LU 4 - Integrated Communication Flashcards
explain conceptual authenticity.
A current area of conflict emerging from empirical literature, case studies and the growing body of public relations knowledge as an academic dist cipline is that of the nature of public relations itself. No reputable profession can afford dissonance around its own identity or its public image, so next generation public relations leaders and opinion formers must commit to a definitive acceptance of the facts of the ’nature’ of the public relations industry as distinct from generally accepted notions about its ’nurture’.
There is a popular misconception that, just because approximately two-thirds of public relations agency fee income is used to sell product and only around one-third is going on government, investor/financial, corporate/reputation promotional campaigns, public relations is a simple communication support tool, albeit using a variety of tactical means, for bottom-line sales and turnover in the short term. Most large corporations and institutions now label their traditional public relations departments as ’corporate communication departments’. Whether the spend is on a corporate issue or product branding, it must be aligned to the strategic business plan in terms of time, motion and activity and be overseen by the board level corporate communicator/strategic public relations director.
In practice, many generic public relations operational tools and techniques support integrated marketing public relations activity. However, in theory, the body of knowledge required to forward plan and manage a public relations strategy is so aligned to corporate or organizational strategy that the reputation of the whole organization is more than the sum of its parts and certainly of any single product or service. This is not mere semantics or bureaucratic management speak. The history of public relations is littered with examples of the dangers of losing sight of core organizational goals or corporate objectives due to overzealous, creative marketing, especially during the 19805/905. That is not to say that profits from a single product promotion cannot sometimes bring about a healthy injection of much needed capital and income, eg iPod in 2004, but it does not, or should not throw the whole business strategy off course. Profits from one area of a business may be required to go into supporting other areas such as health and safety, technological and environmental developments in other activities, products and services at any given time. Better that the sales and marketing industry referred to ’marketing publicity’ or ’market promotion’ and dropped the term ’public relations’ in its strategic planning and policy making.
The word ’relations’ in the term ’public relations’ can be used in a shallow or deeply meaningful way, and so the generic term ’public relations’ should not be structured as a subsidiary component of a marketing function or applied loosely to the selling of material goods and services. This is not to take the ethical dimension to its furthest, ideological position whereby two-way, symmetrical communication is regarded as the democratic norm in the building of relations based on trust. In any organization, there are threatening or competitive situations in which asymmetrical communication is necessary because of received intelligence. However, as Alvin Toffler wrote some 35 years ago in his seminal work Future Shock, ’our first and most pressing need. . . a strategy for capturing control of change. . . diagnosis precedes cure’. He continued, ’we need a strong, new strategy. . we can invent a form of planning more humane, more far-sighted and more democratic than any so far in use. In short, we can transcend technocracy. There is a message here for marketing public relations professionals, as the following words suggest.
Today’s wonderfully creative public relations campaigns that often capture society’s hearts and minds must be underpinned by skilful diagnosis based on quality research so as not to intensify ’the rise of a potentially deadly mass irrationalism. Whether through traditional methods such as advertising and events management, or modern methods involving new media and mobile telephones, Toffler’s strategy for survival is ever more pertinent in our globalized economy. Unlike legal and social issues, commodities have shorter and shorter lifecycles in what Toffler called ’our high transience society and reminds us that ’in almost no major consumer goods category. . . is there a brand on top today which held that position ten years ago and ’in the volatile, pharmaceutical and electronic fields, the period is often as short as six months.
Organizations are social institutions, whether operating for profit or not and, today it can still be argued, depend on:
continuity, order and regularity in the environment. It is premised on some correlations between the pace and complexity of change and man’s decisional capacities. By blindly stepping up the rate of change, the level of novelty and the extent of choice, we are thoughtlessly tampering with these environmental preconditions of rationality.
explain the knowledge and skills concept.
In the 1990s, a more substantive approach to developmental education and training emerged through the Chartered Institute of Public Relations for public relations professionals, the Institute of Advertising for advertising Professionals, and the Chartered Institute of Marketing for marketing Professionals.
