The Gradual Mergence of Public Relations and Marketing

I believe marketing and public relations are gradually merging rather than growing farther apart.
The relationship between marketing and public relations has always been characterised with a lot of similarities especially in the tools they used to carry out their functions such as: research, planning and media.
Currently that relationship has gone beyond using similar tools to performing similar functions.
In a bid to win consumer support in an increasingly competitive business environment, marketers now find themselves doing the job of the public relations practitioner and the public relations practitioner finds himself doing some marketing jobs.
Fraser Seitel observes that, public relations practitioners are now expected to understand and be able to work with the marketing concepts and tools while marketers are also expected to learn about and be able to use public relations concepts and tools. In such a situation therefore, one cannot distinguish the marketer from the public relations practitioner and vice versa, thus indicating the unification of the two disciplines.
Some public relations scholars like James Hutton, have observed that marketing is "redefining" itself as public relations. I think this observation is true because, there are a whole lot of functions which was previously thought of as belonging to the public relations domain which are now being carried out by marketers. For example, there is now an emerging discipline in marketing called 'internal marketing', which deals with the internal communication functions of an organisation such as employee communications, workplace publications, employee meetings and more. These functions are exactly what the public relations practioner in an organisation does. Also we now have marketers carrying out crisis communication under the name "Crisis marketing" and even public relations itself under the name "relationship marketing". This just shows that the two disciplines are moving closer than ever before. Alison Theaker has also observed that the present activities of marketing and public relations shows that the two disciplines are moving closely together towards an integrated approach. The gradual mergence of marketing and public relations is heralded by the emergence of concepts like: "marketing Public relations" (MPR), "product public relations", "marketing communications" and Integrated marketing Communications (IMC).
So the big question to you all is, do you think marketing and public relations are merging or growing further apart? and if they are merging, what impact will this mergence have on the public relations industry?

Introduction

Hellooooo!!! Greetings and welcome to you all who visit this blog. Hope you do find it interesting. Blogging is actually a new experience to me but I find it interesting anyway. On this blog we will be discussing about an aspect of some current trends in the field of public relations , specifically about whether marketing and public relations are merging or growing further apart.
Your comments and contributions are most welcomed.