It’s time once and for all for publicity and public relations to separate. My research into the way that public relations has evolved over the last century shows that it has been in two distinct forms since the 1950s. Before then, publicity and media relations were just seen as a way of delivering an organisation’s public relations objectives and strategy. After consumer marketing took off in the 1960s and brands went world-wide, publicity appropriated the title of PR and became mainstream practice. Public relations, as it was recognised back then, became the minority method, mainly carried out in corporations and governments.
In 1988, the UK PR pioneer Tim Traverse-Healy very bluntly spoke about this separation:
“Communication activities such as product advertising, product publicity, editorial publicity or sales promotion … sometimes masquerade under the banner title of public relations but in reality they are substantially dedicated to the short term sales objectives of a corporate, namely the increased take-up of products or services … Product publicity is not public relations although some opportunists fast to jump on a bandwagon would like us to believe it so.”
A quarter of a century on, the representation of “publicity = PR” is unmistakeable. It is at the heart of the constant bickering over definitions, professional standards, measurement and evaluation and soul-searching over education and training.
My view is that it’s time for publicity to separate from public relations. There are large numbers of talented publicity practitioners who find little similarity with strategic communicators and see no purpose in organisations like CIPR and PRCA. Yet there is no home for them which supports their businesses, helps with training and education and recognises them as a distinct practice in its own right.
Last year, I proposed that CIPR reinvent itself as the organisation which focuses on the strategic communicators. Out of an estimated 60,000 people employed in “PR work” in the UK, only 9,000 are CIPR members (15 per cent). That indicates that 85 per cent choose not to join CIPR (or can’t afford to) or see themselves as separate practice which CIPR does not represent.
Responses came in two forms – CIPR supporters saying “oh dear, oh dear”, the organisation needs to cover the whole spectrum for legitimacy; and publicity folks saying that CIPR is not relevant.
History shows there’s been a need for professional recognition of public relations since the 1920s. The PR industry has not, however, developed the characteristics of a profession with distinct features such as widely-agreed definitions, practices, education, regulation, body of knowledge, and so on. This is because it is in a constant crisis of identity: craft publicity is always mixed up with managerial-style strategic communication.
By encouraging publicity to create its own persona and structures, public relations (with its professional and industry bodies) can focus on organisational communication in strategic forms and so develop professional standing. Whether this results in some form of regulated or licensed profession is less relevant than having a clear understanding of its identity, practices and value.
It is time to change and for publicity and public relations to separate and take different paths for development. It is a divorce that can produce mutual benefits.
Written by Prof Tom Watson PhD, Professor of Public Relations, The Media School, Bournemouth University.
Tom is a former consultancy MD and is a fellow of both CIPR and PRCA. He was chairman of PRCA from 2000-2002.
Stephen Waddington has written a response on PRmoment to Tom’s blog.
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A thought provoking post and I can see a lot of merit in the idea.
I’m not entirely comfortable with the term ‘strategic communication’ as an umbrella term as it implies that what we do is just about communication, when in fact a lot of it should be about behaviour and what we do. It therefore doesn’t clearly separate publicity from public relations.
One of my consistent themes when lecturing or speaking at conferences is the need to understand the difference between the tools of public relations and the purpose and practice of it. It’s quite legitimate to use PR tools (e.g. the humble age-old news release) for publicity and marketing communications, but that doesn’t make it PR.
Absolutely agree with your call, Tom.
I am always amazed when clients say they are spending a lot with a newspaper, so they know they can get good publicity from the paper’s journalists (sadly, these days they are sometimes right, but they don’t understand the concept of editorial independence).
I guess at a practical level, advertorial is sometimes mixed into the PR brief – purely because PR people are good writers. I have turned around copy for advertisements twice this week, as an add-on to the PR we are doing for them.
There is a real irony here that the communications industry should be so bad at explaining what we do and so unclear about our own role?!
You mention that 85 per cent of people in PR work ‘choose not to join CIPR (or can’t afford to) or see themselves as separate practice which CIPR does not represent’. There are also those who just don’t see the relevance of the CIPR to their work – I am a reluctant member, more to do my bit for our industry than because I feel the CIPR has anything to offer me or my business.
