PR-Bridge

Dear Bill,

Your post on public relations and marketing is compelling. Upfront, I admit that I am in complete disagreement. I teach from an IMC perspective and believe that students who are PR “purists” or who learn from that point of view are entering the workforce at a disadvantage.

Based on my own decade-long career as a “communicator” (rather than PR and/or Marketing label) at companies like Ernst & Young, Fleishman-Hillard, and Bank of America, and my own teaching, I don’t see how PR can be “on board” in one sense, as you say, “support[ing] the marketing effort,” then out of the equation in another.

From my perspective, the breakdown is separating marketing and PR into silos within an organization, rather than looking at them from a truly integrated viewpoint. It is not about which branch will “dominate the partnership,” but building a single organizational point of view (Management by Objectives) that places the needs of the company/organization ahead of differences between marketing and PR.

Communications management, using a centralized view, then focuses on aligning all an organization’s efforts toward mutual ends. Thus, a PR professional may use her skills best in an internal communications setting, developing an intranet content system or designing a better employee-based newsletter, while at the same time, a marketer is doing product development work or presenting at a trade conference, but BOTH are working off the central plan set out in a MBO setting.

I am also not sure that the two-way symmetrical model is important enough to criticize marketing, just because they do not preach the same jargon. Grunig’s two-way model, like his (and his co-authors’) so-called “Excellence Theory” is filled with logical holes.

And, is it unrealistic to think that public relations practitioners can (or should) “walk a fine line between organizational goals and goals of society – kind of like an ombudsman or arbiter?” PR professionals are a part of this organizational conscious, but so are all other employees across the organizational chart. We could call into question how business schools and universities in general teach ethics, just as we are questioning the role of PR courses.

By labeling marketing “our evil twins” and using language like “surreptitious selling,” “infiltrate influencer groups,” and “the sell job,” you are guiding readers to see sales as a negative. I do not see companies and organizations selling products as an automatic bad thing.

Where I completely agree with you is in how the problem of misunderstanding PR begins. At the University of South Florida, we require students to take Economics, Management, and Marketing courses, and many minor in Business. However, because of admission requirements to get into the School of

Mass Communications, business students cannot get into our classes. However, I think the challenge runs deeper. Marketing professors, business school deans, etc., have no real interest in adding PR to their curriculum. So, future execs are getting their knowledge of public relations from a part of a chapter in a marketing textbook. All the sudden, they think they understand the profession. Obviously, the number of PR crises that occur daily show this isn’t the case.

And, I do not throw all the blame on business schools or scholars. As a profession,  public relations has a long history of doing little or nothing toward getting these distinctions softened. After all these years, there are still arguments about the true definition of PR, like that matters in the bigger picture.

You wonder if you are “fighting a war of semantics” at the end of your post. I think you are correct in questioning the relationship between the two disciplines. I just see the battle differently. What we should be fighting for is to get public relations into business schools.

The PR profession also needs to be a part of this effort, initiating a communications campaign to reeducate the public about the field and its historical and current benefits. It’s all our concern (and fault, perhaps?) if people assume that PR is nothing more than pimping the Hiltons and rap stars of the world.

Respectfully yours,

Bob