Public Relations for Management Success

Frank Jefkins

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138571624
• eBook ISBN: 9781351333887
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Originally published in 1984. Public relations is a key element necessary for success in all business activities. Although some businessmen see public relations as a separable business function, this book argues convincingly that public relations should really be an integral management function, practised by all managers, all the time.

Public Relations for Management Success defines public relations and examines particular techniques, including media relations and areas of concern such as government/parliamentary liaison and issues such as conservation and pollution. It discusses how public relations activities should be planned, staffed, financed and assessed, putting forward principles illustrated by worldwide case studies and examples.

1.
A Management View of Public Relations

Communications The Key

Public Relations is seldom any of the things management thinks it is. Try to interest most management in the subject, and they will evade it as something which is handled by someone lower down in the hierarchy. There is a kind of why keep a dog and bark yourself attitude. They either mistrust PR or, worse still, abuse it. Yet the first PRO in any business should be the chief executive officer.

This is because the CEO - or any line manager - will succeed only if he or she is able to communicate. Public relations is the art of communicating in order to obtain understanding through knowledge.

The CEO may head a splendid company with an excellent product or service, but profitability depends on his ability to communicate, and know how to use communicators and their techniques. Thus, ability to communicate should be a primary facet of the job specification of anyone involved in management, no matter at what level.

This requirement extends beyond the elementary need to be articulate and literate. It is not only or even a question of being able to command, advocate or persuade. Business communication is more sophisticated than that. It is necessary to understand what has to be communicated and why, and to whom it is vital to communicate and how. Moreover, communication is an intelligence system, and it is equally important to receive information and gain understanding.

The principle reason for industrial disputes, lost orders, low share prices, take-over threats, unhappy dealerships, staff instability, unsatisfactory exports, slow cash flow and ultimately poor company results lies in management’s scepticism or downright ignorance about public relations.

Is this a true assessment of the typical management view of public relations? Generally, yes, although it must be admitted that in our really successful growth companies management does know about PR and there is often a PR director on the board. But this is rare. More often, where it exists at all, PR is relegated to a corner of the marketing department, if the marketing manager admits that such a thing exists. Marketing managers are especially dubious about PR, and it is noticeable that PR is absent from most textbooks on marketing.

Some of the worst offenders are management consultants who rarely know what to do with public relations when recommending the reorganisation of a company, or how to set up a new one. There is much training in business studies and management up to DBA standards, but public relations seldom if ever has an important place in the curriculum. One has only to look at the prospectuses of some of our universities and business schools to find that the subject is ignored and there is not even a visiting lecturer. How, then, are ostensibly trained managers expected to communicate? They may learn something about marketing or advertising, but public relations is evaded.

However, a British MBA programme with a major PR content, is under discussion at the time of writing and could be introduced in 1985.

Part of Management’s Job Specification

The answer is probably that if a business manager really wants to manage effectively, and create a rising career for himself, he has to write public relations into his job specification himself. That then entails finding out what PR is all about, applying its principles to his managerial functions, and knowing when and how to augment his own PR efforts with the skills of specialists. But he cannot delegate what he does not understand. It is no use employing a journalist as a sort of guard dog, which is what often happens. A positive commitment to PR is necessary from the top down.

But even when a company is headed by a committed PR-minded CEO, communication problems may occur lower down the organisational tree of command. Misunderstanding of the role of PR often exists within middle-management, among the very people who aspire to top management. Large corporations today have bureaucracies of timid middle-management who are incapable of communicating. Most of them cannot write a letter: they can only pick up a telephone. Preparing a report is like trying to write a will. Taking a decision is like going to the dentist. Does this stem from management training which is all about theories and has forgotten how man first started communicating by drawing pictures on walls?

Visual Communication

It is significant that pictures - video - are rapidly becoming one of the most significant forms of management communication, usually in the hands of the company PRO. Video is often doing the job which management has failed to do. Here is an example.

It happened in one of our twelve regional gas undertakings. The service engineers complained that there was too little work and their earnings were suffering and jobs were at risk. Management told them that when they were carrying out work in customers’ homes they should keep their eyes open for customer needs and tell housewives about the new appliances in the showroom. If they could help sales they would get more installation work. The men retorted in true British workman fashion that they were enginers, not salesmen.

The PRO, who produced the video staff magazine, heard about this. He set up an interview with the trade union official and asked him whether it would not be a good idea if service engineers encouraged their customers to visit the showroom to see the new cookers and refrigerators. Splendid idea, agreed the trade union official. The interview went out to 90 locations in the next edition of the video magazine. The CEO couldn’t believe it - but why hadn’t he communicated so subtly in the first place? You have to negotiate from a position of strength, in this case having the trade union on your side. The men took the advice of their union official and so boosted their earning capacity.

