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Marketing, Public Relations and Corporate Communications 41

corporate imagery, created through public relations programmes, can positively reflect
upon the product brands of a company, thereby increasing the awareness of the prod-
uct brand as well as adding an additional attribute that enhances consumers’ favoura-
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bility of the brand. Another complementary relationship that exists is the guarding
role of public relations as a ‘watchdog’ or ‘corrective’ for marketing in bringing other
strategic viewpoints to bear besides the need to create customer exchanges. 20

Integration in marketing and public relations functions

As a result of this overlap and complementarity – suggesting that it is useful for orga-
nizations to more closely align marketing and public relations or at least manage both
functions in a more integrated manner – since the 1980s and 1990s a lot of discussion
and debate has been around integration in communications management.This notion
of ‘integration’, or an integrated approach to communications management, shines
through in a number of concepts that have since emerged as an outcome of these
debates,including integrated marketing communications (IMC),integrated communi-
21
cations (IC), and corporate communications. The idea of integration that underlies
each of these concepts,while at times having been dismissed as a buzz word or as mere
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rhetoric, has been advanced in response to a number of highly significant changes in
the practice of communications management. Understanding these changes is quin-
tessential for attaining a greater understanding of the emergence of corporate com-
munications and the relevance of this management function for contemporary
organizations.The following section details these changes,and outlines why the notion
of integration in communications management has become so pertinent today.

2.3 Communications management comes of age
The different concepts of IMC, IC and corporate communications that have
emerged in recent years and that all proclaim some form of integration – at the
message, media, process or organizational levels – obviously differ somewhat from
one another in their positions and in their perspectives of the practice of communi-
cations management.All of them, however, agree on the idea that in any case there
should be some alignment or coordination (integration) of marketing and public
relations activities in order to achieve the best possible communications impact for
an organization and its products with external audiences.This does not mean that
both the marketing and public relations functions are actually merged or reduced to
one and the same function – as this is hardly if at all feasible in practice given the still
apparent differences in activities and audiences addressed by each (see Figure 2.2) –
but that both functions, while still existing as such, are balanced and managed
together from within an overarching framework (which is then termed as IC, IMC
or corporate communications). Such a framework suggests a holistic way of viewing
and practising communications management that cuts across the marketing and public
relations functions (and disciplines such as advertising and media relations within them)
and as such recognizes, as Anders Gronstedt puts it, that communications manage-
ment ‘is too complex and interactive to be fractionalized into insular disciplines’.