Thomas L. Harris and Patricia T. Whalen have referred to public relations strategies and tactics that are used to achieve marketing objectives as Marketing Public Relations (MPR) in their book The Marketer’s Guide to Public Relations in the 21st Century
Marketing objectives that may be aided by public relations activities include creating awareness, giving customers a reason to buy, facilitated communications, educating customers, building trust and building relations with stakeholders. So I feel Marketing Public Relations adds value to the integrated marketing program in a number of ways.
1. It is cost effective way to achieve the marketing objective
As PR activity also means earned media activity, the cost invested in comparison to advertising or other marketing activities is very minimal. PR activities are done to gain media attention and so it is cost effective.
2. It achieves credibility
Since PR is not a paid activity, it is all talking about the facts of the products/services by media or influencers (In case of social media) or consumers themselves; it builds more credibility and trust about the product or services.
3. It is a highly targeted way to conduct PR
PR follows the management function whereas MPR follows the marketing function. So these PR activities are highly focused to achieve the marketing objective. This ease up in building the PR strategies keeping a single goal in mind.
Related Article – Integrate Your Marketing and PR Strategies
4. It breaks through the clutter
With so many social media, digital news media, and traditional media platforms available for information, your advertising has high chance of losing the attention of the target audience in this clutter. PR news form a very focused, informative and reliable piece of content that can quickly get picked up by the target audience
5. It supports marketing programme
MPR is very focused driven PR, hence it supports other marketing communication tools to spread out the main key message. It also complements other marketing activities. For example – It helps to create awareness about the marketing event and then its outcome, awareness about the product/service benefits, and more.
MPR has some challenges too which you should keep in mind so that you are well prepared during the crisis in the process
So I believe PR is a very broad concept and it goes beyond marketing. It can hence be done keeping in mind a very focused objective to achieve a very specific goal.
Happy Marketing!
– Shreya Doshi
Shreya is currently part of a Marketing team at School of COmmunication and REputation, Mumbai (SCoRe). She has completed her Masters in Marketing and Advertising from Mumbai Educational Trust (MET) University. She believes that learning should never stop in life. Hence, learning something new every day is her moto. She loves to travel, enjoys the thrill while performing adventure sports, music and dance takes her to a different world.