A CEO’s Attitude to Communication

The Chairman of one of our international growth companies - whose share price always makes good reading in the city prices - once scared his middle management by saying ‘Tell them everything - we’re bound to do 50 per cent of the business.’ Middle management always seems to have an in-built fear of industrial espionage. Trade secrets are often a myth invented by the uncourageous. This same chairman also told his PRO that he should know more about the company than anyone else in it. When a director wanted the PRO fired for refusing to have his photograph taken for largely reasons of vanity, the Chairman said the PRO was in a special position and if he decided ‘no pictures’ there would be no pictures.

When that PRO moved on to better his career, the Chairman sent him a thank you note saying ‘our PR is the envy of our competitors.’ Here was a CEO who knew what PR was all about, and what he wanted from PR. The company spent little on advertising, but with the Chairman’s inspiration the entire staff were involved in PR. Such is the reputation of that company that 60 per cent of its business is said to come from recommendations. When it went public some years ago - in spite of a depressed stock market - its shares were heavily over-subscribed, and there have since been two scrip issues on top of high dividends.

Those Favourable Images!

The knack of being a good communicator lies in frankness and appreciation of the fact that the real world is full of good and bad days, successes and failures, profits and losses. The mistaken idea is that public relations is about favourable images, favourable climates of opinion, favourable this and that. It would be very nice if that were true. Public relations is about facts, about the real, hard world in which it may be enough to be fully and properly understood, let alone loved. One day the product is a brand leader, next day the bottom has fallen out of the market.

Management which understands PR is able to deal with all situations. It does not expect PR to act as a smoke-screen, a trouble- shooter, a pretender that bad things never happen. Today in some of our more sensitive disaster-prone industries, wise management has introduced crisis management with the PRO organised in advance to deal with serious situations. This is management aware of the need to communicate quickly, accurately and effectively so that the company is not placed at the mercy of media rumour-mongering and speculation.

The same thing applies to that major growth area of PR - management-employee communications. With PR-orientated management, the grapevine is uprooted and the ‘teatime’ strikes do not occur. Greater worker participation has to be management inspired so that employees know why it would be stupid to kill the cow which produces the milk. An organisation which has grown in membership and influence in recent years is the International Association of Business Communicators which aims to develop the house journal editor into a more wide-ranging internal business communicator. Management can benefit from supporting the role of the internal PRO.

Perhaps it is significant that in Britain, in spite of recession, the PR consultancy world has found the 80s their most profitable. Partly it has been because advertising has been found to be less cost-effective than was previously believed, but mainly it has been because more wideawake management has recognised the need to communicate so much to so many publics. Industries have changed, new technologies have emerged, and businesses survive only so long as they are known, understood and respected, not just by customers but by all those who influence survival from politicians to investment analysts, employees to media pundits.

2.
Public Relations as an Integral Management Function

Introduction

In the previous chapter public relations was defined quite simply as creating understanding through knowledge, and while this concerns the total communications of the whole organisation with all its publics, it stops at understanding. Beyond this point other more persuasive forms of communication proceed into the realms of marketing, salesmanship, advertising and sales promotion. In other non-commercial organisations such as government, political parties, trade unions and religious denominations, persuasive communications become progaganda.

Public relations, far-embracing although it is, stops at understanding for a very practical reason. It has to be credible. Public relations fails if it exceeds this limit and indulges in bias which is acceptable in persuasive, promotional or propagandist communication.

This need to be impartial often baffles people engaged in management, marketing and advertising. But the simple fact is that PR’s strength lies in its acceptance by all the recipients of PR information, including the media.

At the same time, the persuasive activities do have their PR element in that PR is about goodwill and reputation stemming from good behaviour. A business will be judged by its behaviour, and if it adopts malpractices such as over-charging, dubious selling methods, poor products, late delivery or offensive or misleading advertising, this will detract from its good name. Thus, PR will seek to create understanding that a business is deserving of its good name.

Bernard Levin once accused PR of pretending that things were what they were not. Such falsifications may be the aim of some misguided management, but that is as much a malpractice, and an abuse of PR, as selling medicines which cannot possibly alleviate let alone cure. Credible PR is a powerful stimulant of good business; its abuse is silly.

