Startup CEOs Gone Wild: 3 Big Trends Facing PR 2025

As 2024 fades away, let's look at the 3 Big PR Trends shaping communication in 2025. In the new Trumpian world, brash is good and demure is out. Here is PRmoment India's round-up of news trends that PR can expect in 2025.

Forget Corporate Reputation, Viral Is King

Another week, another Reddit forum about a startup CEO in India. This time, the quick commerce platform Zepto's CEO and co-founder, Aadit Palicha's work habits and the company culture hit the headlines. The OP on Reddit claimed that Palicha could not wake up before 2 PM to get to work and kept staff working until 2 AM.

The post also alleged that "There are a lot of dark patterns in the app to extract money from customers in multiple ways including charging more for customers with phones more than 30,000 INR."

22-year-old Palicha's response was typically cheeky. However, he stated later the quote was borrowed from Greptie's Daksh Gupta.

This is just scratching the surface of the bolder, brasher, outspoken Indian CEO. And its accompanying company culture . In this quarter alone, there was Ola's Bhavish Aggarwal vs comedian Kunal Kamra face-off, social media darling Zomato's Deepinder Goyal's 'Pay me to work with me drama", and Byju Raveendran was named by a Reddit community as the worst Indian founder of the year for being "greedy, toxic and scamming customers."

And earlier this week, an email claiming to be from the HR department of the at-home beauty services firm, YesMadam, stated that it was firing all employees who had responded that they were stressed following an employee survey.

Naturally, this went viral on the 'Redditt Startup India community as well as all over social media. After nearly a day of back and forth, the company admitted that it was a ploy to get attention for their wellness packages.

Most unusually, their PR firm V 360 distanced itself from the marketing campaign campaign. A statement issued Tuesday evening denied their involvement in the planning or implementation of the stunt.

In an email shared with PRmoment India, V 360 said, "The recent marketing campaign by YesMadam has sparked widespread discussion on social media, eliciting a range of opinions. While we are officially managing PR activities for Yes Madam, Value 360 Communications was neither consulted nor involved in the strategic planning or execution of this particular campaign."

What upsets PR professionals is the quick labelling of this as a PR stunt.

Moushumi Dutt, senior communications professional says, "One thing is for sure, that Q for Quick is going to be the prime culprit for half-baked and almost senseless campaigns, there I suspect, that in the coming years, many “ fools” will rush in and come up with inane ideas, all in the quest to seek Quick attention and virality.

But in all this, why does and why did “PR” take the blame? the moment these “Yes- No Madam “ kind of campaigns go live, the immediate impact is on the PR community and function, and this is something that needs to be called out. The misperception is channelled by the ignorant, who are not clued into the process and for them, the closest and the easiest scapegoat is to point and wrongly label such flop campaigns as “PR stunts”, that’s a wrong assumption. Do your fact check, please, and find out who created the campaign, who approved it and who shared it online. Till then, resist the temptation of shooting the PR fraternity”.

Spending patterns shifting away from Roti, Kapada, and Makaan towards Services: National Account Statistics 2024

The latest data on spending released by the National Account Statistics shows a shift away from the traditional Roti, Kapada and Makaan ( food, clothing and housing) from 2013 to 2023. The share of essentials in Private Final Consumption Expenditure (PFCE) is declining in areas such as clothing and housing.

The shift in PFCE is towards consumer spending on health services, transport, communication and education. This indicates the sectors to draw PR interest in 2025.

Within food, which remains the top spending category for essentials although declining in growth), packaged food spending grew at 10.4%.

Global South View on DeI, Trade

Even as DeI is taking a hit in the US as being 'too-woke', especially under Trump and his cheerleader Elon Musk; the Global South and India may have a different view.

The layers of diversity in India are very nuanced in India: across gender, caste, class and religion. The DeI measures in India have just about begun in the last decade with gender and LGBTQAI with forms such as Tata, Godrej and Havas taking strong measures towards DeI.

As India develops its point of view on the intersection of DeI, politics, corporate hiring and national identity, comms can play a rale in negotiating these complex groups of stakeholders.