On a positive note, it’s good that you are raising this issue – let’s hope there is good debate on it!
Thanks for interesting thoughts and arguments. I support your argument but, based on the similar identity struggle in Sweden, think that re-branding of public relations is very difficult. At the department of strategic communication at Lund University(www.isk.lu.se), which is the leading platform for education and research in this field in Sweden, we use strategic communication as a concept (focusing communication processes from societal and organizational-managerial approaches) instead. In Denmark, close to us, most researchers use both strategic and corporate communication instead of public relations. Outside academica, in business, the concept of strategic communication, not damaged by historical imaginations of “PR”, is increasing its use, at least in our national context.
best regards
Jesper Falkheimer, Professor in Strategic Communication, Lund University, Sweden
Tom,
Well said. I whole heartily agree.
I think both (1. publicity / promotion / marketing communication (marcom) vs. 2 strategic communication / public relationships / strategic public relations ) can stand on their own. They may be two sides of the same coin – but they are two different sides.
It upsets me to see papers/blogs/award submissions on measurement talk about public relations measurement when they actually mean media relations or more precisely publicity / promotion / marketing communication measurement. At one point in time, media relations publicity or earned media was 90% or more of what PR people did. Not any more! Surely today, more of our “PR” time is spent on environmental scanning, research, understanding and building relationships with the organization’s stakeholders, anticipating and dealing with issues, participating in social media conversations, helping engage employees, working with internal clients in staff and line departments to help them meet their objectives, ETC., ETC.
There is a place for publicity, be it for brands or products or even for ‘reputation’ or the so-called ‘image’, but it can’t be seen or valued today as mainstream public relations or strategic communication work.
Hello Tom: I appreciate your call for separating publicity from PR, but more importantly, the need to professionalize PR. I have been writing about this need for several decades (look me up under the topic of “strategic communication” at Google Scholar)and have been in leadership position on several national or international bodies trying to promote it. Our field of strategic communication, or however the broader public will end up defining it if we don’t proactively and effectively do that ourselves, has long navel-gazed about definitions, boundaries, our BOK, means and ends, standards, etc. This is actually a healthy activity, should it lead to constructive action that might move the professional meter further. At some point, an association (or umbrella organization) must define standards, clearly articulate the net public benefits of strategic communication practice, the uniquely distinctive boundaries of the field, its ethics and values, promote its body of knowledge, and have the heft to regulate practice and enforce regulations should a practitioner who, claims to be a professional goes behaviourally astray. I’ve been calling for this for decades, and we have made some inconsistent progress, but we will not become strategic communication professionals until we build the appropriate set of professionalizing activities, resource them, and follow through. I remain mildly optimistic that it will happen during my lifetime, but there is no better time than the present to move it forward. Please keep communicating your views — I know that I will.
Tom – well stated. I’m in total agreement. This is the elephant in the room to which few have formed and shaped such a clear response, but just as others have said it will be difficult to implement. As you know, in the ‘Business Leaders in Communication Study 2012′ we talked about the need for a CRO (as in Reputation) in the C-suite to lead the corporate function and to work alongside the CMO and others. I look forward to further development.
Tom – I love this on several levels, not the least of which is its means of unhooking “marketing” from integrated communications. Our marketing brethren have hijacked PR — calling it content marketing — whilst the press agentry of Hollywood and politics reduce our perception of value. If publicity and press agentry are removed from the classical definition of public relations, we’re left with the business function that is most strategic. I like it like that. That way we can dispense with the faux measurement activities that really are more appropriately tagged to marketing, whilst we worry more about issues, reputation, understanding and relationships.
I’m slightly shocked (as a contrarian of sorts) to find so much agreement with my proposition. OK, it’s not always 100 per cent but you have all put forward evidence to support the terse 500 words that I wrote. Actually, I could have written the same article every five years for most of the past 50 years. Now we have social media and then they had telex and Gestetners (remember the inky fingers) but our predecessors were desperate to professionalise the practice. It was, for instance, a fundamental aim when IPRA was formed in the early 1950s, that PR was professionalised and separated from publicity.