In blue-chip companies, marketing, advertising and public relations functions are linked autonomously to the corporate and business plans but managed overall as corporate communication. Clearly each function is accountable for its own strategic analysis, segmentation and targeting of those stakeholders for whom it is accountable, but the overall organization’s image or reputation must not be compromised by any one function. Of course, all three areas overlap at the boundary between themselves and at the interface between the organization and its environment, with consequences for environmental monitoring and research. It is here that the focus of each function must be independent of the other to maintain plurality of views and richness of information. However, the various perspectives must be brought together at a later stage for integration, then linked strategically with other functions such as HR, since environmental intelligence will have relevance for a range of internal functions.
Strategic planning for all functional areas incorporates analysis, monitor~ ing of individual programme development, implementation control and evaluation. If there is a lack of control over any one area, say one attempting to dominate another for competitive budgeting or status purposes, then the communication strategy is put at risk. A climate of rivalry can be managed as a force for good or ill, depending on whether the culture is based on a closed or open management system.
As the amount of information flowing in and out of every organization increases, far exceeding any public relations strategist’s requirements, the key task of any adequate intelligence system is to access and capture only relevant data and direct it to the required location for analysis by the right group at the right time. A focus on capturing and using pertinent marketing communication data, for example, will not necessarily help serve the needs of the advertising or public relations group as it may be too customer-specific at the expense of other stakeholders if not moderated by the communication strategist or overseer. Large firms have comprehensive management information systems, and the development of new technologies is increasingly making the selection and identification of critical data easier. Because of the need for longer-term relationships with customers, marketing professionals have been quick to realize the need for systematic design, collection, analysis and reporting of data. Findings relevant to the mutual understanding and sustaining of goodwill, traditionally seen as a customer relations activity, are increasingly coming under the auspices of public relations and referred to by marketers as ’relationship marketing’. This is especially the case in the retail industry, which promotes products and services through loyalty card schemes.
In terms of environmental scanning, market researchers analyse and categorize the economic environment in a number of ways. A common approach to strategic marketing is one where the philosophy implies that all organizations exist because they are offering some form of ’product’ to someone else, whether it be direct, such as fast-moving consumer goods, a service offered through a third party and perhaps paid for by a third party (say, government), or a service in the community or to achieve a social objective.
Some of the rivalry referred to earlier between marketing and public relations departments in organizations has been about whether or not the Principal stakeholder group or customer ’audience’ ought to define the department’s name. Traditionally, even though the communication tools and techniques available may be drawn on by all three functions of marketing, advertising and public relations, the dominant strategic force remains with public relations. The public relations function views its constituencies as consisting of a broader range of stakeholder groups or publics than customers, to include competitors and suppliers, employers/employees, community and local government, central government, financiers, investors and the media. Usually, only qualified public relations graduates are trained to appraise all ongoing stakeholder relations to ensure that the organization’s strategic communication plan is coherent and consistent with the strategic business plan. However, increasingly, models such as the integrated marketing communication (IMC) mix model are emerging from marketing academics; see Figure 5.1.
explain the value added concept
Of particular value to market research professionals has been the public relations evaluation concept of value-added, so the notion of IMC has established itself as a critical learning and teaching topic. Value-added is an accounting process that involves horizontal analysis of the industry a firm is in, along with a vertical study of the overall distribution chains to see where value can be improved and competitive advantage gained by strategic repositioning or sales reconfiguration.
Another important technique that overlaps with public relations is market segmentation. Guiltinan and Paul define market segmentation as ’the process of identifying groups of customers with highly similar buying needs and motives within the relevant market’. Segments are formed by identifying response differences between segments. They can be clearly described and reached, and are worthwhile as benefits to the Organization. They are stable over time, so marketing programmes can fix costs to be acceptable. They will be classified using descriptive categories based on management’s knowledge and experience of customer needs or desires supported by available information (customer group identification), Or by the way customers respond. Groups can be identified by working backwards, for example noting characteristics such as the frequency of individual or group purchases or perceptions of brand preference.
Communication theory is grounded in models of perception from clinical psychology, a key factor in public relations academic modelling. Thus, another tool that is increasingly popular is the use of perceptual mapping, where consumer perceptions of product attributes can be analysed psychologically. On the two-dimensional perceptual map, consumers recepeption is grouped together with competitive brands to demonstrate position and relationship.
discuss the integrated marketing communication mix model.
textbook page 104
analyse competitive advantages of integrated communication.
