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The Importance of Public Relations

The Importance of Public Relations
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In the current day, it takes no effort for an organization to go under the clutter and disappear. With the price of advertising rising, many are turning towards public relations in the hopes of making it to the top. The effectiveness of this discipline is questionable. This essay hopes to establish that public relations is an effective substitute to advertising.The cost of advertising is increasing along with the number of advertisements present all around us, every day.

The number of advertisements an average person sees everyday varies but experts say it is up in the hundreds. The situation is getting complicated and competitive and to stand out among all these adverts, one must have a really good commercial/ad themselves. This could cost more money than a company can afford. They may end up yielding no profit. Public Relations is a relatively new subject to be studied despite the fact that it may have been around in the past, too. Defining it is difficult but the basis of public relations is, “the management of communication between an organization and its publics” – Todd Hunt, Jame E. Grunig (1997).

The company makes an effort to understand the public rather than simply feed the public what the management things they need to be fed. It can be considered as free publicity and that’s where the easiest difference to spot between advertising and PR is. According to William Wells, advertising can be defined as follows.

“Advertising is paid non-personal communication from an identified sponsor using mass media to persuade or influence an audience.” Advertising is paid publicity, whereas PR is free publicity. But, there have been instances where people have paid/bribed journalists for a story in an attempt to build goodwill or sell their product/service.PR works to build relationships, communicate with and understand the consumers. Effective PR is important to the well-being of the company overall as not only does PR establish goodwill with the organization’s publics, it also does crisis management, which is one of its most important functions. Inefficient handling of a crisis situation could be as disastrous as the crisis itself.

For an example, a fire at a hospital. If they fail to handle the situation properly, many more lives could be lost than the number if they had handled it properly. A well-structured PR campaign will provide the customer with much more information than an advert and thus, more space and time for the product/service/company. It is very low in cost compared to advertising but could be equally or even more powerful than advertising. The reason for this is because generations of media spoon-feeding has made people believe most of what media provides and when they read a journalist writing well about a company, they truly believe it. For an example, if a new organic restaurant puts up a few adverts claiming it is the best organic restaurant in town, less people will believe it than when a journalist who critiques restaurants in the local newspaper writes the same thing. This hits harder than adverts because credibility is a strong persuasion.

PR is a direct interaction between a company and its publics, so establishing credibility through PR is easier. Public relations uses tools such as press releases, blogging and newsletters to get their message across. PR specialists take advantage of public events because they know that the organization/individual receive an opportunity to speak publicly and therefore can directly communicate with the audience present and indirectly communicate with a much larger audience.

Press releases have a bigger impact than advertising because the audience consider it more trustworthy. Blogging is useful because it provides creative space for the organization that other tools likes press releases, public events and newsletters don’t. It is an active channel for two-way communication between the organization and its target publics. The disadvantages of PR include the fact that the organization has no control over where or how the message will be delivered when they do a press release or a interview. They also don’t have complete control over what information the media portrays. You can sit and talk a reporter for hours, trying to explain something but, when you check the papers the next day, something completely different may have been written. This free publicity can be dangerous.

Though P. T. Barnum quoted “there is no such thing as bad publicity”, it is not advised, neither is it ethical to follow that advice. Something completely untrue could be written due to misinterpretation for an example.

One of the employees may have a personal grudge and let it slip that the CEO is abusive, for an example. Journalists need no second telling. Another issue is, though press releases are credited with being deemed more trustworthy with audiences, many don’t really want to sit down and go through a press release, event half way. If the organization’s target audience age group is in the teenage years or early adulthood, they most probably won’t look at press releases. PR may create results but coming up with an interesting press release is not easy. They may be boring due to the limited creative space and it is hard to measure the level of success reaped through the PR efforts. Advertising is a more versatile, easily accessible discipline.