Unfortunately, management is not encouraged to understand the proper and valuable use of PR when it is so often misrepresented by the media. Two examples of this are when the media refer to public relations practitioners as ‘hidden persuaders’, borrowing that misleading expression from Vance Packard’s¹ excellent book of that name which was about an entirely different subject, namely motivational research. Again, whenever a government conducts a policy which is regarded with suspicion by the media (such as an arms reduction proposal) the media calls it ‘merely a PR exercise’ when it has nothing remotely to do with PR. Management, frequently faced by sceptical references to PR, is therefore inclined to either shy away from PR - or mis-use it as they believe they are expected to do.

There are also distinct differences between North American and European attitudes towards public relations, some of which have been imported into Britain by the big American PR consultancies which dominate British consultancy practice. In North America, marketing, salesmanship and advertising are more acceptable ways of life than they are in Britain. Consequently, American PR tends to be more promotional than its British counterpart. In Britain, the media dislike anything smacking of advertising. To be credible, to be acceptable, and to make PR work in Britain it is essential that it be confined to the creation of mutual understanding and leaves partial, promotional, persuasive communication to the worlds of advertising and propaganda. This is a sensible division because PR has quite sufficient to do in seeking to create understanding. It is not pious but practical policy to keep persuasion out of the PR business. Public relations aims to inform and educate while advertising aims to persuade and sell. Both may be necessary but PR will not work if it persuades, and advertising will not work if it fails to persuade.

All this perversion of public relations is not helped by the weevil in management’s very midst. Marketing has become a vital part of many businesses. But marketing people are often very misinformed about PR, and this weakness is often transmitted to higher management. We must also include marketers as part of the management structure. Immediately, we have an important part of the management structure which is poisoned by its ignorance of or abuse of PR. Why is this?

One reason, put to the author by marketing lecturers, was that marketing itself was having to struggle for acceptance, and this led them to be sceptical of public relations which they felt was even less acceptable than marketing! Public relations people are not so professionally inhibited, and they take their profession seriously. The problem with those marketing lecturers was that they were teaching the wrong kind of marketing, largely because they relied on out-dated American texts. In the 80s employers were finding that marketing graduates were out-of-touch with modern marketing.

Marketing Attitudes to Public Relations

Marketing, as distinct from selling, was imported from the USA. It became so important in Britain that the former Institute of Sales Management was renamed the Institute of Marketing. Publishing houses which used to employ ‘space salesman’ now employ ‘marketing executives’. In recent years, building societies have set up marketing departments to sell investments. Put simply, instead of selling what has been produced, a business now produces what it can sell. Market research is used to find out what the market will buy.

Students of marketing are very largely taught from American texts, the most famous being those of Philip Kotler. Not surprisingly notions about PR adopted by marketing students and marketing management are those expressed (if at all) by American writers on marketing. These notions are so distorted that marketing students, teachers, other writers on the subject and those who practice marketing, all over the world, are sceptical about PR. They tend to regard it as a black art which they may well use if it suits their purpose.

In Britain, one has only to attend the annual conference of the Marketing Education Group (representing marketing teachers) to appreciate how poorly they regard PR. It is possible at such a conference for no-one to even mention PR, as if it was a forbidden topic.

Again, this is understandable if we look at the works of Philip Kotler, and his peculiar definition of ‘publicity’² (Kotler’s misinterpretation of public relations) proves the point. He defines publicity (that is, public relations) as:

’non-personal stimulation of demand for a product, service or business unit by planting commercially significant news about it in a published medium or obtaining favourable presentation of it upon radio, television, or stage that is not paid for by the sponsor.’

It will be explained in later chapters that the business news story is not ‘planted’, favourable presentation may be impossible and accurate or factual presentation may be more to the point, and even press relations cost money to conduct.

A More Realistic Definition

To relish the silliness of the above we have only to consider The Mexican Statement which was produced at the international conference of PR institutes held in Mexico City in August 1978.

Public relations practice is the art and science of analysing trends, predicting their consequences, counselling organisation leaders, and implementing planned programmes of action which will ser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. A Management View of Public Relations
• 2. Public Relations as an Integral Management Function
• 3. Tangible Public Relations
• 4. The Costs of PR
• 5. Planning a PR Programme
• 6. Media and Methods
• 7. Media Relations Techniques
• 8. Special Action Areas of Modern Public Relations
• 9. Assessment of Results
• 10. PR Professionalism
• 11. Setting Up a PR Department
• Appendix 1: Bibliography
• Appendix 2: Addresses of Organisations and Services
• Glossary of Abbreviations
• Index