Whilst I strongly believe that marketing plays a central role in business and that PR can and must support the brand, I also believe that PR and marketing must remain two distinct responsibility centers: PR must not answer to marketing, period. They must work closely together – marketing centered on the brand, PR centered on the relationships. Or, put another way, marketing centered on the consumer and PR centered on the citizen.

There’s a never-ending debate about who’s the leader – PR or marketing – when it comes to getting an organisation on the map. Ford Kanzler argues that marketing is the ‘brains’ of the outfit’. That it provides the direction for all communication. PR is the helpmeet providing the support. If there was no marketing, there would be no organisation. Ford takes this further in saying an organisation’s “essential reason for being is marketing.”

Marketing should be the brains of the outfit, including a deep concern for customer relationships. Marketing, in an ideal scenario, should provide clear direction for any communications function, including PR.

The PR industry globally is undergoing one of its biggest changes since social media boomed across the web – it’s called content strategy and it’s rocketing through the traditional corridors of marketing and PR.

All public relations has positioning inherent within it, but positioning itself is often thought of as being marketing-specific. Three main manifestations of how PR impacts on positioning, however, are narratives, language and, perhaps especially, the fluid negotiations that take place between an organisation and its stakeholders to create meaning: a ‘contested space’.

Marketing communication has the potential to be, at least partially, an application of effective issues management. This is essentially because marketing communication is a proactive, ‘friendly’ mode of communication and may not necessarily raise suspicious hackles from stakeholders.

Those that advocate the view that PR and advertising will be subsumed into a hybrid communication discipline and those who believe the discipline should mint itself a ‘new’ name, like ‘communication professionals’, are in grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What about the most basic tenet of PR, that which constitutes it being a discipline that can help organisations change so they better meet society’s expectations?

The adage of what goes around comes around rings truer than ever when applied to business referrals and social media. If you give, you get, is the way I look at it. Biblical, in some ways. In social media terms, the parlance is reciprocity and its strategic manifestation is thought leadership provision resulting in meaningful [...]

Five critical topics that public relations and marketing communicators need to know about and be adept at leveraging are content marketing, optimising online real estate for search, the value of 3RD party brand advocates, the subtleties of media relations and evaluation and measurement. This post touches on all five, referring you to some excellent PR and marketing bloggers who have recently explored these issues.

A perfect storm has erupted over the issue of whether PR should, partially at least, be measured on its ability to drive sales and/or generate profits. Public relations is about building mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and its stakeholders. Its contribution to business-related outcomes is significant. Better: stakeholder relationships, organisational reputation, awareness of and trust towards or of the organisation and/or its products/services.