Building Coalitions, Not Just Coverage: How Media Relations can Drive Strategic Change
By David Jenkins | Senior Media Relations Manager
Intellectual Property Office
The Problem: Communications in Fragments
Campaigns fail not from lack of resources or expertise, but because they treat media relations and stakeholder engagement as separate activities.
Traditional models lend themselves to artificial boundaries: press teams chase headlines while policy teams court professional bodies. Public campaigns run on one track, stakeholder mobilisation on another. Metrics are measured in isolation - media success through reach and sentiment, stakeholder engagement through meeting attendance.
Press teams celebrate coverage spikes. Policy teams curate bilateral meetings. Neither conducts systematic analysis of how these activities amplify each other.
The result? Fragmented impact, missed opportunities, and short-lived awareness that dissipates when the media cycle moves on. Campaign evaluations rarely explore how media narratives influence stakeholder behaviour, or how stakeholder mobilisation shapes media narratives. This leaves stakeholders without evidence of public support, and policies without broad legitimacy.
This compartmentalised thinking misunderstands how modern influence operates. In today's interconnected information landscape, powerful campaigns don't just capture attention - they create sustained momentum. They don't just change individual minds - they build coalitions. They don't just generate coverage - they establish new norms.
The Solution: Strategic Integration
As the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO)’s Senior Media Relations Manager, my work increasingly sits at the intersection of marketing, policy, stakeholder engagement and campaigns activity – often moving beyond traditional press office functions.
Working fluidly and cohesively across disciplines, we've learned that our best results come from harnessing each specialism’s skills and deep knowledge - working dynamically and with permeable boundaries.
This approach delivered prominent national media coverage of the UKIPO’s anti-counterfeiting campaigns through engaging and credible media content – while at the same time transforming stakeholder sceptics into positive advocates.
The amplification was organic and self-sustaining. Stakeholders didn't just endorse our work, they actively drove it forward without prompting – encouraging others to follow suit. This provides fundamental insights into how strategic media engagement can simultaneously drive public behaviour change and mobilise stakeholder coalitions.
The experience of these campaigns exemplify how this integrated approach creates a multiplier effect that can transform short-term awareness into lasting cultural and economic shift. This isn't just about better press releases or cleverer social media content. It's about fundamentally reimagining media relations as strategic architecture, connecting public influence with stakeholder power.
The Golden Thread: Evidence-Driven Coalition Building
When Border Force seizures generate headlines about dangerous counterfeit goods, the resulting press coverage doesn't just warn consumers. It validates stakeholder concerns, helps create global political space to support enhanced enforcement, and provides industry bodies with credible content they can amplify. It moves to the core of setting the agenda.
The central argument is straightforward but revelatory: the most effective campaigns use media relations not as an end goal, but as a catalyst for building and sustaining coalitions that outlive any individual communication activity.
By embedding ongoing relationship-building into our communications strategy, we can transform one-off consultation participants into sustained advocates, reaping dividends that extend beyond any single engagement period.
This approach works because it recognises a fundamental truth about modern influence: sustainable change happens when public awareness and stakeholder action reinforce each other in continuous cycles. Media attention legitimises stakeholder priorities. Stakeholder mobilisation helps build consensus and sustains focus. Evidence-led activity by law enforcement partners generates fresh insights for media campaigns. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing.
Lessons Beyond Government
The implications extend far beyond Whitehall. Any organisation facing complex challenges that require both public behaviour change and stakeholder coordination can apply these principles. Corporate communications teams struggling to align brand campaigns with public affairs advocacy. NGOs trying to connect grassroots awareness with policy influence. Trade associations seeking to mobilise members while educating consumers. International organisations building worldwide consensus while influencing national debates.
The key insight transcends sector boundaries: in an era of information overload and declining institutional trust, the organisations that succeed will be those that use communications to create authentic coalitions around shared evidence and mutual interest.
This requires reimagining the traditional model of separate teams pursuing parallel objectives. The most successful campaigns will instead be based on integrated strategies that recognise how different audiences and stakeholder groups amplify each other's actions.
The Strategic Imperative
UKIPO's anti-counterfeiting work illustrates what becomes possible when media relations evolves from tactical output generation to building strategic coalition architecture. Its ambition - making counterfeiting socially unacceptable while strengthening legitimate trade - represents the kind of sustained cultural and economic change that traditional campaign tactics simply cannot achieve.
But this type of transformation demands more than minor organisational tweaks. It requires modern evaluation frameworks that measure interconnected influence rather than isolated outputs. It needs investment in evidence-gathering and partnership-building that extends beyond conventional communications planning. Traditional metrics like reach and sentiment scores remain important, but they must be complemented by measures that track coalition strength, stakeholder activation rates and the durability of behavioural change.
Most critically, it demands brave and agile leadership that understands how authentic and sustained coalitions form around credible evidence and mutual benefit.
The Legacy
Organisations that master this integration will reshape the very landscape in which their issues are understood, debated, and ultimately resolved. In a world where sustainable influence requires both public legitimacy and stakeholder power, the future belongs to those who can create and maintain both simultaneously.
This necessitates a culture shift from campaign-thinking to coalition-thinking - where success is measured not only by individual activity performance, but by the strength and sustainability of the alliances created.
In a world where every organisation competes for attention, the question for all communications professionals is no longer whether their latest campaign generated coverage, but whether it also built the foundations for iterative and sustained progress.
This isn't just about better campaign execution. It's about fundamentally reimagining the strategic role of communications in driving lasting change through collaborative networks rather than isolated messaging.
The winners will be those who generate attention to build something bigger than themselves.