Perhaps the most popular competitive advantage theory has been Porter five competitive forces in determining industry profitability which can clearly be adapted to organizational-level monitoring and evaluationthrough perceptual mapping and intelligence communication. Perceptual mapping is a technique that identifies gaps in the market to see if there is scope for a new product, or to plan branding or competing products in terms of particular characteristics such as price and quality. It is a useful concept for integrating marketing communication with corporate communication to ensure that publicity is coherent and consistent with the aims of corporate communication programmes, or ’on message’ as the politicians say. Such analysis can produce public relations intelligence that feeds into the research, monitoring and evaluation information paradigm, as shown in Figure 5.2.
The importance of theoretical models such as Porter’s lies in the focus on the competitor stakeholder group and the subgroups Within it, such as rivalry between existing competitors, the threat of entry from new niche competitors, and the financial muscle of buyers and suppliers. The dynamic nature of competition and thus shortand longer-term relationship building is central to both marketing and public relations involvement, including lobbyists acting on behalf of both professions. Increasingly, interest has been shown by the public relations industry in the notion that marketing tools and techniques can be applied to the competitive internal communication environment of an organization, because of the political nature of competition for jobs and status, thus creating a ’market’ of the human resource function requiring public relations. Where once this was the domain of the public relations department, today it is sometimes thought that the marketing department is as likely to be aware of the corporate climate, structure and culture as other experts. Their knowledge and sensitivity to culture, orientation, power and influence will have been accrued from their analysis of customers, organizational structure linked to the marketing plan, and the interfunctional dynamics needed to operate that marketing plan.
Porter’s theories of competitive advantage suggest that it is essential that organizations understand how the physical, human, financial and intangible aspects of an organization, including plant, equipment, people and finance, must be appraised together so as to quantify added value to the customer and thus to the organization as a whole.
The focus on data collection tends to be organized around customer databases, which provide insight into customers’ behaviour and motivation in many markets, but particularly retail markets with data collated from loyalty card schemes in the grocery sector. One supermarket chain uses the Target Group Index, a research service that matches customer databases to three years of customers’ buying behaviour; see Figure 5.3.
With the growth in service marketing and the development of relationship marketing, more and more organizations have adopted customer awareness programmes to harness the organization’s effort to deliver improved value to its customers. This coincided with a general global economic recession which meant that, although traditional public relations departments had been removed or downsized, the need for public relations techniques remained. Market research departments found themselves on a fast learning curve to adopt the public relations skills and techniques required to cope with their sales and marketing strategies, given the rapid rise of consumer awareness and pressure groups. Customers not only had access to IT and media, but were now well organized and increasingly vociferous in their demands for value for money. If a particular product or brand attracted bad publicity, this could impact on corporate image, identity or reputation to the extent that the overall public relations strategy could be undermined, not least in respect of shareholder investment.
From the point of View of the overall planning process, stakeholder communication must be integrated around core corporate values, objectified by the production of mission statements. Representing the vision of what the organization is or hopes to become, the PRO collates the communication aims and objectives of each function, assesses compatibility and integrates them with the corporate business plan.
explain how to achieve a competitive advantage through customer relations.
Porter’s model suggests that there are three fundamental ways in which firms achieve sustainable competitive advantage through customer relations: cost leadership strategy, differentiation strategy and focus strategy. The difference between strategic marketing that seeks to interpret the organization’s generic strategies into market-based strategies centring on perceived added value is that it is dominated by price. Other writers such as Grunig and Repper believed that the interdependence of stakeholder groups in the achievement of organizational objectives reaffirms the strategic role of public relations in the goals encapsulated by a mission statement. Marketing and sales management therefore would report to PR management at functional level, but directors from each department Would liaise with each other at board level. Competition for budget resources between marketing and public relations can be ruthless. In-house self-interest, as the recent global banking crisis demonstrated, can override corporate loyalty and personal integrity where money and status are concerned. Cooperation depends largely on organizational culture and quality of leadership, as analysis of the credit crunch by the media revealed.