It uses tools such as print, outdoor advertising, TV and radio, telemarketing, web and social media.It is more immediate and the public can be made aware of the product, service or organization in a fleeting glance, which is important as in this day, people of all ages are always rushing. Frequently advertising can help raise awareness and that in turn helps put the company ahead of its competition. Advertising gives place for creativity, which PR doesn’t which means is plays well with young children, too. They may see an eye-catching toy advertisement on the TV and ask their parents buy it for them. TV and radio can reach millions of people simultaneously.

Some of the disadvantages of advertising include the fact that it costs a lot especially for creative space, it confuses buyers because they buy a product and it’s not similar to what was advertised. For an example, McDonald’s burgers look completely different in the adverts and in real life. It encourages sale of products that are inferior in quality. For an example, a bug spray from company X is advertised in the same market as Mortein. A customer may buy company X’s bug spray but when he or she uses it, it doesn’t do much to get rid of the pest.

A customer cannot tell the difference till they’ve actually tried out the products because the advertisement will always either exaggerate or state falsehoods about the quality of the product, like the many skin-whitening lotion commercials on the television every day. The main disadvantage is that it may annoy potential customers. They may feel like the advert is being forced upon them, like on youtube when they click on a video and an ad that cannot be skipped plays. Television ads are temporary and it may have to be broadcasted multiple times to be noticed well enough.

This leads to further expenses and may begin to annoy consumers. Another effective but annoying tool of advertising is telemarketing. When you call up a person, you directly engage them in your advertising effort and therefore have their undivided attention but most consider this annoying. Also, unsolicited emails from advertisers are frowned upon, though it can get their product info to many millions of people and this is called spamming.

Radio is known as a background medium so it will be difficult to capture the attention of the listener who may be doing other things while the radio plays on. The target audience may be spread over multiple stations, which is another disadvantage. Newspapers are cluttered with adverts, are expensive and the ad will have a short shelf life. The organization/individual end up paying for an ad that will reach a lot of people of only few who may be their target audience.

It is difficult for small businesses to get noticed on social media and people who are on those websites are there to socialize and so pay no heed to advertisements. Advertising has far more disadvantages whereas public relations has tools with a larger impact. The most importance facet of PR is that it establishes credibility. To stand out in the competitive business world, winning customers and keeping them is the number one objective.

If corporate credibility goes down, the company goes down with it. This is where public relations comes in. It does what advertising cannot on its own. It builds or rebuilds the trust between the organization and its publics because a destroyed image means the company will soon become irrelevant and will only be remembered for the wrong things it has done or something that went wrong.Staying relevant is important because there are many organizations doing similar things as the other.

An irrelevant company will fade out and not be noticed by the consumers who will most like look at it superficially and choose the ones at the top.PR plays such an important role in the business world that ineffective PR could be catastrophic. For an example, in 1997, UPS suffered a blow when the union that represented UPS employees called International Brotherhood of Teamsters, set up a strike. The strike lasted 15 days.

They were not happy with UPS because of their insufficient wages and lack of health and retirement benefits. Their main issue was job security since OPS utilized part-time employees and Teamsters wanted UPS to set a higher percentage of full-time jobs. And the negotiations dragged on. UPS lost $750 million USD.

They received upto 20,000 phone calls and were used as story bait in the press. UPS had not crisis communications plan in place and this cost them dearly. The strike left a blemish on the company’s image which took years to remove. But, in the end, after the strike had ended and the negotiations had come to an end, UPS decided not to vilify its employees and established a better communication relationship which proved to be a positive strategy in limiting any long-term damage. No matter how much advertising they could have put up, they wouldn’t have been able to get through this situation. If they had effective PR strategies in place, they would have been able to avoid this situation altogether.

And that is why PR is so important in the current cluttered climate of the business world and that makes it a possibly better substitute to advertising, as it establishes the most important factor that will help an organization rise, credibility and it can exhaust crisis aftermath better advertising.

Allan Leider
Author: Allan Leider
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