The Public Relations Handbook

Alison Theaker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317487364
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

The Public Relations Handbook, Fifth Edition provides an engaging overview and in-depth exploration of a dynamic and ever evolving industry. The diverse chapters are united by a set of student friendly features throughout, including clear chapter aims, analytical discussion questions, and key further reading.

Featuring wide ranging contributions from key figures in the PR profession, the new edition presents a new chapter on public relations and activism, alongside discussion of key critical themes in public relations research and exploratory case studies on public relations practices in relation to a variety of different institutions, including The Bank of Scotland, Queen Margaret University, Diabetes UK, Continental Tyres, and Action for Children.

Split into four parts exploring key conceptual themes of the context of public relations, strategic public relations, stakeholder public relations, and shaping the future, the book offers coverage of essential areas including:

• public relations, politics and the media
• media relations in the social media age
• using new technology effectively in public relations
• public relations and engagement in the not-for-profit sector
• business-to-business public relations
• the public relations of globalisation.

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Part I
The context of public relations

Chapter 1
What is public relations?

Sarah Roberts-Bowman

Chapter Aims

This chapter attempts to define public relations and its complexity. There is a brief history of the discipline to explain how it emerged and to provide context. An overview of the sector follows that looks at the structure, skills and tasks and what distinguishes it from other disciplines. It concludes by looking at the different ways of understanding public relations and introduces the idea of theory.

Introduction

If you asked a hundred people to define public relations, you would get a hundred different answers. Ian Burrell, the Media Editor on The Independent, called it one of the most misunderstood professions (2014). From popular culture who are the role models? In the UK we have Malcolm Tucker, the fictional Director of Communications for the government in the series In The Thick of It, who is aggressive and abusive and uses lies and rumours to achieve his ends. What of Samantha Jones, in the US-devised Sex and The City who gives the impression that PR is about party planning, celebrities and drinking cocktails. More recently the character of Nan Flanagan, in the True Blood series, focuses on how PR can be used by the American Vampire League to promote equal rights for vampires. These are hardly ringing endorsements for the profession.

So what is the reality? PR is far more complex and difficult to explain. It touches everything and everyone. When Save the Children launched their ‘Read On. Get On’ campaign to encourage dads to read to their children for ten minutes a day and secured substantial media coverage in newspapers, isn’t this a good thing? Isn’t it a good thing when local authorities encourage more people to recycle their waste by encouraging local residents to use recycling bins?

What about a company such as Unilever who took their Lifebuoy soap brand and established a powerful social mission by creating accessible and affordable soap bars and promoting healthy hygiene habits, with the aim to change the hand washing behaviour of one billion people across Asia, Africa and Latin America. India has the highest number of children under five dying from diarrhoeal disease, over 380,000 deaths a year or more than 1,000 deaths per day. These can be prevented. Handwashing Behaviour Change Programmes are now central to the Lifebuoy brand. Linking the organisation’s values and products with a social need puts responsibility central to communication.

On a different note, Unity PR won numerous awards for their hard-hitting PR programme for vInspired to tackle internet trolling. They used real-life trolling tweets projected onto the walls of the Waterloo Station underpass in London. This created an experiential and immersive space where passers-by felt just as threatened as if they had received real tweets. The campaign saw #lolzNOTtrolls trending on Twitter worldwide two hours after launch and was reported in over 74 pieces of traditional media. Just over 9,000 young people actively engaged with Facebook to discuss the impact of trolling. Changing attitudes and behaviours is often at the heart of what PR practitioners do.

Changing perceptions isn’t always easy. In 2005, Centrepoint, the UK’s leading youth homelessness charity, celebrated its fortieth anniversary. With a mission to change people’s attitude to young people who find themselves homeless, Centrepoint commissioned a series of photographs of young people staying in Centrepoint services. The images – of vibrant, dynamic young people full of energy and enthusiasm – were a powerful reminder that the horror of homelessness can happen to anybody. It helped pull in donations and put pressure on the UK government to change its policy towards youth homelessness.

Then there is perhaps the traditional view of PR – how to grab consumer attention. Edelman’s launch of Xbox 360’s Halo 4 in Europe – a game worth $3 billion that has sold over 45 million copies worldwide – resulted in a campaign for virtual reality, real reality. Working with the Principality of Liechtenstein, a real-life replica of the Halo universe was created and 70 media, super-fans and bloggers were invited to play the game for real. As a result, Halo 4 became the best selling Halo title ever released, making more than $220 million worldwide in the first 24 hours. The event secured more than 250 stories, with coverage in 20 markets and reached more than 14 million people via Twitter.

What about when organisations get PR wrong? The response by BP to the Gulf of Mexico environmental disaster in 2010 when 11 workers died has become a case study of how not to communicate. Poorly judged comments by the CEO Tony Hayward, long silences and a complete disconnect with the local communities in the regions that were affected by the disaster caused long-term damage to BP’s reputation and share price. Trust in BP has been severely damaged and they are now due to pay an $18.7bn environmental fine.

All of this shows aspects of PR in action. It is capable of having a tremendous impact by helping organisations and individuals connect, communicate and build relationships with those necessary for their survival and success. But how do we explain it?

In Search of a Definition

Public Relations is an emerging profession with its modern-day origins in the late nineteenth century. Yet it is only in the last 50 years that the practice of PR has come under serious study and defining the practice still vexes both practitioners and academics alike. One of the earliest and most helpful definitions is by Harlow (1976), who suggests that:

Public relations is a distinctive management function which helps establish and maintain mutual lines of communication, understanding, acceptance and cooperation between an organisation and its publics; involves the management of problems or issues; helps management to keep informed on and responsible to public opinion; defines and emphasises the responsibility of management to serve the public interest; helps management keep abreast of and effectively utilize change, serving as an early warning system to help anticipate trends; and uses research and ethical communication techniques as its principle tools.

