Professional public relations executives are “safe”, according to Peter Hargreaves, co-founder and executive director of Hargreaves Lansdown, the independent financial adviser. The downside is that they all too often provide “a bland message”.

For that reason, Hargreaves Lans-down does not employ an individual or team whose sole responsibility is public relations. Instead the FTSE 100 listed company devolves the role of liaising with the press to five executives who are also experts in the company’s affairs, such as financial planning or pensions. The benefit of such an arrangement, says Mr Hargreaves, is that “a journalist can talk to someone immediately who is knowledgable on a financial subject. It gives a better service than putting a team of people in the middle between the journalist and the expert.” The downside is that they might go off-message: “You just have to live with it. I am well-known for my faux-pas.”

The public relations industry may seem omnipresent, but there are still some companies that purposely choose to have a limited or even non-existent press or public relations department and do not hire external agencies. Warren Buffett spurns spin-doctors. Press calls, investor queries and sundry other requests for the billionaire investor are handled by his assistant Debbie Bosanek and he communicates with shareholders in an annual meeting in which he ex-plains his yearly letter to them. Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors, opts to do his own public relations – although, with his supersonic vision for Hyperloop, he is often perceived as the personification of a walking PR machine.