Marketing and Public Relations: Why Your Company Needs Both
Note: This is a blog post I originally wrote for the Allen Hall Public Relations blog when I was an account supervisor there, but it’s still very relevant so I’ve decided to re-post it on my own PR blog.
Although marketing and public relations overlap and complement each other in some ways, they aren’t interchangeable. Simply having a marketing department with no public relations is bad news for any business. Still, many companies need to be persuaded of the benefits of having both.
Here are four reasons why companies with marketing departments still need public relations:
1. PR practitioners make marketing more successful.
Good public relations helps make a marketer’s job much easier than if a company has no or poor public relations. Because public relations reinforces positive public opinion about a brand, consumers are more receptive to marketing tactics. In other words, if the public likes you, they’re more likely to listen to your marketing campaigns and support you. Although some public relations strategies don’t directly bring in profit, they do pave the way for marketers to execute successful campaigns.
2. PR practitioners keep a company’s image positive.
Marketing doesn’t help a company manage its reputation. Public relations, on the other hand, has the best interest of both the company and its publics in mind. This makes public relations very valuable when it comes to ethical and legal situations, in addition to employee, consumer and media relations. Marketing departments are less concerned with image than making a profit, but a bad public image can result in severe negative consequences. Public relations helps prevent such consequences.
3. PR practitioners are experienced in writing for the media.
Public relations practitioners have extensive backgrounds in writing for all types of media. They are taught to write in specific styles that get stories picked up by social media, newspapers, magazines, broadcast channels, etc. More media coverage results in more awareness of the company. Marketers, although experienced writers in some areas, are generally not nearly as skilled in writing for the media.
4. PR practitioners are trained to handle crisis communication and damage control.
It’s not the job of marketers to deal with crisis communication and damage control. It’s the job of public relations practitioners, who are specifically trained not only to come up with crisis communication plans, but also to implement them. And in this age of transparency, crisis communication is more necessary than ever. People want to know what’s going on and what the company is doing to fix an issue, and they want to know immediately.
Because of these reasons, and many more, underestimating the value of public relations is a huge mistake for any company. Only having a marketing department or using the marketing department to do the company’s public relations can result in poor crisis communication, inadequate press coverage and an unstable reputation. A company is at its best when it utilizes both marketing and public relations practitioners.
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Tags: difference between PR and marketing, how public relations and marketing can work together, public relations, what is public relations, why public relations is important, why you need both marketing and public relations
Solid post Sarah. You draw on several ideas of why PR is important. However, you’re trying separate PR from marketing, which anymore in the digital age, the two are being fused together. It’s impossible now to tell where PR starts and where marketing ends (see: New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott). To have the two departments entirely separate creates an inefficiency within the company, delays response times, and doesn’t create a cohesive branding message across media platforms. The problem with this can be traced all the way back to the educational system. We have a J school and a B school. One teaches PR, the other teaches marketing. However, they neglect to teach where they overlap. If you’re a PR major, you won’t be nearly as successful in the agency/client world if you don’t fully understand the marketing function that your work is supposed to complement. And the same goes for marketing majors. The two cannot be separated anymore, however our universities are 10 years behind on the change. If we want businesses to have fully integrated hybrid PR/mktg departments, it starts with how we train our youth.
Moving on, you made a couple broad generalizations about marketers that are fairly off base. “Marketing departments are less concerned with image than making a profit.” On the contrary, the marketing department is completely concerned with branding and image. A CMO will not sign off on a campaign that damns the brand in the name of profits (unless the CMO is on their way out, or it ‘s a very poorly run company). A company needs to make profits, but one of the driving forces behind those profits is the brand’s strength. If you damage the brand for short term growth, you’re doing so at the expense of long term sales.
You also make a good point about how PR professionals have experience writing for the media. Yes, they do. But the marketing department tracks, measures, and monitors the pulse of the consumer. And anymore, the trend is going towards writing to the consumer, not the media (see the entire Old Spice viral campaign, ComcastCares, RefreshEverything, etc.). This is why the marketing and PR departments have to be interconnected. You cannot be crafting a message for a large media outlet without knowing what the message/branding effort is that is targeted at the individual.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Cheers,
Josh Groth
Josh -
You made some very good points in your response to my post. I shouldn’t have tried to draw such a line between PR and marketing when that line is getting fuzzier by the minute. And your right that a disconnect between the two departments can cause inefficiency within a company and create an inconsistent brand image.
You also bring up a really great point about the way that we’re taught PR and marketing in college – in two completely different schools. I think you hit it right on the nose when you talked about how important it is to be educated on the roles both play in a company, especially because they are so interconnected and dependent on one another. That’s something that I know the curriculum at the UO J-School and B-School were missing.
The idea behind my post wasn’t to say that marketing and PR can’t/shouldn’t work together, it was to show that overlooking the importance of key PR skills just because you have a marketing department is not a good idea for any company. The key skills I’m talking about are media relations (because yes, we do still pitch stories for media exposure – pitching online media is similar to pitching print), writing (we took very specific writing classes in the J-school to learn how to write very specific ways – with AP style, inverted pyramid style, precise grammar, SEO optimized, non-advertising-y, ect.), brand building, social media, among other things. I know some of these overlap with the training in the B-school, but I also know some don’t.
One thing that’s important to keep in mind is that the role of the PR practitioner and the marketer are changing and if you don’t evolve with them, you’re SOL (excuse my language). I think we both realize that though.
As far as writing for the consumer goes, I think business AND PR students fall a little short there. In PR program, I was fortune enough to take classes that taught us blogging and other social media, but it all just skimmed the surface and most of it I learned on my own from my own extracurricular activities and research. (University of Oregon J-school teaches it, but most other J-schools don’t.) Did the B-school teach any social media? It should. Smart marketing students (same with smart PR students) should be exploring blogging and social media on their own because they’ll be useful in their future careers. Those who learned it in school may, perhaps, have a bit of a leg up. But that really depends on whether they took advantage and pursued it outside of school or not. We did get a lot of really strategic writing training though. (Maybe my writing in this comment isn’t the best example of it lol)
What I should have discussed more in my post (and I would have if I’d written it more recently – I was reposting an old blog post) would have been the importance of relationship building in PR. It’s something we put a huge emphasis on. And two-way communication – not just putting messages out there but also responding to responses, asking questions, conversing, and having a plan. Then again, this isn’t specific to PR, but from my understanding there’s more emphasis on it than in marketing. (I could be wrong!)
I’m not in any way trying to overlook the strengths of a marketing department. However, marketing doesn’t really need someone defending it to businesses because most of them put a high value on it already. PR, on the other hand, often gets overlooked or misunderstood. Which is, in my opinion, a huge mistake.
Hope that some things up. Looking forward to talking with you more!
Sarah