Because most sales and marketing becomes strategic at some point and because of the range of options available, the academic literature concentrates on issues of strategic choice, target market strategy, marketing strategies with demand, positioning strategies and marketing strategies for different environments. The strategy adopted will depend on whether the organization is a market leader with 45 per cent market share, a market challenger with 30 per cent market share, a market follower with 20 per cent market share or a market niche with 10 per cent of the market share. Intelligence data from each market share will drive any public relations imperative.
Other areas of promotional overlap with public relations are in the sales and marketing of fast-moving consumer goods, as previously mentioned, and business-to-business markets. Consumer markets are characterized by heavy advertising and promotion programmes targeted at key segments so as to build brands and speed up the process of innovation and new product development. They also seek strategic relationships and alternative channels of distribution such as direct marketing and selling via the internet.
discuss business to business relations.
In business-to-business or industrial markets, relationship marketing is crit~ ical to success, with particular emphasis on conferences and trade shows. Kotler identified three types of strategic marketing in service industries, with the company, employees and customers being linked by internal marketing, external marketing and interactive marketing. With services marketing, the different attributes of the service are identified or organized to target customer value and to position the organization to obtain differential or competitive advantage.
A public relations service must be able to articulate and prioritize any or all attributes offered by the service or organization in order to target customer value and to position the organization for competitive customer advantage. In global markets, strategic sales and market decisions are based on international research and may include looking for similarities between segments in different countries with a combination of factor and cluster analysis to identify meaningful cross-national segments.
discuss Web analysis and evaluation.
This has driven the public relations industry to look for new ways of measuring the impact of messages across diverse cultures and in shorter time frames. With export marketing, products are usually sold from the domestic base. With international marketing, products and services are marketed across national borders and within foreign countries. With global marketing, coordination of the market strategy in multiple markets operates in the face of global competition. One of the principal strategic concerns in the latter case is the task of developing the global portfolio, which incorporates a very high level of involvement from sales and marketing and public relations departments in developing e-commerce and evaluating purchasing and promotional web pages as part of the strategic plan.
Eye-tracking analysing the eye movements and point of gaze of subjects in a market research or public relations study is now an accepted component in most studies involving visual presentations. The technology has advanced to the point where data can be analysed in real time for computeror “TV-generated images or rapidly analysed with video analysis tools when the subjects have viewed a live scene such as a shopping experience. In Figures 5.4 and 5.5, an evaluation of a Financial Times page shows Where subjects looked and for how long.
Communication students generally understand the fundamental concepts of e-commerce technical infrastructure and applications. This includes electronic commerce and law, security and authentication, and internet protocols for knowledge-economy companies. These are key competencies for consultant practitioners who are expected to offer strategic corporate e-learning communication solutions for business and commerce. Furthermore, an understanding of the value/ supply chain, with all its communication interfaces and the implications of an e-enabled supply chain, is essential to the marketing public relations practitioner. How people receive, interpret and respond to visual information now forms a critical component in market research and relationship evaluation.
differentiate and explain efficiency versus effectiveness.
The effectiveness of any strategy depends in part on the quality of the monitoring and environment seaming Within different environments, which are in a constant state of change. Of particular concern to the public relations practitioner is the problem of control. Not all marketing departments make clear strategy statements that are comprehensive or articulate the interdependence and interaction of the various elements so that the total mix is achieved in a harmonious way. Many a product promotion has created communication and public relations disasters when reactions to scandals became focused solely on customers and omitted to consider the knock-on effect of corporate image on other stakeholders.
Development of branding theory and public relations input into practice have reduced some of this difficulty, but at the same time have created semantic confusion when describing activities relating to both marketing and public relations. For example, Craven says that, ’a product is anything that is potentially valued by a target market for the benefits or satisfactions it provides, including objects, services, organization, places, people and ideas’. This description covers both tangible and intangible services and could conceivably include other identifiable stakeholders, beyond suppliers and customers.
Discuss the tools and techniques used for integration communication.
Brand promotion, including corporate advertising, is a traditional public relations tool for adding value to a product so as to differentiate it from its competitors or to add value to the corporate identity. However, not all marketers see it this way, nor indeed do all other professional departments in the organization. Finance, for example, may be involved in designing pricing strategy, given, as Kotler says, that ’price is the only element in the marketing mix that produces revenue. The other elements produce costs’.