(Harlow 1976: 36)

The key words here are management, meaning that public relations doesn’t just happen, it must be deliberate; mutuality, in that it is not one-sided; publics plural, meaning that there are a variety of different types of audiences around which relationships need to be built; responsibility and public interest, in that it is about a wider duty of care both inside and outside the organisation.

In 1978, at the first World Assembly of Public Relations Associations agreed that public relations ‘[i]s the art and social science of analyzing trends, predicting their consequences, counseling organisational leaders and implementing programmes of action that will serve both the organisations and the public interest’ (Mexican Statement 1978). Here the idea that PR is both an art and a science is an interesting one. An art because of the importance placed on showing empathy and understanding, the role of storytelling and creativity; yet a social science because it uses tools from psychology such as persuasion and is grounded in research and evaluation techniques. Again, the ideas of mutuality and a duty of care predominate these definitions.

Over time, the definition has been broadened to incorporate the concept of reputation. The UK’s CIPR talks of PR being:

About reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. PR is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

(Chartered Institute of Public Relations, n.d.)

We will look at the word reputation shortly, but other key words to think about include the concept of it being planned, returning to the idea of PR being a deliberate and thought-through activity. The idea of mutual understanding embeds the idea of a conversation, an exchange of viewpoint and a relationship. The concept of the organisation is important as it implies that PR does not just belong to one type of organisation, but is applicable to all sorts of organisations from small businesses to FTSE 100 companies, from professions and trade associations to governments and activist groups, and also includes those from the private, public and third sectors. Then there is the idea of publics again in the multiple sense and not just a single entity. Organisations need to communicate with a range of different types of publics (also known as audiences or stakeholders) from customers to investors, from employees to politicians. All are relevant and important.

The year 2012 saw yet another definition when the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) consulted its members on how they would define PR, given the impact of social media. They came up with: ‘Public Relations is a strategic communications process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their publics.’ This mirrors the simple and earlier definition of leading PR scholars, Grunig and Hunt, who suggested: ‘the management of communication between an organisation and its publics’ (1984: 6). This was later refined to ‘an organisation’s managed communications behaviour’ (Grunig 1997, cited in Grunig et al. 2006: 23). The role of Grunig and Hunt in PR history is one that will be explored later in this chapter.

What does this tell us? It tells us that PR is not tied to one particular PR tool (e.g. social media or media relations) as these are the tools PR people use. It also suggests that people interpret things differently. Guth and Marsh (2006: 7) argue PR people should avoid arguments around wording and concentrate on the elements of PR itself. They suggest that the ideas that underpin PR are straightforward (see Table 1.1).

A number of common themes emerge. PR is an organisational function, but organisations should be viewed broadly and not in the narrow sense of multinational corporations but including those of all shapes and sizes. It also embodies the view that organisations need relationships. This leads to the idea of PR being a relationship function. Ledingham and Bruning (1998: 62) defined the organisation–public relationship as ‘the state that exists between an organisation and its key publics in which the actions of either entity impact the economic, social, political and/or cultural well-being of the other entity’. This moves PR away from a narrow definition of relationships as in an information exchange to something more meaningful and mutual. Ledingham (2003) went on to argue that this relationship perspective of PR was fundamental to the understanding of PR as a managerial and strategic function.

Table 1.1 The five elements of PR

Public relations is management function	The relationship between an organisation and the publics important to its success must be a top concern of the organisation’s leadership. The PR practitioner provides counsel on the timing, manner and form important communication should take. In other words, practitioners aren’t just soldiers who follow orders; they’re also generals who help shape policy. And like all managers, they must be able to measure the degree of their success in their various projects
Public relations involves two-way communication	Communication is not just telling people about an organisation’s needs. It also involves listening to those same people speak of their concerns. This willingness to listen is an essential part of the relationship-building process
Public relations is a planned activity	Actions taken on behalf of an organisation must be carefully planned and consistent with the organisation’s values and goals. And since the relationship between an organisation and the publics important to its success is a top concern, these actions must also be consistent with the publics’ values and goals
Public relations is a research-based social science	Formal and informal research is conducted to allow an organisation to communicate effectively, possessing a full understanding of the environment in which it operates and the issue it confronts. PR practitioners and educators also share their knowledge with others in the industry through various professional and academic publications
Public relations is socially responsible	A practitioner’s responsibilities extend beyond organisational goals. Practitioners and the people they represent are expected to play a constructive role in society

Source: Adapted from Guth and Marsh (2006: 7)

PR is also a society function. Here ideas around corporate responsibility and corporate citizenship are important, moving our understanding of organisations beyond economic entities to expecting them to demonstrate a degree of societal accountability. Some argue PR itself supports the free flow of information that underpins freedom of speech, decision making and democratic processes. Indeed, some go further (Fitzpatrick and Bornstein 2006; Berg 2012) arguing that advocacy, campaigning and communicating play a powerful role in securing a healthy democracy.

These ideas may sound idealistic but the more PR is researched and understood the more these aspects become apparent. But where does reputation fit in and what does it mean? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, reputation can be defined as the condition, quality or fact of being highly regarded or esteemed. In other words, it is the beliefs and opinion someone has about another person, organisation or object. A useful way to think of reputation comes from a quote by Abraham Lincoln: ‘Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.’ PR is about both – ensuring the character of the tree is based on authenticity, honesty and good behaviour, allowing it...