Trust is a Must: How the EON Group Became One of Asia’s top PR companies, According to Chairman and CEO Junie del Mundo
Junie Del Mundo, Chairman and CEO of EON Group, shares lessons from a career that has taken the company to the top of the world.
Junie Del Mundo is on top of the world. As Chairman and CEO, he leads the EON Group, a public relations company he founded in 1998, at the turn of the millennium. Under his leadership, EON has grown and expanded by leaps and bounds. In 2017, it was named by PRWeek as one of the top PR agencies in the Asia Pacific region and the world. From its early days as a five-person events management company, EON has transformed into a multi-faceted company with over a hundred employees. Its humble beginnings are, as startups go, a common enough story–yet why did EON succeed so dramatically when other companies never reached the heights that EON did? How did the company achieve its success? What is so special about Junie Del Mundo’s leadership? And what lessons does he have to impart?
For a leader at the very top of his game, Del Mundo talks a lot about trust. He digresses into arts and culture. He focuses on hard work and contributing to society. His point of view is a unique one, with a wide perspective of trends and changes that are shaping the marketing and PR industry.
The Business Manual joined Junie Del Mundo at the art-filled offices of EON to discuss the remarkable rise of the company he leads, its origins and its plans for the future. Throughout our conversation with him, he shared numerous valuable lessons for both PR practitioners and entrepreneurs.
The Public Relations Universe
To many Filipinos, public relations is close to their hearts–a part of their daily lives. They are avid followers of celebrities and influencers, and they’ve seen firsthand how PR can spark conversations and shape public opinion. Many understand how brands spread their message to different audiences, and some even participate in the process as digital micro influencers.
Del Mundo begins by explaining that public relations is much more than influencer marketing. To him–and other like-minded PR practitioners–it is a far bigger landscape.
“You have to think of public relations as an entire universe,” he says. “And then digital marketing and influencer marketing are just part and parcel of this big universe.”
A limited understanding of PR from the public is familiar to Del Mundo; he recalls when PR was perceived as being just about press releases. Speaking about those differences, he says, “Before, it was the other way around. It’s the brands, it’s the product, wherein you understand our world, and you are the consumers. So it was a one-way communication before. Now, this is a whole conversation that the landscape has become quite complicated. And there’s a lot of noise around it.”
Despite the rapid changes in technology and the world, some things remain the same. After all, the role of public relations lies in communicating with audiences to change perception. Yet PR has always been difficult to define and measure, as PR deals with hearts and minds. How does Del Mundo explain the work of EON?
“We make heads and tails of this noise,” he says. “We make sure that the messages of our clients are understood. And most importantly, what we try to develop is that, not only that our clients connect with target audiences, but there is a relationship that is developed that is built on trust.”
There’s that word again: trust. This isn’t the first time Junie Del Mundo mentions it, and it won’t be his last. But, in many ways, it is his most important lesson.
After all, public relations is a business built on trust. It is this trust between stakeholders and agencies, between agencies and audiences that has made public relations a rapidly growing global industry worth an estimated USD 20 billion, according to 2024 research.
Lesson #1: ‘No Safety Net’
Junie Del Mundo began his career in the foreign service. At first blush, it may seem like a distant place to start, but Del Mundo insists that his work in foreign service was not very different from public relations.
“Every day is an exercise in public relations,” he says of the time he spent in foreign service. “Every day is an exercise in crisis communication because we deal with multi stakeholders in the foreign service. And relationship building is very crucial for us because we should be able to connect to a community…
“The foreign service is an exercise in public relations. It’s an exercise in relationship building. The difference is in the private sector you are there pushing the interest of your clients, pushing your own business agenda. But there, you are really entering a battle, and it’s a battle for country, on behalf of country.”
In 1998, Junie Del Mundo left this career to put up EON. The company began as a small events company with just five employees.
Del Mundo recalls, “We worked in a cramped office space not bigger than this [room]. But through sheer hard work, I was really able to grow it.”
Even while Del Mundo successfully grew the business, with EON eventually taking on a larger public relations agency role, working in PR was very different from the foreign service.
He says, “I really took away the safety net and the very safe world of diplomacy, of the foreign service and entered into a brave new world. And that is the world of business.”
This charge into uncertainty has been echoed by numerous successful entrepreneurs. It is estimated that 90% of startups fail, according to research from Startup Genome. Del Mundo’s experience underscore the real risk involved in putting up your own business.
Lesson #2: ‘Organize the Experience, Control the Substance’
While there have been, and continue to be, many PR agencies in the industry, EON found itself catapulted to success. Was it really just hard work, like Del Mundo claims? Why did they succeed when others failed? Was there a breakthrough insight involved? A secret sauce, as it’s called among entrepreneurs?
Del Mundo shares an important factor that differentiated EON’s work from the rest. He recounts, “I always tell this story that there was one time I attended a major conference, and it was Sharon Cuneta who was the entertainer… So when I asked people when they got out of the conference room, and I asked them, ‘So what do you think of the conference?’ [They replied,] ‘Oh! Sharon Cuneta was very good!’ ‘Oh! The food was good!’ I said, ha! They never really remembered the messages of the company who hosted the conference.”
It was then that Del Mundo found his early formula for success.
He says, “Then I realized that was the niche I was going to fulfill. We organized the experience. Yet we control also the substance. So it’s two-pronged. And that actually was the secret sauce in the 90s… We handled both the substance, the logistics, the organization, and creating that whole audience experience. And that helped us, that differentiated us from the market.”
EON PR would handle the whole experience, the whole communication–a one-stop shop. It would also carefully craft the messaging, working with clients and finding the insight that would make a crucial difference for audiences.
