Positioning Theory and Strategic Communication

A new approach to public relations research and practice

Melanie James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134615322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In public relations, people talk about positioning an idea, a persona, a political ideal, an ideology – but what are they talking about? Why do some positions taken by organizations crystallize in the minds of audiences, while others fail?

Whilst positioning is not something new in public relations, this book is the first to explicate what it involves, how it works and how to do it. This is the first in-depth exploration of the possibilities of Positioning Theory for the public relations field and it adds a new perspective to the growing body of multidisciplinary work in this rich theoretical area, moving the discussion away from the traditional communication plans of previous decades, which fail to accommodate the changing media and opinion landscapes. The author pulls together various strands of socio-cultural theory into an analytical framework, providing readers with a tool to analyse the organizational implications of public relations decisions, guiding strategic decision making through realistic scenario planning.

This thought-provoking book provides an alternative path to studying communication in increasingly complex environments and as such, will be vital reading for researchers and educators, advanced communication and public relations students, and for senior public relations practitioners.

PART I Public relations and positioning theory

1 Positioning in public relations

10.4324/9781315886084-3

Much of the public relations effort exerted by organizations aims to move people towards a position where they share with the organization a way of thinking, knowing, acting or speaking about an aspect of the world. Such “organizations” include corporations, small businesses, not for profits, trade unions, activist groups, individuals, celebrities, government agencies and more. Sometimes these public relations efforts are used for “good”, such as moving new parents to a point where they seek to have their babies immunized. There are public relations practitioners that work to position immunization as the “right thing to do”. They do this in an effort to get parents to act in the way the public health officials want them to act. At other times the same techniques are used for less ethical reasons. We know that some people in the public relations industry work to position smoking as fashionable behavior, in attempts to attract young people to take up the habit. Both are positioning exercises, both draw on strategies and techniques that aim to have people construct meaning in certain ways in certain social contexts.

This book is premised on the assumption that public relations is a strategic undertaking underpinned by techniques or processes that help organizations achieve their goals. As Heath (2001) said, “public relations is called to action when an organization’s routine activities fail to produce the desired results” (p. 33). When organizations engage public relations they often do this with the strategic intent to move themselves, or another entity from one position to another. Once so positioned, organizations also use public relations to maintain and secure those positions for strategic purposes (James, 2011).

Positioning is often used in public relations contexts but it has been very under-researched given its ubiquitous use in practice (James, 2009, 2011). Public relations practitioners often refer to positioning until recently little had been written to explore what was meant by the concept outside a marketing context. In the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Public Relations, positioning was defined as something that “depends on how a consumer compares a product to the competitor’s product” (Pompper, 2004: 629). In the most recent edition, it is becoming clear that the field is starting to give more consideration to the concept of positioning. Pompper (2013, p. 663) acknowledges that “the posiiton-positioning process is a deeply complex one that depends on context and orientation” and, that “while public relations practitioners and academics may not offer formal operationalizations for position and positioning, they nonetheless imply its significance in relationship building”. However, it is within the marketing literature that discussion of positioning predominates, and this primarily relates to brand and product positioning or to identity, profile and image (e.g. Butler and Harris, 2009; Egan, 2007; Holm, 2006; Knox and Bickerton, 2003; Porter, 2008). This concept of positioning in marketing is most often centered on the “4 Ps” of marketing, namely: product, place, price and promotion (Egan, 2007).

A better understanding of positioning in public relations contexts is needed for several reasons. Firstly, practitioners may want to know how to design more effective positioning strategies for their clients and organizations. Secondly, people may want to understand the mechanisms and thinking behind strategic positioning to facilitate understanding of how organizations wield and concede power. Thirdly, others may want to gain insights into the way elements of practice such as language use and stakeholder engagement come together to shape the meanings that circulate in our societies.

In 2008, I was conducting a large research project wherein positioning had emerged as a key aspect of Australian award-winning public relations practice. I was trying to make sense of my findings when I encountered “positioning theory”. In 2012, Harré defined positioning theory as being:

…based on the principle that not everyone involved in a social episode has equal access to rights and duties to perform particular kinds of meaningful actions at that moment and with those people. In many interesting cases, the rights and duties determine who can use a certain discourse mode…A cluster of short-term disputable rights, obligations and duties is called a ‘position’.

(2012: 193)

Moghaddam and Harré (2010: 2) state that positioning theory is about “how people use words (and discourse of all types) to locate themselves and others”. These definitions immediately struck a chord. Intentional positioning in public relations could be seen to be about how organizations used words (and discourses of all types) to locate themselves and others in particular ways, in order to achieve specific outcomes. Although the theory originally was applied to how individuals positioned themselves and others in unfolding episodes such as a conversation (van Langenhove and Harré, 1999), I saw immediate relevance for public relations. In a conversation, the ebb and flow of exchanges means that positions can be constructed by individuals but also challenged by other conversational participants. In public relations episodes, when an organization takes and enacts a particular position, it also is open to challenges and attempts by others to reposition in different ways.

Since the late 1990s, positioning theory has been seen to allow “for a very natural expansion of scale, from the analysis of person-to-person encounters to the unfolding of interactions between nation states” (Harré, Moghaddam, Pilkerton Cairnie, Rothbart and Sabat, 2009: 6). Although originating in the field of social psychology it has had widespread application over the last decade or so (Moghaddam and Harré, 2010). This has included research in areas as varied as anthropology (e.g. Handelman, 2008), journalism (e.g. Miller, 2013; Weizman, 2008) midwifery (Phillips and Hayes, 2008), organizational change studies (Zelle, 2009), political identity studies (e.g. Slocum-Bradley, 2008), and recently, public relations (e.g. James, 2010, 2011, 2012; Leitch and Motion, 2010; Tsetsura, 2012; Wise and James, 2013).

