PR Studies

In two words: what is public relations?

More than half of the readers to this blog come here as a result of a search. 

Someone arrived having typed meaning pr into Google. An archived post at PR Studies came second to Wikipedia for this cryptic search string.

Who were they and what were they thinking? I can imagine it was a student attempting some last-minute 'research' before an essay deadline.

Well, let me disappoint you. Google isn't yet a complete library containing all the wisdom of the world. I suggest you view a search as the start of your research, not the end.

In that spirit, here are some helpful pointers. I can't write your essays because that wouldn't be right, and I don't know what your essay question is. But I can provide some straightforward two-word explanations of public relations and some sources for further reading (yes, that conventional activity that still mostly involves printed books). What follows may help explain [the] meaning [of] PR (or rather several competing meanings).

(This is a blog entry, so the referencing is not comprehensive, but you'll be able to find the sources at my PR Books site.)

Communication management: This is the 'classic' two-word perspective on public relations, which Grunig and Hunt defined as the 'management of communication between an organization and its publics'.

This appears to be self-evident, but there are some issues with it. Public relations is not the only discipline involved in communicating, so you need to explain the relationship between PR and marketing / marcoms (Kitchen, Kotler et al) and between public relations and corporate communication (van Riel, Cornelissen).

Then there's no hint in this definition of why communication is important to organisations. Hence another two-word description of PR:

Relationship management: Cutlip, Center and Broom's famous definition adds in the purpose of PR:

'Public relations is the management function that establishes and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the publics on whom its success or failure depends.'

The main scholars of PR as relationship management are Ledingham and Bruning, though Phillips and Young recently conceptualised public relations as 'relationship optimisation'. I view stakeholder management approaches to be consistent with the relationship management approach.

One debate surrounds whether this theoretical approach is compatible with - or opposed to Grunig's theories. For the record, Ledingham has written that 'the notion of relationship management is consistent with major concepts such as systems theory and the two-way symmetrical model of Grunig and Hunt'.

It's easy to conceptualise public relations as relationship management, but my questions surround how this works in practice. What does a relationship optimiser do, and what tools and techniques do they use to achieve their goals?

Reputation management: The UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) defines PR as 'about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say, and what others say about you.'

They're not quite on their own, but this view is outside the academic mainstream, with the main champions of reputation research being Fombrun and van Riel.

Reputation is a flexible concept that works for individuals, websites, corporations and public sector bodies. But critics have challenged this approach since public relations is not the sole contributing factor in corporate reputations. So once again, there are some definitional and domains issues with this concept.

Ideas management: Not a peer-approved academic concept, but merely my lecture theatre attempt to distinguish public relations from event management for first year students. Event management is a separate discipline: PR people view it as a subset of their craft, while event managers view PR as a small part of their job (publicising the event).

Ideas management works as a concept because it explains the role of PR-as-publicity (the best job in the world was a brilliant idea to promote Queensland Tourism that achieved global resonance). Most academics dismiss or even ignore publicity (Grunig and Hunt linked it to propaganda).

Ideas management also suggests what happens at the more exalted level of 'issues management' (the discipline that is often linked to crisis management and to public affairs). It works with internal communication too since the role of the practitioner is to provide a coherent narrative to explain an organisation's strategy and the role of employees in helping to achieve organisational objectives.

Other concepts: Postmodernists and critical theorists dismiss any attempt to provide a single definition of public relations, so their theories are excluded from this brief review.

I have summarised the main managerial approaches to public relations, but there are others that don't fit the managerial perspective so well. For example, the rhetorical enactment (Heath) and communitarian (Kruckeberg and Stark) approaches. These can wait for another post.

Comments

In two words: what is public relations?

More than half of the readers to this blog come here as a result of a search. 

Someone arrived having typed meaning pr into Google. An archived post at PR Studies came second to Wikipedia for this cryptic search string.

Who were they and what were they thinking? I can imagine it was a student attempting some last-minute 'research' before an essay deadline.

Well, let me disappoint you. Google isn't yet a complete library containing all the wisdom of the world. I suggest you view a search as the start of your research, not the end.

In that spirit, here are some helpful pointers. I can't write your essays because that wouldn't be right, and I don't know what your essay question is. But I can provide some straightforward two-word explanations of public relations and some sources for further reading (yes, that conventional activity that still mostly involves printed books). What follows may help explain [the] meaning [of] PR (or rather several competing meanings).