Marketing communication: principles and practice

MARKETING PUBLIC RELATIONS
It is helpful to distinguish corporate public relations from marketing public
relations, the latter of which, like financial public relations and community
public relations, serves a specific group – in this case, the marketing
department. Kotler sees marketing public relations as a development of
‘publicity’ which moves beyond ‘editorial column inches’ to assistance 
in product launches, repositioning mature products, promoting product
categories, influencing target groups, defending products under threat, 
and building corporate image – i.e. creating an effect, and not just out-
put. Bradley (1995: 666) defines public relations as ‘any non-personal
communication in the form of news about the company or its products 
which is carried by the mass media’. In a book of some 990 pages, public
relations gets little more than three pages. (This is disappointing for a book
I D E N T I T Y
,
I M A G E
,
A N D R E P U T A T I O N
208

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with such an alluring title!) What Bradley describes is closer to marketing
public relations (MPR), but it should be pointed out that MPR is not all
‘non-personal’ communication, nor is it only about promotion. Fill (1995)
appears to present marketing communications are part of organizational
communication.
Cutlip 
et al
. (1994/1999) distinguish corporate public relations as a
function of management seeking to identify, establish and maintain mutually
beneficial relationships between an organisation and the various publics on
whom its success and failure depend, whereas marketing public relations is
not only concerned with organisational success and failure but also 
with specific publics: customers, consumers, and clients with whom exchange
transactions take place.
Mercer (1992) sees public relations as the means by which the various
significant ‘publics’ of the corporation are identified and communicated with,
to the advantage of the corporation, through personal and impersonal media.
This publicizes a positive image of the company’s achievements and leads
to a good reputation. Mercer feels that publicity is the dominant form of
public relations activity in practice. Others have argued that public relations
is merely a form of consumer-oriented sales promotion. Then, marketing
public relations is simply part of sales promotion – an information
dissemination activity.