Public relations is often confused with marketing and advertising, but public relations is a completely separate entity that deals with the likeness of an image and a businesses relation with their customers as well as employees. Public relations is not concerned with making sales, rather creating trust and a likable image.
In specific, Public Relations is primarily concerned with the idea of “publics”; groups and demographics of people who have a direct stake (or at least a direct opinion) on the organization or company in question. Publics can be both external (like customers and legislative bodies) and internal (employees across the organizational structure.) Public Relations is then, even more granularly, the study and practice of communicating with these publics and making sure they keep a positive relationship with the overall organization.
In contrast, advertising involves a paid form of communication in hopes of leading to sales. Like public relations, advertising seeks to boost customer awareness, not to boost positive relations, but rather to boost sales. Just like public relations, advertising takes place in all mediums of communication from television to social media. The key focuses of an advertiser are; product, pricing, place, promotion, physical evidence, people, and process.
Marketing is the umbrella term these subjects fall under. Marketing consists of all these elements and is the practice of identifying and providing consumers needs. Marketing is concerned primarily with driving organizational income; the process of selling products and ensuring that they are ultimately bought, and making sure the organization achieves the financial goals it has set forth for any given period of time. Public Relations, in contrast, only responds to financial needs from a management standpoint. While the purpose of every organization is to make money, marketing focuses exclusively on that process of production to the customer buying the product whereas Public Relations interacts with the public in ways outside of immediate financial objectives.
In conclusion, while they are both practices of communication, Public Relations is much wider reaching and requires a more “personable” outlook whereas Marketing is much more focused and does generally exclusively keep in mind those profit objectives. In a sense, Marketing is a very utilitarian form of communication with these customers, whereas Public Relations is less utilitarian but is focused on long term benefits from the sort of relations and community effort that it involves.
This post was written by SJMC students as an SEO assignment for our web content and development class.