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38 Mapping the Field

public relations and marketing. Importantly, Figure 2.1 also indicates the trend from a
view of marketing and public relations as largely separate functions to a more integrated
perspective that combines them into a new vision of the practice of communications
management.This ‘integration’trend was already noted in a landmark article in 1978 by
Philip Kotler and William Mindak, which highlighted the different ways of looking at
the relationship between marketing and public relations.The view of public relations
and marketing as distinct functions had characterized much of the twentieth century,
the 1978 article emphasized, yet it predicted that a view of an integrated paradigm
would dominate the 1980s, 1990s and beyond as ‘new patterns of operation and inter-
relation can be expected to appear in these [marketing and public relations] functions’. 10

Marketing and public relations as distinct functions

Traditionally,before the 1980s,the marketing and public relations functions had been
considered as rather distinct in their perspectives and activities, as having very differ-
ent objectives and value orientations and with each function going through its own
trajectory of professional development. 11 Central to this traditional view was the
simple point that marketing deals with markets, while public relations deals with all
the publics (that excludes existing and prospective customers and consumers) of an
organization. Markets, from this perspective, are created by the identification of a
segment of the population for which a product or service is or could be in demand,
and involves product or service-related communications; while publics are seen as
actively creating and mobilizing themselves whenever companies make decisions that
affect a group of people adversely.These publics are also seen to concern themselves
with more general corporate, rather than product-related, news and communica-
tions. Kotler and Mindak articulated this traditional position by saying that ‘market-
ing exists to sense, serve, and satisfy customer needs at a profit’, while ‘public relations
exists to produce goodwill with the company’s various publics so that these publics
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do not interfere in the firm’s profit-making ability’. This split in publics versus
markets was further perpetuated by the view that publics need to be addressed by
organizations rather differently from markets, through a more balanced or symmetri-
cal process of dialogue and accommodation. Markets, it was suggested, are then
primarily approached by unidirectional and asymmetrical message flows from orga-
nizations, with a strict aim of persuasion to boost sales or increase a company’s market
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share. Following this line of analysis, many industry commentators, academics and
communications experts concurred that while both the marketing and public rela-
tions functions are needed in the world of organizations, they have very different
objectives and target groups, and also use very different ways of communicating.As
a result, the conclusion was that both functions are distinct and should remain largely
separate from one another in their scope and operations.

Marketing and public relations as distinct but
complementary functions

Cracks, however, time and again appeared in this view of public relations and marketing
as two functions that are completely distinct in their objectives and tactics.For one,it had