Lesson #3: Innovate Constantly
It wasn’t long–within EON’s first 10 years–until the success of EON became a financial reality. Junie Del Mundo remembers the moment he learned that the company had revenues that surpassed the PHP 100 million mark. He calls it “my proudest moment” but says that it was also “one of the scariest moments of my life.”
He compares the change in scale to driving a boat. “Just think of it as,” he says, “in the beginning, you are riding a bangka [outrigger canoe], now it’s a whole ship. And moving a business having that much topline, and then you are increasing it further, ain’t gonna be easy. So that was really the fear inside me. What was in store? What are the next steps? What are the next challenges that we have to hurdle?”
The first, and greatest challenge, according to Del Mundo, was “how to keep innovating.” He asked himself, “What was that secret sauce that we need to discover? And what can again we bring to the table in an ever-evolving environment?”
The answer for EON involved many things. Digital was poised to explode in the 2000s, and the company took advantage of that. At the same time, Del Mundo had to manage how his own company was changing, with a larger headcount composed of younger hires.
“So that was when digital comes in already,” he says, “and you have different generations coming into the workforce, different products, new ideas. So what do we need? What are the things that we needed to innovate?”
From a management perspective, professionalizing the company was also important at this point. Del Mundo says, “…managing a business that is worth 10 million or 20 million is totally different from managing a 100 million peso business.“
Today, EON is led by a professional team of experienced marketers and PR practitioners who handles day-to-day operation, with Junie Del Mundo taking a broader leadership role for the whole group of companies as Chairman and CEO.
“Basically you can say that I am the north star. I am the guiding light of the company,” he says. “I try to steer it in a direction wherein the people working for us will discover a different world, new worlds, new trends. And I try to open doors for them.”
Lesson #5: Have a Bigger Mission
This big-picture perspective as Chairman of EON Group has broadened Del Mundo’s mission well beyond revenues and profits. It has led him to lead in the various communities he is a part of and contribute to nation-building. He is a member of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP), and he plays an active role in a number of non-profit organizations, such as the Kythe Foundation. He was a member of the board of Hands On Manila and Museo Pambata. And recently, he has joined the board of Rise Against Hunger. He is also a trustee of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.
Why are the arts and culture so important? According to Del Mundo, “I always say that if we don’t know and do not understand culture, then we don’t have a soul. We will lose our soul. So it’s very important for every Filipino to be able to understand and have a deep understanding of our culture and the manifestations of our culture in the different artforms.”
Del Mundo continues, saying, “I also try to make [the team at EON] understand that the world we live in, we are not here just to think of ourselves, not to think of profits and the bottom line but also how can we contribute to the communities where we are moving around, to country–what’s our mission to country–and to the world.”
Lesson #4: Trust, Again
Today’s EON is a massive, professionally run organization with offices in Manila and Dubai. As PR has changed through the decades, so has EON. It has successfully innovated continuously by embracing all aspects of the digital landscape we move in today, from influencer marketing to new products to the tools that big data has made possible. And yet, it all goes back to trust.
Junie Del Mundo explains “[Trust] is really the front, back, and center of what we do. Because if you do not establish trust in the world that we are moving in, you will, and especially in this particular time, it is very easy, especially for the younger generation, to say or to know if you are being truthful or not.”
For this reason, in 2011, Junie Del Mundo and EON began the Philippine Trust Index, a comprehensive study on trust among different stakeholder groups in the Philippines. Now called the Philippine Trust Study, it takes an in-depth look at trust drivers in six different institutions: the media, academe, government, business, NGOs and the Church.
“Now this is all built on data, built on quantitative analysis,” Del Mundo explains, “And that’s what we use as the backbone of our campaigns. So it’s not only the Philippine Trust Study. We also overlay it with digital tools. So here we use the big data. And all of this is instilled into a big idea and then from there, to develop a strategy and then of course your tactics and your executions.”
Advice for Young Entrepreneurs
In parting, Junie Del Mundo gives young entrepreneurs a few pieces of advice:
- Be passionate.
Del Mundo says simply, “Because if you have passion, then you will be able to meet a lot of obstacles.”
- The value of hard work.
At the mention of hard work, Del Mundo talks at length. Clearly, he is passionate about the importance of work ethic. ”I always say that the secret to success is hard work,” he says.
- Build your fort.
Aside from hard work, Del Mundo’s advice specifically advises entrepreneurs to strengthen the backbone of their business. “If you are an entrepreneur,” he says, “you will be put into a situation wherein you feel that you are always on the edge. You feel always uncertain. You are always questioning yourself. But also the most important lesson that I learned is that you should strengthen first your fort, meaning the backbone of your business is something you should build immediately from the get up and go.”
- Community
“Always, when you’re working, you don’t only think of yourself. You always have to think of people around you that will benefit from your hard work, meaning you have to think of your employees… You should always have foresight that yes, I’m a businessman, yes, I’m an entrepreneur, but how can I contribute to society at large?”
Summarizing these important lessons, Junie Del Mundo graces us all with, not just advice for entrepreneurs, but advice for life, from the public relations universe. He says, “It’s really hard work, build your fort, make sure that you think of your own community, your internal stakeholders and external community at large. Then it has to be coupled by your passion. That’s why, in here, our values are love of country, being Pinoy, diversity, because these are things that would really make the journey very rich, the journey through life, the journey through business.”
Text VINCENT SALES
Photography ED SIMON
Videography EXCEL PANLAQUE of KLIQ, INC
Art Direction ANDREA SANGCO
Sittings Editor ROCKY TEODORO
Shoot Coordination TONI MENDOZA
Shot on Location EON GROUP OFFICES
