to 2012. Coined by sales executive, Paula Green, it’s hard not to imagine she was thinking of the sisterhood when she wrote it.

For context, Avis changed the slogan to ‘It’s your space’ which, aptly, is a strap that many of our clients might consider.

Meantime Communications has supported its clients with corporate aspirations for 18 years, and has become the best PR company in its space (I am happy to hear any arguments…) and I know this to be true because…

‘…we try harder, consistently.’

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