Obviously, a case that has not been finalised for nearly 60 years may not be valid but the more I have researched current practice and delved into PR’s archives, the more I have been convinced that PR and publicity are separate practices. They may have had some distant antecedents (as do advertising, marcoms, direct marketing, etc) but the family relationship is now of cousins several times ‘removed’.
As I said in my blog, there is nothing “wrong” with publicity and there are many clever practitioners. Let them set up as a separate practice and both publicity and public relations can develop with clearer definition and purpose. At present, however, PR is in a discursive loop about what it is and why it isn’t a profession which has gone on for 60 years. It’s time to move on.
Do we continue to call the practice as ‘public relations’ or something else such as strategic communications or organisational communications? That’s downstream of the need to clearly separate the short-termist one-way methods of publicity from the objectives-led and two-way (however imperfect) of “true” public relations. Your views and contribution to the debate are welcomed.
Final note from Fraser Likely to me earlier today: the latest GAP Study (from the University of Southern California) found that corporations reported a significant decline (-11%) in budget percentage allocated to marketing/product public relations. From 2009 to 2011, spending on dropped from 61% to 50% of PR budgets.
Craig, so good to hear from you.
How do your views – and your’s Tom – relate to the new Melbourne Mandate produced by the Global Alliance and representing the views of PR/C membership associations?
http://melbournemandate.globalalliancepr.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Melbourne-Mandate-Text-final.pdf
Tom
The suitcase and wheel have lived in parallel for centuries. People’s lives are now made easier by combining the two.
This seems to symbolise to me how public relations theory has lived and operated in the same pace as the concept of ‘brand’ yet have spent their lives either oblivious of one another, or relegating each other to a very specific niche role.
The concept of ‘Brand’ and its central role as a communications vehicle has failed to be fully adopted by the public relations industry and by many of its academics. Instead they use vague concepts of ‘corporate reputation’ and ‘image’.
There is a fundamental need to reframe their paradigm of ‘brand’: a brand is often wrongly defined as a badge to mark a certain product or service. (And that was its original definition.)
The term is also used to describe a category of management: ‘Brand Managers’ typically look after a range of brand promotional activities (sometimes including public relations as a subset of its activities.)
If however, we define in what I call a ‘Big Brand Theory’ where a ‘Brand’ is the sum of the cognitive representation about an individual, product or organization – or in non-psycho speak – the sum of emotions, perceptions, and expectations held by others about an entity.
Does this not then equate or even subsumes terms currently used by public relations academics such as ‘corporate reputation’ and ‘image’. Is ‘Brand’ a better catch-all term for these concepts?
The mistake I feel many public relations practitioners make in dealing with the concept of ‘brand’ is to see it as either a label, or a corporate ID or a sub-branch of marketing, and a concept within the individual or organization, rather than a concept that sits externally to the entity.
Many public relations use ‘reputation’ as a cornerstone of public relations activity.‘Reputation’ is a by-product of behaviours, actions and words. I would liken it to a gas; it’s there, but it is nebulous, hard to see, or indeed to measure or manage.
Also, the role of brand in 21st century communications is likely to take on greater significance for six key reasons:
Firstly, neuroscience evidence shows that people absorb, understand information better if it is communicated within the structure of a story. The art of story-telling is being recognised as a key skill in effective communications.
By creating a narrative within which information can be contextualised creates a vehicle for people to understand the past, present and future for any data. The medium of story-telling also harnesses emotional dimensions within a situation.
Exposition is a story-teller’s technique of deepening an audience’s understanding and engagement with characters through the telling and development of the story, through the choices made by the character, and describing any changes in the character’s environment.
Public relations professional with their expertise in writing and telling news stories are ideally placed to capitalise on the growing importance of brand story-telling and brand exposition within communications.
Secondly, there will be greater appreciation of the distinction between ‘characterization’ and ‘character’.
