Issues on the Gradual Mergence of Public Relations and Marketing

In response Shang Li Lia's comment, the major difference between public relations and marketing today is that, marketing deals with making profitable exchanges with customers for their organisations. The marketer provides goods or services to consumers while consumers give them money in exchange for the goods or services provided, while public relations deals mainly with the reputation building of an organisation by creating a mutual understanding between the organisation and its many stakeholders, both consumers and non-consumers.
I am not saying that the two disciplines have already merged, my main argument here is that there are indications that these two disciplines may merge sometime in the future, say like 10 years from now. And what are the indicators?
The actvities of marketing today shows that marketing does not only aim at creating exchanges with consumers, it also aims at buillding relationships with the non-consumer publics.James Hutton has pointed out that the reason for this has less to do with marketing trying to dominate public relations, that marketing today is just progressing naturally toward relationships and non-customer publics. In my previous write up, I also made mention of the fact that you now have marketers who now perform functions which were thought of previously as belonging to the public relations disciplines such as 'internal marketing', which is more a less internal communications in public relations and 'crisis marketing' which is about crisis communication in public relations. On the other hand you also have public relations practitioners who carry out some marketing functions as well. Also with the emergence of concepts like marketing public relations and integrated marketing communications it becomes increasingly difficult to seperate marketing from public relations.
Philip Kitchen and Ionna Papasolomou comment on this integration of marketing and public relations by saying that, there is an increasing number of articles in which public relations and marketing communication practices are recognised as increasingly integrated and converging concepts. They add that, there is a growing tendency for public relations and marketing to be seen as converging disciplines in both professional and academic circles.
I believe a lot of companies and organisations would capitalise on this mergence because it will help them cut down on expenditure. They would rather run just one department with fewer workers who have the ability to perform both public relations functions and marketing functions than run two seperate departments with different workers for each department because it will be much more costly.
Also in regards to Africa, and specifically in Cameroon I will say, I believe the mergence is very possible and would be very much welcome in contrast to Michael's opinion that it can never work. This is because, in most companies aand organisations in Africa and even in Cameroon, there is no seperate department for public relations. The public relations practitioner reports either to the marketing manager or human resource manager. This could be due to the fact that public relations in Africa is not well developed or that the organisations are trying to cut down on costs. So I strongly believe they would welcome this trend because, in a way it is already in line with what some companies and organisations there are practising.