As with any policy making, planning and strategic development, evaluation and control are of paramount importance. A strategic review of marketing plans is usually conducted every two or three years to provide groundwork for long-term strategy development as well as interim analysis. It will usually consist of a full audit of the marketing environment and Operations relating to all aspects of the corporate mission, objectives and strategies, as well as a review of the marketing objectives, strategies, programmes, implementation and management issues.
The role of advertising and publicity is to be cost-effective in creating awareness in the early stages of the product lifecycle, whereas sales pro~ motion is used in the ordering and reordering stages of buyer readiness Where the product is mature or in decline. Some of Kotler’s views of the tools and characteristics of communication are shown in Table 5.1.
Christopher et al suggest that ’relationship marketing has as its Concern the dual focus of getting and keeping customers’. They go on to develop a model that suggests there are five other markets that impact on the customer market: referral, internal, supplier, employee recruitment, and influence markets, and if marketing people are to tinker with all these particular audiences, the role of the strategic specialist becomes imperative. It is apparent that marketing models are linking segmentation to discrete variables within the stakeholder model. Meanwhile, customer communication relies on the traditional bottom-line approach (marketing) and the value-added approach (public relations), as shown in Table 5.2. As with public relations and advertising campaigns, reviews are essential in examining the extent to which sales programmes are appropriately directed and whether or not a particular programme has been properly integrated within the PR strategy as a whole. This may include a product promotion review, where benchmarking takes place against external examples of best practice, which also involves ethical and social responsibility criteria. Some of the performance criteria and measures used by marketing functions are sales analysis, market share analysis, sales to expense ratios, financial analysis and profitability analysis. This is a costly process, and the results will be compared with various internal budgets, targets and performance measures set by the organization.
It is at this point that any positive or negative performance gaps, new opportunities or threats may require corrective action to bring the annual plan or longer-term strategy back in line with objectives. The requirement is often to identify the difference between problems, symptoms and causes that cannot be ignored from seasonal or short-term variations.
Third-party public relations consultants are often bought in, in conjunction with other management consultants. Where, for instance, some interfunctional relationship problems experienced by marketing and manufacturing departments cannot be managed effectively, consultants can provide an objective solution. Typical problems that emerge are products that have developed around technological capability, not market needs; products failing commercially; products being technically superior but priced too high; and concentration on tangible attributes superseding the customer benefits. Indeed, some organizations have placed research and development and marketing under one authority, in physical close proximity, or set up coordination teams or task groups on particular projects. The role of public relations may be to advise on internal or external communication processes, including impacts on corporate identity.
TOOL CHARACTERISTICS
• Tools Advertising
Public presentation, pervasive, amplified expressiveness; TV, radio, press, cinema, ma gazin print, packaging, posters es
• Product/service publicity
Gain attention, provide information, inducement that gives value, invitation to engage in immediate action. competitions, premiums, gifts, trade shows, Coupons, stamps ‘
• Direct marketing
Direct at consumer, customized, up to date; cataIOgues mailings, telemarkets, electronic shopping
• Press and media
High credibility, messages as news not advertising; press kits, seminars, annual reports, sponsorships, lobbying
• Customer Relations(sales)
Personal confrontation, cultivates relationships, encourages response; presentations, incentives, samples, trade shows
• Marketing PR
Product pre-launch by preparing the marketplace for introduction of a new product
Differentiate between marketing and manufacturing.
Other areas of inter-functional conflict may arise from:
- Marketing who want more capacity, versus manufacturing who want accurate sales forecasts;
- Marketing Who want faster response, versus manufacturing who want consistent production;
- Marketing who want sufficient stocks, versus manufacturing who want cost control;
- Marketing who want quality assurance, whereas manufacturing have products that are difficult to make;
- Marketing who want variety, whereas manufacturing want economical runs;
- Marketing who want low prices and high service, Whereas manufacturing often have high costs with extra services; and
- Marketing always looking for new products, whereas manufacturing see extra design and tooling costs.
Effective communication between departmental heads is crucial, although few will realize that they are involved in public relations.