While studying on a film scriptwriting course I had an epiphany when I came across the distinction between ‘characterization’ and ‘character’; within the mechanics of story-telling characterization describes the surface detail of an actor within the narrative. In brand terms this can include certain elements of a Brand’s iconography and style. (Note; a Brand ≠ logo. Two of the world’s best know brands – the Mafia and Al Qaeda do not have a logo.)
A ‘character’ however, is defined by the choices it makes. Whatever choices are made defines the character. Real-world choices truly define who you are – and what you are not.
The prime influence on Brand character – the real qualities of when it says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – are its actions. Public Relations counsel rooted in understanding a context and an environment is ideally suited to advising an individual or organization on how its choices will impact on its Brand.
Thirdly, within the concept of Brand public relations needs to wake up to the potential of Brand Content, or as is increasingly being known as ‘Content Marketing’. Most businesses are moving to a Freemium Business model, where Content asset created, owned or stored by the business is provided free in order to create a relationship which can be migrated to a premium income-generating customer.
Content – ideas, IP, editorial, information, entertainment is a crucial asset for 21st century businesses.
The traditional skills set of public relations – strength in the written word in explaining, creating conversations and in brand story telling are suited for the task of Content Marketing. Content Marketing provides tremendous opportunities for public relations professionals.
Fourthly, there is now recognition that ‘Values’ are a key element of communications. I define a Value as something you do even when it hurts. Your Values underpin and drive your behaviours, guiding when to say ‘Yes’ and when to say ‘No’.
Again, public relations in practice has been the poor relation in terms of being attendant to, but often not at the heart of corporate or culture change programmes within organizations.
By identifying Brand Values as an integral part of what makes up a Brand, and how these impact on existing and potential communications is an area which should in my view, be under the domain of public relations counsel, and not some ‘change management consultant’ – usually from the human relations domain.
Fifthly, a crucial part of an effective brand is its icons – the images that come to mind when you mention its name. In my talks I use the example of New York City and ask delegates what is the picture in their heads? The reason I use ‘New York City’ is that it is one of the world’s most icon-rich brands. (Try it with a group of people and see all the different responses you get.)
I believe icons act like coat pegs in managing your understanding and comprehension. If you don’t have strong icons there is nothing to hang the rest of the communication upon. So, a crucial element of effective communications is ensuring you have powerful icons. .
As more people recognise the significance of the role icons play in communications, Icon management will play an increasingly important role in brand communications – with hopefully public relations at its heart.
Sixthly we can use the model of DNA in nature and apply this to ‘Brand’. Brand DNA consists of an infinite-way, multitude of elements, all in either a positive, neutral or negative state.
The public relations communicator will be operating in a constant state of vigilance on how their Brand is responding to changes in its environment, where every action and communication changing both itself and its context. Think of the ‘Butterfly Effect’ where sensitive changes provide the trigger in a non-linear, chaotic world, ultimately generating large changes to the system.
Is it about time many of the public relations academics and theorists should wake up to embrace ‘Brand’ in its widest definition rather than clinging to its now out-grown original or earlier definitions?
On the one hand we have a concept like ‘reputation’ which is like a gas, on the other we have we have a concept that is like a suitcase with wheels – it is distinctive, measurable, and we can go places with it.
Andy: Sorry but I don’t understand the point you are making other than some suitcases have wheels now.
Oh dear, I’m going to be one of the dissenters for practical reasons. I am fascinated by the ‘split us into two’ argument. Theoretically looks great on paper and makes much sense, practically you’d create chaos as practitioners can’t easily divide activities in a clean enough fashion – too much cross over. Just like practitioners often say they are strategic but then are mainly tactical, equally many are often obliged to deliver ‘publicity’ on behalf of their employers / clients when perhaps they would choose a different route and / or actually do use a different route for others. Carving up in this way would make us an even smaller industry and to my mind would potentially kill rather than increase CIPR membership at a time when practitioners need support more than ever. I think to the wider business community, we’d also look a little bonkers.