The three real reasons PR fails
The protagonist problem
Your business is the hero of its own story. It should not be. Buyers and journalists respond to stories where they, or someone recognisably like them, are the protagonist. If your pitch is mostly about how impressive you are, it will not land. The more relevant question is what changes for someone else because you exist.
The stakes problem
Risk that is vague does not move anyone. If the consequence in your pitch sounds like "miss out on growth opportunities", it will disappear into the pile. Specific consequence creates urgency. Vague consequence creates nothing. A journalist needs to understand why this matters now, and to whom.
The voice problem
Committee language kills authority. If your pitch sounds like it was written by three people, it probably was. Journalists and buyers are pattern-matching for authenticity all day. The second copy sounds sanitised, it reads as interchangeable. Interchangeable rarely gets covered.
"Most PR problems are not media problems. They are narrative problems."
How to diagnose which problem you have
If your PR is not landing, the useful question is not "which journalist should we try next?" It is "where is the story breaking down?" This is exactly what The Scriptwriter Test™ is built to diagnose. It is a simple but unforgiving lens for working out whether your narrative is failing on the protagonist, the stakes, or the dialogue. In other words: are you making yourself the hero, are the consequences too vague to matter, or does the whole thing sound like it was approved by committee?
That matters because each problem creates a different kind of failure. A protagonist problem makes the story self-involved. A stakes problem makes it forgettable. A voice problem makes it feel generic. If you do not know which one you have, you end up doing more of the wrong thing. More outreach. More media lists. More recycled angles. The result is usually the same.
The Scriptwriter Test is useful before a press push, during a stalled one, and after one that produced very little. It is also useful beyond PR, because the same narrative weaknesses that stop journalists paying attention often explain why buyers are not choosing you either. If the story is not legible enough for the market, it will not become legible just because it is sent to more people.
What good PR actually looks like
Good PR is not just about landing coverage. It is about building authority signals that travel across search, media, and AI systems at the same time. A strong piece of coverage still matters. So does a strong founder point of view. Those signals also need to be legible enough for search engines and AI assistants to find, summarise, and repeat accurately.
That is why PR and GEO are increasingly tangled together. If your language is inconsistent, your proof is buried, and your claims are hard to cite, you do not just lose the journalist. You lose the search visibility, the AI discoverability, and the category association that should have compounded from it. Good PR means being easy to understand wherever the market first encounters you.
The question to ask before your next pitch
Before you send anything, ask one blunt question: if someone received this cold, would they immediately understand who this is about, why it matters now, and why this voice is worth listening to? If the answer is no, the problem is not distribution. It is the narrative. If you are not sure where your narrative is breaking down, The Scriptwriter Test is a good place to start. If you want help seeing it clearly, book a Scene-Setting Call.
Not sure why the story is not landing?
Start with The Scriptwriter Test™, or book a call if you want to talk it through properly.
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