subject: Pr As A Complete Marketing Solution [print this page] Public Relations is a quite generic term which covers the whole field of communication, marketing, profile raising and management strategy. It is about how an organisation is viewed by the wider world, the message it conveys and the publics identification with its service or product.
In the words of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA): Public Relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their publics.
The means through which important information is projected are many and diverse, and frequently vary depending upon the nature of the target audience. For example a company communicating with its own workforce would not in all likelihood use a public medium like a newspaper advertisement to pass its information on, whilst news of a new product aiming to achieve widespread recognition would not be very usefully served by its mere inclusion as a footnote in the companys monthly newsletter.
Edward Bernays, considered by many people to be the founder of modern PR, claimed it was a management function which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures and interests of an organisationfollowed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance.
The root of Bernays analysis lies in an understanding of the role of management in identifying existing public attitudes and using them as a means through which to inform company policy, in this way responding to a need as opposed to creating one.
Once one understands this principle and uses it as a benchmark around which a companys PR strategy can be developed it is merely a question of taking advantage of the various media available for spreading the message to maximum effect.
Building an organisations PR necessitates an understanding of all that is effective in todays world for communicating with the target audience. This takes us beyond routine advertising and into the exciting realm of web development, search engine optimisation (SEO) and social marketing. It means building a separate (but co-ordinated) presence in each and every area of activity and of developing that presence around a corporate message that is sharp and catchy but at the same time able to offer a tantalising snapshot of the product itself.
PR therefore is about more than just sending out good news to as broad an audience as possible. It is just as much about managing the message in a way that enables the public perception of a product or service to be the one that you wish it to have.
