Bite Size Comms

In their excellent BBC podcast ‘When it hits the fan’, David Yelland and Simon Lewis recently discussed the role of marketing in an organisation (they were discussing the rebranding of BT to EE). They said that marketing was focused on one stakeholder group, whereas PR was aimed at a wider group of stakeholders, and that the implications of reputation were not thought through in marketing. They concluded that marketing and PR were separate functions that should “work alongside each other rather than one feeling they are lesser than the other”.

I agree. I always spend time explaining to PR apprentices, new to the role, what the differences are. That marketing covers a broader range of business tasks: developing the product or service, setting its price, where it can be bought, and promoting it to potential buyers. Marketing is highly focused on customers. Understanding those people is important to the discipline. PR, on the other hand, is just about communications, but on a much wider range of issues than sales and with a broader audience. The two disciplines are distinct and separate and should work together. There is a fallacy within marketing that PR is part of the marketing mix and is just about gaining publicity. There is envy among in-house PR people of the bigger budgets that marketing often commands.

Can marketing and PR learn from each other? I believe so. PR practitioners could get better at understanding their audiences. I cringe whenever I hear ‘general public’ as a stakeholder group. The marketing process of segmentation – targeting – positioning, linking and positioning audiences with propositions, could be adapted for PR. Marketers could understand that enhancing the reputation of an organisation and building strong relationships with the stakeholders is important to an organisation’s sustainability. There is more to it than ‘brands’ selling stuff. I also think the good work within the PR profession on ethics, inclusion and accessibility is relevant to marketers.

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