Katie Coetzee on why PR cannot exist as a single thread, and how weaving it into the wider business narrative is what builds real influence.

Over 17 years, Katie Coetzee has developed and led communications strategies across luxury hospitality, technology, travel, interior design, art, fashion and beauty. Her work is not that of a surface-level generalist moving between categories, but of a strategist who goes deep within each sector to understand what gives a brand real credibility, and how to position it with clarity and intent to the audiences who shape its reputation.

“Lifestyle as a category sounds broad,” she says, “but that breadth is the point. The brands that matter tend to exist across more than one world.” That connective thinking is what Lume Agency, the Johannesburg-based consultancy she founded, is built around.

Coetzee’s insights and understanding have sharpened over nearly two decades in a constantly evolving space. It’s clear that  PR works best not as a standalone function, but as part of a genuinely integrated strategy. Integrated in the structural sense: co-created with sales and marketing from the outset, aligned to commercial objectives, and built so that each discipline strengthens the others.

“The best work I’ve been part of is always the work where the communications thinking was in the room when the broader strategy was being shaped,” she says. “Not received as a brief after decisions had already been made. That’s when it compounds.”

When PR is conceived downstream, handed a finished position to execute against it produces coverage. But it rarely produces the kind of sustained brand momentum that shifts how a business is understood over time. Coetzee has spent her career working as close to the strategic centre as possible, which is why her relationships with clients extend well beyond media relations into positioning, partnership development, and the editorial thinking that defines how a brand is perceived across years, not just cycles.

There is also, she notes, a case for PR that has never been easier to make: it is more measurable than it has ever been, and the assets it creates endure long after the moment of coverage itself.

“There’s a persistent idea that PR is something you feel rather than something you measure,” she says. “That’s no longer entirely accurate. Editorial coverage, executed properly, creates assets with a long lifespan which are powerful reputation pieces and credible marketing assets. They shape how search engines index a brand. They inform the content that AI tools draw from when someone is researching a category, a destination, a product. A well-placed piece of coverage becomes part of a  robust infrastructure.”

That framing, PR as infrastructure rather than activity, is central to how she approaches her work in luxury hospitality, where she manages communications across large cultural festivals, restaurant groups, beauty, skincare and hair care brands, tech and consumer electronics brands, FMCG products, wine and spirits, fashion houses and several hotel properties in South Africa, among other clients. Campaigns are built with longevity in mind: aligned to international awards cycles, editorial calendars, and a consistent brand narrative that accumulates authority over time rather than producing peaks with nothing between them.

The SEO dimension has become particularly significant. As AI-driven discovery reshapes how people find and evaluate brands, the editorial credibility that PR creates has taken on a new function. Coverage in the right publications, with the right language, positions a brand within the conversations that matter, not only to readers, but to the systems that increasingly determine what people encounter.

“It has made the case for quality over volume considerably stronger,” she says. “One piece of genuinely well-positioned coverage does more work than a dozen releases fired into the market. That has always been true. Now it’s visible in the data.”

-The range of sectors Coetzee works across — technology, travel, interiors, design, fashion, beauty, hospitality — is not incidental to her practice. It reflects a deliberate position: that the most interesting brands tend to live at the intersection of categories, and that understanding those intersections requires genuine familiarity with each one.

It also means that the strategic thinking she brings to one sector regularly informs another. The way a design brand builds editorial authority has lessons for a hotel. The way a fashion house manages cultural relevance has lessons for a lifestyle technology company. Cross-sector pattern recognition, she has found, is one of the most underused resources in communications strategy.

“You notice things in one world that haven’t arrived yet in another,” she says. “And if you’re paying attention, you can apply them before the conversation has caught up. I don’t look for trends to attach to, I look at the developing creative consciousness and movements that emerge in various sectors and how those touch points can be woven into various messaging opportunities as a common thread of relevance and interest.” 

That thinking became the inspiration behind her agency name, LUME. A phonetic play on the word “loom” — a device used for weaving — LUME is driven by the idea of bringing multiple threads together to create something cohesive, considered and impactful.

Well into her career, that is still what interests her most: not executing well within a single lane, but seeing where things connect and building communications strategy that works precisely because it was never conceived in isolation.

The industry has changed substantially around her. Digital, social, AI, the contraction of certain media models and the emergence of others. Her approach has evolved alongside all of it. The underlying conviction has not.

PR, done properly, is not a department. It is a layer of thinking that runs through everything a brand does in public. When it is built that way – integrated, intentional, and commercially grounded, the results are not just visible. They endure.

*Katie Coetzee is the founder and CEO of  LUME Agency, a PR and communications consultancy based in South Africa.*