CH14 PR & Publicity & Corporate advertising

Public Relations, Publicity, and Corporate Advertising

• Public relations, publicity, and corporate advertising are distinct components of an Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) strategy.

Public Relations

• Public relations activities include building excitement pre-launch, improving ROI, creating news about the advertising itself, influencing the influentials, and defending product/position with reasons why.
• Public relations as part of IMC has advantages, including amplifying and adding credibility to campaigns, being cost-effective in achieving goals, supporting relationships between stakeholders, mitigating negatives to controversial campaigns, and improving search engine optimization.
• Disadvantages of public relations as part of IMC include lack of control over media, no guaranteed media coverage, and infrequent collection of relevant survey data to guide public relations decision makers.
• Practising public relations involves preplanning, determining and evaluating public attitudes, planning, identifying policies and procedures, implementation, and developing and executing an action program.
• Determining public attitudes is crucial as it affects sales, perceived image, and employee morale.

Public Relations Plan

• Establishing a public relations plan involves a four-step process: formative research on situation, organization, and publics; strategy to establish goals and formulate action; tactics to choose and implement; and evaluation.

Measuring Effectiveness

• Measuring effectiveness involves evaluating the public relations plan, including the PRIA evaluation framework, and tracking social media engagement.
• Evaluation measures include measure actual PR activities, measure changes in perceptions and attitudes, and measure changes in behavior, such as attendance, press clippings, and site hits.

Publicity

• Publicity is a strategy that involves communication about an organization, brand, or idea not directly paid for or identifiably sponsored.
• Publicity has variable level of control, being controlled by and from the organization, and controlled by the media about the organization.
• The power of publicity lies in its ability to make or break a product or even a company.

Corporate Advertising

• Corporate advertising is paid messaging to promote overall awareness of a company or enhance its image among a target audience.
• Objectives of corporate advertising include creating a positive company image, sharing views on issues, boosting employee morale, addressing investor questions, and identifying ownership of brands.
• Types of corporate advertising include image, crisis recovery, sponsorship, and advocacy.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Corporate Advertising

• Advantages of corporate advertising include excellent positioning of the firm, taking advantage of benefits derived from PR, and reaching a selected target market.
• Disadvantages of corporate advertising include questionable effectiveness, raising questions of fairness and ethics, and potential negative impact on sales.