Public Relations and Corporate Communications in the UAE

When I first moved to the UAE in 2006, I was most impressed when my husband started to talk about the number of PROs or public relations officers in his company. It was indeed a welcome surprise given my assumptions about public relations being relatively undeveloped. However, we soon learned that instead of being at the front edge of communications, these PROs, usually from the sub-continent and remarkably efficient at getting work visas and labor cards, were far from being part of the organization’s stakeholder outreach - a tidy lesson that illustrated the challenges of terminology being used for different purposes but also a stark illustration of how public relations was (and in some cases still is) perceived in the Middle East.