Page 46 - Corporate Communication

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Marketing, Public Relations and Corporate Communications 35

Table 2.1 Historical models of public relations

Characteristic Press agentry/publicity Public information Managerial discipline
Purpose Propaganda Dissemination of Persuasion and/or mutual
information understanding/accommodation
Nature of commu- One-way complete, truth One-way, truth Two-way, (im)balanced effects
nication not essential important
Communications Source → receiver Source → receiver Source → receiver
model ← feedback, actor ↔ actor
Nature of research Little if any Little, readership Formative attitude evaluation
readability
Quote ‘public be damned’ ‘public be informed’ ‘public be influenced, involved
and/or accommodated’
Communications Publicity (propaganda) Publicity, media Publicity, media relations,
disciplines involved relations employee communications,
investor relations, general
counsel, government affairs…
Period 1800–1899 1900–1940 1940–1990

capitalism and government corruption, and raised public awareness of the unethical
and sometimes harmful practices of business.To heed these ‘muckrakers’, many large
organizations hired writers and publicists to be spokespeople for the organization
and to disseminate general information to these ‘muckraking’ groups and the public
at large so as to gain public approval of its decisions and behaviour (the ‘public infor-
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mation’ period mentioned in Table 2.1). At the same time, while demand still out-
weighed production, the growth of many markets stabilized and even curtailed, and
organizations also started to hire advertising agents to promote their products to
existing and prospective customers in an effort to consolidate their overall sales.
In the following decade (1900–1910) economic reform in the US and UK and
intensified public scepticism brought it home to organizations that these writers,
publicists and advertising agents were needed on a more continuous basis, and should
not just be hired ‘on and off’ as press agents had been in the past.These practitioners
were therefore brought ‘in-house’, and communications activities to both the general
public and the markets served by the organization as a result became credited as more
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fully-fledged functions, rather than just as fragmentary, ad hoc publicity stunts. This
development effectively brought the first inkling of expertise in the area of communi-
cations and planted the seeds for the two professional functions that were to define for
the majority of the twentieth century how communications management was approached
and understood in organizations: public relations and marketing.
Both the public relations and marketing functions have sprung from the under-
standing that has ever since become established in the industrialized world; namely
that an organization, in order to prosper, needs to be concerned with issues of
public concern (i.e. public relations), as well as with ways of effectively bringing
products to markets (i.e. marketing). Starting from this understanding, both the public
relations and marketing functions have gone through considerable professional