Homework 1: How markerters and PR practitioners view PR

Nowadays marketing is completely different than it was before. The main reasons of changes are media development, bigger budget to all the campaigns, the influence of the environment and different attitude to customer. All these changes led to development of companies using marketing communications activities which include advertising, sales promotion, public relations and personal selling, to provide better services, attract and engage new customers.

Definitions can help to identify the difference in the first place.

According to UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) marketing is “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements profitably”. It means that if marketers want their business to be successful they need to build good reputation of their company and to build good relationships with their customers. In addition to this, marketers are using PR practitioners to help them to deal with their publics. The reason why they using PR is because firstly the company needs to gain good reputation to get more customers. So as UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations definition of PR is: “Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics”.

In order to this, public practitioners are very important to marketing because it helps to build good relationships between company and its publics, and to maintain good reputation.

Marketers view to PR

As Ralph Tench (2009) showed the chart about how starting, growing and mature organisations are using PR. For example, organisation which starting the new business is using PR for face – to – face communications, to meet new people, attract different audiences. Also, they are trying to show what kind of product they are selling and what kind of services they provide. Basically, PR “is undertaken as marketing duties” because it is used to write press releases, run the conferences, use social media to show the product and keep updating the news and information on company’s website. So in the beginning of organization’s development PR plays only an introducing role. In addition to this, for the growing stage PR’s role is changing because the organisation meets more challenges and its objectives are a bit different. In the growth PR I orientated not only in marketing communications but also in internal communication. It means that before dealing with other audiences organisation needs to have good relationship with their employees, because they are the public which knows the best what is happening inside the company. Besides, it is very important to build good relationships between employees too because team working provides more effective results. The third part of chart is about maturity period of the organisation and as well they view PR in different perspective. Organisation needs more than only PR consultancy, they give more power to PR practitioner because as a mature organisation they need to keep interested loyal customers and attract more publics. PR department is responsible for wider range of activities like charity giving, inform shareholders, be ready how to manage crisis and to show more interest in their publics.

PR practitioners' view to PR 

To begin with, public relations is about two – way communication between an organization and its publics. It focuses on organizational actions and process how to provide that information to different publics. On the other hand, there is a difference between marketing and PR because Jacquie L’Etang (2008), claimed that public is not “’customer care” or simply “promotion”” or being likeable or not, it is about analysing the problem and effects to an organization and honestly provide the right information. PR practitioners view PR like argument and case – making industry which requires all ways of communication and critical understanding about the issues. The issues might contain many different spheres like environmental, organizational, local, national or international, so PR practitioners’ job is to analyse, evaluate and solve the problem through communicating with different publics. Publics are also different, so PR needs to evaluate problem from different perspectives like culture, economic stability and interests. Basically, PR is presenting not only organizational issues, but also technological, economic changes. Also give the information about society problems and governmental aims. Besides, to announce any issues to the publics which might affect publics’ motivation, deal with public complaints, and listen what people want. So the biggest difference between marketers and PR practitioners’ point of view to PR is that PR is taking care for the whole picture, the main issues which includes not only organization. It looks for long – term communication and is non - profit, which will help to improve the relationship between publics and organization or issue and maintain goodwill. While marketers need communication with their customers for increasing sales and promote the product to keep the brand on top.

Examples:

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