Emotional Labour in PR: The Hidden Work of Client Feedback

 

“I look forward to better drafts.”

When a line such as this arrives in your inbox on a Wednesday afternoon, the first thought is WTF. It's an automatic and visceral reaction to the undercurrents beneath the words. Even though they sound passive-aggressively polite, it really is the verbal equivalent of a middle finger. What the writer really means is: “The draft so far hasn’t been good enough.” 

It gets worse in the context of the rest of the email. Here, he questions the agency's attitude, implies that we failed to see or deliver an obvious solution, and dismisses the draft as superficial, uninspired, and interchangeable. All the while being exceedingly self-congratulatory about one interview, where he was able to argue his point not only "very successfully" but "much to the satisfaction of my conversation partners". It was one journalist. 

What he does not mention are the other ten articles about the same topic. 10 texts he had already approved. 10 texts we used as a basis for the new draft, to build on the same messaging, the same argument, and in places even the same wording he was now dismissing. 

Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, might analyse the situation and suggest that the client is trying to pull me into an emotional frame: defensiveness, justification, correction, anger. 

And he would not be wrong. His provocation landed. I feel triggered. 

My immediate reaction? A hot, physical surge of anger. The jaw tightens. The shoulders rise. Heat moves up the neck and into the face. The stomach drops and clenches at the same time. There is a pressure in the chest, a quickening of the pulse, a sharpness behind the eyes. For a few seconds, my body is drafting the reply the professional self will never be allowed to send. 

Even though outrage-based provocations are widely used in the media landscape - especially on Social Media (platform incentives reward attention, reaction, correction, conflict, and sharing) - I know with absolute certainty that I cannot rise to his bait.

I'd be reacting on his terms, escalating the emotionally charged situation further. Instead, I have to remain rational. While the feelings are real, I cannot allow them to dictate the response. Emotions have to be managed, translated, and redirected back towards what Germans like to call "Sachebene" - the matter at hand.

So, the article had been rejected. PR consultants are used to rejection. Journalists reject pitches. Clients obviously reject drafts. The market rejects “exciting company news” with impressive consistency. I tell myself to breathe. It's your average Wednesday. A Serenity Prayer later, I can ignore the unwritten implication that, as the consultant, I should have known better, earlier, and preferably telepathically, that he had done a 180 on the topic. 

Professional me takes over. De-escalation it is. In my mind, I run through tactical options. Maybe through tactical empathy? By naming and labeling the client’s frustration? Mirroring the criticism to acknowledge the perceived problem, and asking calibrated questions that move the exchange away from accusation and back towards a workable brief. 

If that sounds familiar to you, you have probably read "Never Split the Difference". If that sounds absurdly dramatic as a reference point for an email about an article draft, you have never had a highly emotional, status-sensitive client who treats a draft as a test of whether the agency has properly recognised his authority, intelligence, and control over the narrative. 

I start typing, mentally going through the list of don'ts 

• Do not react. 
• Do not defend by saying: "We did not invent this in a dark room five minutes ago.”
• Do not say “This is the argument we have been using for months.”
• Do not send screenshots or attachments for "Context, Since Apparently We Are Doing This Now.” Do not ask what he would consider “better drafts”.

This is the moment when the job is no longer about communication, but emotional labour: the disciplined conversion of anger into a language that the relationship can survive. Every sentence has to do two things at once. It has to respond to the substance of the criticism, and it has to absorb the force with which that criticism was delivered. It is time-consuming work. Every word has weight. Every sentence has to be checked not only for meaning, but for temperature. Too cold, and it reads as dismissive. Too warm, and it sounds like surrender. Too direct, and it escalates. Too vague, and it fails to move the work forward. 

It is exhausting, performative, and the least honest part of my job. 

Still, composure, reassurance, responsiveness, and the ability to absorb irritation and return it as professionalism are becoming ever more relevant parts of what the agency sells. What has changed in 2026 is the operating environment. 

PR consultants are being asked to create certainty in a system that has become less certain. The media side of the job is narrowing. Access is shrinking. Onclusive’s 2026 PR statistics report that 42% of in-house respondents and 52% of agency respondents see fewer journalists covering industry news as a major challenge. The same report notes that 30% of in-house respondents and 44% of agency respondents cite a shrinking pool of journalists willing to build relationships with brands. In other words, there are fewer doors to knock on, fewer people behind those doors, and more brands trying to squeeze through them at the same time.

At the same time, the expectation of proof has intensified. It is no longer enough for PR to create visibility, shape narratives, or secure credible placements. Clients want evidence. Numbers. Dashboards. Attribution. Proof that communications activity is connected to revenue, growth, employer branding, investor confidence, lead generation, or whatever business priority is currently being defended in the boardroom. More than half of PR professionals surveyed by Onclusive said they struggle to connect PR and communications work to revenue and growth. Almost half also struggle to prove ROI beyond vanity metrics.

The German backdrop makes it even worse. The country is not exactly moving through 2026 with a spring in its step. The economic mood is strained, to put it politely. There is weak growth, industrial restructuring, cost pressure, cautious investment, geopolitical uncertainty, and the persistent feeling that the old German promise — stability, engineering strength, export confidence, incremental progress — no longer works as smoothly as it used to.  

You can see the strain most clearly in the industries that used to carry a lot of Germany’s confidence. The automotive sector, for example, is dealing with falling demand, Chinese competition, overcapacity, restructuring, and fears of mass job losses. Recent reporting on Volkswagen’s restructuring describes possible plant closures and tens of thousands of jobs at risk, while the wider German car industry has warned of severe employment consequences without major structural decisions.

That matters for PR because clients are not neutral readers of drafts; in fact, sometimes they are not even readers themselves. Increasingly, they copy and paste the text into ChatGPT or any other LLM, and return 2 minutes later with the confidence of someone who has outsourced thinking to a machine trained to be agreeable.

But whether the criticism is human, AI-assisted, or produced by the cursed hybrid of both, the client does not come to the text with any form of detachment. They come with personal pressure, emotional context, and the market jitters in their nervous system.

Especially in this economy, the text is no longer just a draft for an article.  A lot of times, the clients see it as the article: the one that gets a new contract signed, if it speaks directly enough to what prospective buyers already want to hear. The consequence is predictable. The consequence is predictable. The argument may have worked ten times. The empirical evidence may even support it. But by the eleventh round, one flattering anecdote outweighs the pattern. “Better drafts” are needed. 

So I write another version, because in this economy, the job is also ensuring that the relationship continues to survive. 

More on the job: 

• What happens when your politics flinch at your own work
• How Modern Work Culture Turned ‘Leadership Training’ Into a Meme
• The Myth of the All-Powerful Story: What They Don’t Tell You About Storytelling