PR and marketing: integrate or divide and conquer?
By Craig on Aug 5, 2010 in Advertising, Blog guests & critiques, interviews, Marketing, Public relations, Strategic communication | View Comments
This is a guest post by Sue Corlette*, an experienced professional communicator and educator.
It’s interesting to observe that the traditional divide between the marketing (paid messages) and public relations (third party endorsement) professions still seems to be alive and well judging by their positioning in most organisations.
Each profession is usually either placed in an independent organisational silo, or PR is positioned as a subset ‘add-on’ of marketing, which as we know inevitably leads to turf wars. However this need not be so in practice and it is worth the effort to step across the silos, as the following case study demonstrates.
Sue Corlette
Melding public relations and marketing
In 2007, the National Prescribing Service (now known as “NPS – Better choices, Better health”) conducted a ‘Get to know your medicines’ national campaign to educate people on the wiser use of medicines. The campaign featured two x two week TVCs and a direct mail out of campaign resources. The campaign spanned several teams within NPS and the resulting strategy became a milestone in collaborative success.
This was the third campaign of its kind and was astoundingly successful compared to previous campaigns for three reasons:
- We used real people (PR tactic 101 = third party endorsement) in the TVCs
- We introduced a newsletter / order form targeting both consumer and health professional audiences. This replaced multiple letters sent with sample resources to segmented mail lists of health professional and consumer audiences marketing tactic 101 = DM)
- We extended the DM concept by asking third party stakeholders to distribute it on our behalf in addition to us distributing it via purchased mail lists.
The newsletter was key to the campaign’s success because it articulated both the consumer and health professional perspective.
In so doing it straddled the sometimes precarious divide between consumer and health professional organisational viewpoints.
It also ensured that the messages consumers were hearing in the TVCs would be reinforced by their health professional. It included statements from third party individuals and organisations to reinforce messages and reassure readers that the purpose of the campaign was legitimate; and it had an inbuilt ‘evaluation tool’ – a resource order form.
Importantly:
- this was the first time all the resources were aggregated in one simple form that did not require time-poor health professionals to order online through multiple pages
- the inclusion of third party organisations and individuals gave further reassurance to readers who didn’t already know NPS that the campaigns were legitimate and credible
- all people featured were also media spokespeople
- third parties signed off when satisfied the messages were consistent with their perspective and organisational values
- by default, the sign off process ensured that messages were clarified and stakeholders were aligned
- it included ‘a call to action’ resource order form to measure its effectiveness
- the number of orders generated from the form would indicate if readers were willing to support the campaign.
How did it measure up?
235,000 newsletters were distributed (to an estimated 80% of the target audience) at a cost of $23,000.
- 613,119 resources were ordered during the campaign compared to 257, 714 for the twelve months prior
- 8,000 organisations placed orders, compared to 1,000 in the previous 12 months
- The insertion strategy extended reach to 300,000, generating 8,000 orders
- So successful was the response and feedback to the first newsletter, two more newsletters followed to keep recipients informed of the campaign progress and NPS received further funding for a subsequent 2008 campaign, “Generic Medicines are an equal choice”
- The campaign received several industry awards including:
- 2008 International Association of Business Communicators Golden Quill Award for multi audience communication
- 2008 Public Relations Institute of Australia National Golden Target Award, Health Promotion
- 2008 Marketing Institute of Australia state award for Get to know your medicines national campaign.
What do you think about the integration of marketing and public relations approaches in this case study? Is there a clear line between the two professional communication disciplines, or is it pretty grey? What do you think about the way Sue has outlined the approach taken to campaign measurement? I’d really like to know how you set benchmarks for public relations and marketing activity.
About the author
Sue Corlette MA Org Comms, Dip PR, MPRIA
*Sue Corlette is a senior corporate communications and marketing executive with extensive experience in strategic planning and the collaborative implementation of successful, award winning outcomes for a diversity of businesses, both in the not-for-profit and commercial sectors. Whilst working in various corporate communications roles Sue has spent the last six years also writing course curriculum and teaching public relations and marketing for the vocational and higher education sectors.
