The future mergence of public relations and marketing, heralded now by the emergence of concepts like Integrated marketing Communications (IMC), Marketing Public Relations (MPR) and Marketing Communications (MC) will definitely have an impact on the public relations industry.
First of all Public relations practitioners will be required to be skilled in both marketing and public relations functions, thus their task will be more challenging.
Secondly, as rightly pointed out by Ann Onweme in her comments, they will certainly be less jobs both for public relations practitioners all well as marketers , not just in Africa but all over the world. This is because they will be just one department which will now be responsible for carrying out both public relations and marketing functions thus requiring less people to do the work that was previously done by many people.
Thirdly I believe there will also be a problem of which discipline dominates in the mergence. whether it will be marketing or public relations.
Though the nature of the mergence of both disciplines and the name it may eventually be called cannot be determined for now, I forsee a mergence whereby marketing may tend to dominate over public relations. This is because marketing is still being considered as the driving force behind companies and organisations. Marketing is being considerd as the department that brings in money into a company or organisation. You can measure marketing's output but you cannot measure that of public relations. For this reason, the marketing department is still being allocated the largest budget within organisations. Also some marketing scholars believe public relations tools, tactics and techniques can be readily adapted and used by marketers. Yet again another problem which mays make it difficult for public relations to dominate is the fact that the public relations discipline does not have a specific name that defines its functions. Many companies and organisations practice some sort of public relations but it is not called public relations, it may be called, marketing, customer relations or human resources.
Commenting on Integrated marketing communications (IMC), De pelsmacker et al, point out to a similar problem when they observe that public relations departments are reluctant to integrate because they often consider IMC as the encroachment of advertising people on public relations professionals and a form of marketing imperialism.
I therefore believe a mergence of public relations and marketing would have a more negative impact than a positive one on the public relations industry.
In this light, public relations professionals and academics need to work hard to tighten the loopholes which are existing in public relations now in order to measure up with marketing in event of a future mergence with marketing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Your argument is developing and slightly moving forward after every comment, which is actually a process of argument maturing. To me, the gradual mergence of marketing and PR somehow is similar to your argument building – you are developing and improving the argument, which is the consequence of the communication process with people who comment. Somehow, it seems that the commenting and responding processes are backing up your argument. Marketing and PR are getting closer together and merging because they communicate and respond to each other. Which is the process of blogging, isn’t it?
Yes while I agree there are many boundary overlaps between public relations and marketing, and that there is an field of PR called marketing PR, I believe that the two despite similarities, will never merge. This is based on the fact that marketing is based on customers and selling products and services (Wilcox et al). The banks are a good example, where the product (rates, interest etc) and services (flexible opening hours, customer relations etc) are paramount to its operations, not public relations (which is reputation building). Yes sometimes there are overlaps in an organisation’s operations, for example, a university will heavily engage in marketing by promoting its programmes as the product, while at the same time building its reputation by hiring the best academics. If the organisation already has a good reputation within the communities they serve, then there is little work for public relations and attention will be on marketing. Public relations will still be around to manage crisis, and manage the flow of information to the public of their work.
Of course when there is a new product or a relaunch of an old product, marketers will resort to the assistance of public relations practitioners to manage this process. The two will only merge and complement each others work when it suits the agenda of the organisation.
I'm not sure about the idea that there will be fewer jobs in the future. Maybe this will be the case in economies that are already well developed and sophisticated. But, in most countries PR is still pretty basic and has a lot of development to go through as economies around the world also grow and develop. I would say that in countries such as India, China, Brasil and Mexico there will be many jobs available in the years to come - even if PR and marketing continue to merge
Hi Ophelia,
I understand from your article on the impact of this mergence on the public relations profession that the mergence will lead to more unemployment in Africa. This will certainly be a bad thing for us so I will not encourage it at all. Anyway I hope this theory of yours never comes to pass in Africa especially in Nigeria.
Post a Comment