We hear a lot about efficiency these days. Particularly when people are talking about generative AI and its impacts on the business world. This triggers fear of becoming obsolete in some (FOBO) and bottom-line thinking in others (e.g., “I can save FTEs by automating my shop!”).

Neither FOBO nor bottom-line thinking are good for the management of public relations, communications, and/or marketing. I suggest you think in terms of efficacy and effectiveness instead of efficiency.

Efficiency is about getting to a result in the most cost-effective way possible. This is important, but it is equally important to NOT start your strategic thinking process with efficiency.

Efficacy is about how well a process works in a controlled setting. This is useful for communicators who are trying to inspire compliance to norms, such as building evacuation in time of crisis; or upholding hygiene standards. However, it is also useful within experiment-informed practice, where you set up each task in your workflow as a hypothesis you want to test: “Using AI to compose social posts will save me time.” You then do the same task using AI and not using AI several times in the same conditions and you see whether your hypothesis worked or not. Using simple experiments like that will help you establish efficacy within a test-case before rolling out AI across your team.

Effectiveness measures how well a process works in real-world situations. To continue with our “AI in social posts” example, after you determine whether AI speeds you up in a controlled setting, you can then see how the process you have designed and tested works in a real-world setting. Then you can tweak it to be more effective.

Efficiency is about achieving a goal while spending the least of amount resources possible. If taken as primary consideration, it can lead to bottom-line thinking, which leads to the diminishment of the strategic value of your practice.

For example, you may be spending 20 hrs a week on social media. Automating parts of writing socials could reduce that time by 50%, but the real question was: “how much value are you getting out of social media posting?” So, the efficiency question becomes valuable only after going through efficacy and effectiveness tests of a process’ value. If you are chasing efficiency as a first priority, you could be blindly making cuts that leave value on the cutting floor and reduce the strategic value of your practice.

Avoid “cost-centre thinking” and take on “strategic value thinking.”

Build your practice’s core value proposition.

Be strategic.

Efficacy vs effectiveness vs efficiency in communications and marketing

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