So what we have seen at a strategic level is the need for integration of all elements of the communication mix while, at a tactical level, some of the tools employed when implementing and evaluating programmes are now shared with public relations experts. As Smith and O’Neill said:
Marketing used to be simple. So simple, it could even be left to marketing managers, but it isn’t like that any more. The business of marketing, namely creating value by managing customer relationships, must be central to corporate management and financial planning. Marketing must be seamlessly woven into every function of those companies intent on getting to the future first.
More than 10 years on, market forces and economic realities have driven the commercial marketing, advertising and public relations sectors to appreciate how each of them contributes to corporate strategy in their own ways, both technically and tactically.
Discuss the importance of mass communication and media society.
The significance of mass communication media on an organization cannot be overestimated. McQuaii ascribes five characteristics to the media that explain their importance to society as a whole, relevant to the modern Organization at all stages of a public relations campaign or programme:
- A power resource this is highly relevant to organizations, given that the media are the primary means of transmission and source of information in society. A disgruntled shareholder wishing to unseat a member of the board will find it difficult to communicate with other shareholders in the face of the power that the organization’s managers can rally.
- As an arena of public affairs for business organizations, this may seem less important than for governmental organizations, which are often the target of media attention, but many recent inter-company controversies involving government agencies have been played out in the arena of the media.
- As definitions of social reality at first sight, this is a nebulous concept and yet McQuail explains that the media are where the changing culture and values of society and groups are constructed, stored and visibly expressed. What society perceives to be the reality of organizations will be formed from a limited or non-existent personal impression gained from direct contact with the organization and from those images and impressions the media choose to present. Different sections of the media attempt to project different realities. For example, in the UK, the BBC ’Money Programme’ presents a world in which it is normal for companies to compete with each other for profit without implying any criticism of the underlying capitalist principles involved. LeftWing publications will, on the other hand, portray a different version of reality, one that is much more critical and sceptical about the motives and social value of the leaders of major firms.
- As a primary key to fame and celebrity status this used not to be particularly important for business organizations. However, increasingly, leaders of organizations have used the media to project a desirable image. This is also true for authors of management texts who have become highly rewarded ’gurus’ on the international lecture circuit.
- As a benchmark for What is normal this is particularly important for organizations where ethical issues are concerned. Currently, business organizations have to face up to the new norms of environmental targets, corporate social responsibility and other matters. Economic criteria used to take precedence over the views of fringe environmental groups, but the media now define normality as one in which an endangered environment must be protected and form part of the criteria for competent management. In the early 1990s, oil company Shell came to media attention over a proposed deep-sea disposal of the Brent Spar oil rig. Despite its eminently rational cost-benefit analysis, environmental issues were brought into the equation.
Along with these characteristics, academics are continually exercised about other qualitative variables in quantitative measures such as cost-benefit analysis. McQuail’s two-dimensional framework for representing contrasting theoretical perspectives (media-centric vs society-centric, and culturalist vs materialist) is a helpful conceptual baseline from which to begin.
Differentiate between rhetoric vs. reality.
Large organizations rely on mass communication, particularly in the form of advertising. In addition to informing the public about products and services and inducing them to buy, advertisements communicate messages about the nature of the organization and its values, which may or may not reflect objective reality. Ind believes that public relations activity fulfils a similar strategic role to advertising, ’in that its function is to increase awareness and improve favourability, but loses out to advertising in its controllability’. He uses as an example the American Anti-slavery Society, one of the longest and oldest public relations campaigns, which was formed in 1833 and established its own newspapers, held public meetings, distributed pamphlets and lobbied state legislatures and the US Congress demanding action to abolish slavery. ’Even after the American Civil War, the society still campaigned for constitutional amendments and civil rights laWs to protect the gains of the newly freed slave. This led to the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.’
The word ’mass’ therefore can be given positive, negative or undifferentiated associations depending on the political perspective adopted. For Example, positive in socialist rhetoric sees the masses as a source of strength, while negative, when associated with the dictators of the 1930s, subscribes to individualistic and elitist cultural values. However, in a communication context it refers to a large, seemingly undifferentiated audience. This is essentially an asymmetrical stance, because message receivers had little chance to share their perceptions with the mass of other message receivers Up until the new technology allowed, for example, chat rooms on the web.
Explain message modelling.
