Public Relations

Public relations is one of the important promotional tools used by a business to manage public opinion about the organisation. A business needs to communicate effectively with customers, suppliers, dealers, shareholders, intermediaries, activist groups, and the government, since all of them can affect its ability to achieve its objectives — for example, the active support of middlemen is needed to survive in a competitive selling environment, while consumer activist groups can restrict a firm's sales directly by urging customers not to buy, or through the imposition of laws. Public relations therefore involves a variety of programmes designed to promote or protect a company's image and its individual products in the eyes of the public. Most organisations have a separate department to manage public relations, or use an outside public relations agency, whose main task is to disseminate information and build goodwill about the business — and to tackle the situation, as an emergency, when there is negative publicity about the company or its products.

Role of Public Relations

The public relations department performs five functions:

1. Publicity: Publicity is similar to advertising in the sense that it is a non-personal form of communication. However, unlike advertising, it is a non-paid form of communication — it takes place when favourable news about a product or service is presented in the mass media. Because the information is disseminated by an independent source (such as the press), publicity carries more credibility than a sponsored advertising message.
2. Press Release: Information about the organisation needs to be presented positively in the press. The public relations department stays in contact with the media to present true facts and a correct picture of the company — otherwise, news taken from other sources can get distorted.
3. Corporate Communication: The organisation's image is promoted through communication with the public and with employees, usually with the help of newsletters, annual reports, brochures, articles, and audio-visual material. Speeches by company executives at trade association meetings or trade fairs, and interviews with TV channels, also help build the company's image.
4. Lobbying: The organisation deals with government officials and ministers on policies relating to business and the economy, since the government also seeks the opinion of major stakeholders while framing industrial, telecom, and taxation policies.
5. Counselling: The public relations department advises management on general issues that affect the public and the position the company should take on a particular issue. Contributing money and time to causes like the environment, wildlife, or children's rights helps build goodwill through such cause-related activities.

How Public Relations Helps Marketing

Maintaining good public relations also helps achieve marketing objectives:

• (a) Building Awareness: Placing stories and dramatising the product in the media builds marketplace excitement even before the product reaches the market or media advertising begins. …