GO Communications Group signs up with Lankan Niche CC

By David Ebert

Australasian public relations giant GO Communications Group Sdn Bhd and Sri Lanka’s Niche Corporate Communications announced the signing of a partnership between the two companies, promising to bring about a whole new perspective in corporate communications in the country.

Headquartered in Malaysia, the GO Communications Group has been named the country’s best PR company three consecutive times since 2009 and is credited with the creation of one of the world’s most successful, continuously running advertising campaigns – the ‘Singapore Girl’ campaign for Singapore Airlines.

Niche Corporate Communications is one of Sri Lanka’s pioneering PR agencies founded in 1995 and headed by Nayomini Ratnayake Weerasooriya. With the signing of the partnership, the company now joins the GO Communications network which boasts a firm foothold throughout the Asian region, with operations in Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand, benefitting from the group’s unique and innovative approach to public relations that achieve results.

Speaking at the ceremony, GO Communications CEO Michael De Kretser was optimistic about the group’s decision to enter the Sri Lankan industry stating that there was much more that can be done to showcase local brands on a global stage: “There’s so much potential for Sri Lankan companies in terms of doing world class PR. It’s a two way approach, on one hand there’s so much that can be done to enhance the image building exercises for organisations here at home and on the other hand we could take those organisations to a worldwide audience via a unique PR platform.”

The ‘unique platform’ refers to the company’s ready access to a range of specialised in-depth knowledge bases, through a well entrenched network of partner PR agencies in each of the regional markets they operate in.

Speaking to the Daily FT, De Kretser shared his views on the local PR industry and what the company plans to offer local corporate in the future: “The PR industry here, with the research we’ve done, is very new, it’s very young and there are probably not many real professional people in the industry but that’s not a negative comment, it’s the same in many Asian countries. True PR today is an art but is one that will grow and it is changing rapidly, so what we hope to do through the GO Communications Group and our expertise in the Asia-Pacific region is to bring elements of this experience to Niche CC and their colleagues here and share that experience.”

De Kretser also added that the company is ideally suited to operating in a culturally diverse market such as Sri Lanka due to its long presence in many multicultural and trilingual countries across the region. The group’s future plans will soon include expansion into Myanmar, Indonesia and Vietnam, even as soon as the mid-2013.  GO Communications Group Chairman Bob Chua explained that public relations has become a key component of every company’s marketing effort and stated that the company stands ready to offer its expertise to provide professional and effective PR services to its clients across the region.

Chua stated that the country’s wealth of natural resources were one of the main deciding factors that prompted the group to enter the Sri Lankan industry due to the economic booms associated with large scale oil and gas discoveries in developing countries: “I think with countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lankan, there a lot of parallels in terms of being natural resource rich and when a country is, you tend to have not only a lot of local brands but international brands as well, and whether it’s from palm or oil and gas, you then see strong government linked or eventually private companies being built up around those resources that can potentially go global. So we are interested in working with those sorts of brands and making Sri Lankan brands global.”