A pluralistic, process approach to any strategic public relations endeavour inevitably involves the mass media at some point. There are a number of different models that help to show how it might inform the public relations manager of today’s organization. These include:
- The transmission model this model views communication as transmitting a fixed amount of information. The sequence of sendeiv message-channel-receiver is now seen as naive and is replaced by the sequence of events and voices in society, channel/communicator role, message, receiver, thereby recognizing that the mass media are not the originators of the message, but rather that the account of a selection of events.
- The ritual or expressivemodel the former model implies that there is an instrumental motive in the communication process, that the message is trying to achieve something. However, communication is sometimes seen as a form of ritual when it expresses sharing, participation, association, fellowship and the possession of a common set of beliefs. Many advertising campaigns exploit the mass media in this way, not transmitting information about the product or service but rather associating it with a supposedly shared value. For example, a butter product might be associated with real ale as representing traditional images of rural life and the country inn.
- The publicity model -this sees the sender as not attempting to transmit anything, but rather simply seeking to catch visual or oral attention. The public may see the media not so much as a source of information but as escapism from everyday reality. Many organizations find it possible to exploit this aspect of the mass media, especially organizations such as Greenpeace, which can provide exciting and attention-grabbing film footage such as a motor boat cutting across the bows of a Japanese trawler, which guarantees media attention.
- The reception model -this argues that any meaningful message is built up with signs whose meanings depend on choices made by the sender or encoder. Receivers or decoders are not of course obliged to accept the messages sent. They can put their own interpretation on what they receive and therefore a reception model is dependent on an encoding and decoding process by those involved in sending or receiving communication.
All organizations plan their relationship with the media as part of their overall public relations policy. It is not possible to proceed without some comment about the term ’public relations’ and the dilemma in which the Chartered Institute of Public Relations finds itself in terms of its own identity and reputation. Public relations has acquired a pejorative association in the minds of many people, being perceived as a process by which organizations attempt to conceal the truth about their activities behind a smokescreen. In political circles, a public relations practitioner has become a ’spin doctor’ whose narrowly defined function is to deflect public criticism and to defend his or her masters or mistresses from public criticism. The shortened marketing acronym ’PR’ for public relations is symbolic of this and, some argue, has added to the profession’s status difficulties as it is often not regarded as a discipline based on reliable and Valid empirical methodologies. Educators, therefore, usually avoid its use Wherever possible.
Explain the term “think global, act local”.
Some of the key issues affecting corporate strategy relate to globalization and new technology, which have brought about the development of worldwide networks, a widening of membership for pressure groups and a broader analysis of competition. It therefore seems an almost pointless exercise to plan strategically in a chaotic environment in which the notion of managing risk appears to be an oxymoron. If the power of individual nation states to control national economies has become limited, the problems of a borderless world become more acute.
As most public relations practitioners know, campaigns have to be planned at the global level, but acted out at the local level. The importance of regions or areas is defined by some degree of economic logic which may lie within a nation state or cross-nation state boundaries. So, just as the relevance of the nation state is being called into question, it is apparent that the modern multinational is continuing to lose what was left of its national character. Reich gave an example of Whirlpool, which employed 43,500 people around the world, most of them non-American, in 45 countries. He pointed out that Texas Instruments did most of its research and development, design and manufacturing in East Asia. Reich’s research, although carried out some 20 years ago, still illustrates, if not more so, that a company’s most important competitive assets, especially when competing in a global economy, are the skills and cumulative learning of its workforce.
Jolly wrote that, as evidence of a global public relations strategy, a company must be able to demonstrate selective contestability and global resources. Selective contestability is where the corporation can contest any market it chooses to compete in, but can be selective about where it wishes to compete. It is prepared to contest any market should the opportunity arise and is constantly on the global lookout. In the chapter covering marketing communication we saw that such organizations represent potential new entrants in all global markets.
Occasionally, the corporation may have to bring its entire worldwide resources to bear on a particular competitive situation it finds itself in. Customers know that they are dealing with a global player even if it is employing a local competitive formula. Thus global strategies are not standard product-type media strategies that assume that the world is a homogenous border-free marketplace. Nor are they just about global presence. If what the corporation does in one country has no relation to what it does in other countries, that is no different from dealing with local, domestic competitors. Finally, globalization is not just about large companies now that the intemet makes it possible for small companies to trade worldwide.