At a basic level, positioning refers to a process by which certain characteristics are attributed to an individual, group or some other entity (Baert, 2012). However positioning theory moves beyond this and is “based on the principle that not everyone involved in a social episode has equal access to rights and duties to perform particular kinds of meaningful actions at that moment and with those people” (Harré, 2012: 193). This idea resonates with public relations practice in that not all organizations are able to position themselves or others in particular ways, at certain times. An organization’s ability to undertake any type of positioning will depend on who else is involved with the actual or potential episode. For example, take a leader of a company whose employees have recently been involved in corrupt practices. He or she may be seen by some as not having the right to position the management team as being trustworthy; at least not until trust had been re-established in some way.

Public relations practitioners may be involved in devising a strategy to help position the company as being trustworthy after such an incident. In this instance, it could be that a public has undertaken a specific act in order to position the company management team as untrustworthy. For example, a group of shareholders may have undertaken a public relations program of their own, publishing an open letter in a newspaper, regularly “tweeting”, and starting a Facebook page detailing their views on the situation. Undertaking a positioning analysis could help the public relations manager to determine a course of action that would assist the company to respond appropriately in the circumstances. Of course, the shareholder group could also undertake a positioning analysis to guide their own campaign to achieve better management practices.

What is a position?

The concept of “position” has not been explored thoroughly outside of the marketing discipline. The word itself is often used in public relations and strategic communication as if everyone knows what it means. Within positioning theory literature, the term “position” is “somewhat ambiguous” (Slocum-Bradley, 2010: 88). However definitions center on a position being a “cluster of rights and duties that limits the repertoire of possible social acts available to a person or person-like entity (such as a corporation)” (Moghaddam, Harré and Lee, 2008: 294). Louis (2008) states, a position defines what is “socially possible without incurring reprobation or punishment” (p. 22). In a public relations context Motion (1997) and Berger (1999) both defined positioning. Motion stated:

…positioning is a subjectifying process of locating and being located within discourse sites or spaces…involves the struggle to create what may be known and how it may be known…. Positioning may be either a strategic manoeuvre or ploy by an individual, or the result of the discourses one is situated within as a subject of particular institutional relations, power relations, and social relations.

(1997: 7)

Berger (1999: 195) described positioning as a:

…simple but particular representation of events, a company-constructed worldview, which subsequently would anchor and frame all…communications (e.g. news releases, advertisement, medical and governmental presentations, and interviews).

These definitions and subsequent small amount of academic work on public relations positioning were not widely taken up by the field. It is notable that position is sometimes used almost interchangeably with the word “stance”, but when viewed through the lens of positioning theory, the words mean quite different things. Myers (2010) stated that generally stance-taking is seen as a “‘public act’ of taking a point of view…[and] does not just involve having an opinion on a topic; it involves using that opinion to align or disalign with someone else” (p. 264). Stance in public relations is most often discussed in the context of contingency theory and has been defined as:

The general way in which management in an organization approaches conflict. Stances range from accommodative, a willingness to make concessions, to advocacy, a willingness to persuade others to your position.

(Coombs, 2010: 484)

Stance in contingency theory has been operationalized as the position an organization takes in decision making, which is supposed to determine which strategy to employ (Pang, Jin and Cameron, 2010: 25).

It is evident that a “stance” differs from a “position” in regards to the attribution of rights and duties. This will be explored more fully in Chapter 2 but Harré (2006) summarizes here:

It seems that what people are taken to mean by what they say and do is partly a matter of what the various people involved in a social episode believe that persons of this or that category are entitled to say and do. Such entitlements are called “positions”…Everyone does not have equal access to the local repertoire of meaningful actions. Some members of a group are more advantageously positioned than others. Some categories of persons are accorded rights and duties distinct from those of others in the same episode. In many cases, people are satisfied with their rights. In other cases, the distribution of rights and duties can be challenged (Davies and Harré, 1999). Revealing the subtle patterns of the distributions of rights to speak and act in certain ways can open up the possibility of their transformation. At the same time, analysis of patterns of meaningful actions in terms of story lines can bring to light previously unnoticed presumptions about what is going on in an episode.

(2006: 229)

Positioning theorists have stated that positions are “related both to the storylines realized in the unfolding of episodes and to the acts that are the meanings of the intentional actions of the people who take part” (Harré, 2012: 194). Moghaddam, Harré and Lee (2008: 294) define “strategic positioning” as the “attributions of rights and duties that are to the advantage of the person who performs the positioning acts”. However this does not account for the specific strategic context of public relations in all cases. Neither does it account for situations where public relations, while still being goal directed, is actually being undertaken to advantage key publics, such as in emergency situations or in charitable fundraising. Motivation and goal directedness of positioning efforts in strategic public relations is a key component of practice. It is also the point at which issues of power come into play, and ethical considerations should be accounted for.

Taking account of the work of Berger (1999) and Motion (1997), together with the perspectives of positioning theory, I propose that the definition of a public relations position is: a point of intentional representation discursively constructed for the purposes of achieving an intended outcome, and from where possibilities for action are established, or in some cases denied, in terms of the local moral order/s wherein the public relations activity is taking place. Positioning comprises the actions taken to achieve the position.

How do positioning theory and public relations work together?

Positioning theory is a social cons...