The Handbook of Strategic Public Relations and Integrated Marketing Communications, Second Edition

By Clarke L. Caywood

The definitive guide to PR and communications—updated with the newest social media and brand-reputation tools and techniques

The most authoritative, comprehensive resource of its kind, The Handbook of Strategic Public Relations and Integrated Marketing Communications, Second Edition, is a gathering of 70 of the brightest, most influential figures in the field. It includes 27 new chapters as well as 44 new authors addressing the major changes in the field since the last edition: the use of social media in business, demanding and growing stakeholder relationships and a new era of openness and transparency to protect reputations and brands and to prevent crises.

Providing best practices for 28 key industries, the handbook is conveniently organized into thematic sections:

• Introduction to Public Relations and Integrated Communications— research, history, law and ethics
• Stakeholder Leadership in Public Relations—crisis management, employees, investors, consumers, press, corporate philanthropy and digital communities
• Current and Continuing Issues in Public Relations—business sustainability, environmental communications, and reputation and brand management
• Industries and Organizations: Business-to-Consumer and Business-to-Business—automotive, aviation, insurance, hospitality, healthcare, consulting, financial, food, law and energy

Each section highlights specific case studies and examples to illuminate exactly how to plan and execute different methods for optimum results. The book concludes with a section on the future of the industry—developing issues, trends and roles of public relations and integrated communications.

Use The Handbook of Strategic Public Relations and Integrated Marketing Communications to position your company, your brand and yourself for success for many years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Dec 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9780071770989

Book preview

2011

PART 1

INTRODUCTION TO PUBLIC RELATIONS AND INTEGRATED MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

CHAPTER 1

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PUBLIC RELATIONS: The Strategic Stages of Integrated Marketing Communications

Clarke L. Caywood, Ph.D.

Professor and Past Chairman, Department of Integrated Marketing Communications

Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications

Northwestern University

Since the last time I edited this book, public relations (PR) practitioners have continued their efforts to build strong leadership for businesses and other complex organizations. These continued efforts to integrate at several levels of business and society will create more integrated management processes, protecting and preserving the reputation of the organization and its stakeholders. In the past decade, public relations has moved beyond its self-defined role of building relations to integrating relationships between an organization and its publics.

DEFINITION

Public relations is the profitable integration of an organization’s new and continuing relationship with stakeholders, including customers, by managing all communications contacts with the organization, which creates and protects the brand and the reputation of the organization.

After reading all the chapters in this second edition of the Handbook, the big idea that emerges is that PR provides management a leadership opportunity to integrate relationships both inside and outside their organization, using a wide range of management strategies and tactics, including communications. I was surprised to find that I only needed to modify my formal definition slightly since the first edition.

Out of all the functions of management, PR has the broadest reach, appealing to the greatest number of audiences or stakeholder groups and individuals. The chief executive officer (CEO) understands that the shareholder, employee and customer are all important stakeholders, although not the only ones. This book begins its section on stakeholders with a chapter on employees by Insidedge CEO, Keith Burton (Chapter 8), which makes this important point.

However, PR is still naturally focused on communications as its strategic advantage and knowledge base. Because of what we are presently calling social media, the field of communications has exploded. The social media chapter, written by part of the leadership team at Edelman, reinforces the concept that PR has gained the greatest ownership and understanding of the use of these applications. Reputation management is now under the wing of public relations, as demonstrated in the chapter by John Graham of Fleishman-Hillard (Chapter 25).

Although some teachers and practitioners continue to waiver between the fields being called strategic communications and public relations, I prefer not to begin to label all the sister fields of marketing, advertising, and human resources with the now overused descriptor of strategy or strategic.

Possibly the most confusing part of my working definition of PR is the word profitable. My defense is the effort to align PR with driving corporate and organizational goals rather than the use of a more narrow definition of PR, focusing only on the functions of PR. With my background in ethical political campaigns, government service, public television, business and academics, I know that the word profit has a special meaning in business. I have argued that the word profitable can be viewed as it appears in dictionary.com: beneficial or useful. Using instead synonyms such as advantageous, valuable and helpful, the meaning for nonbusinesses such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other organizations may be clearer. Naturally, the link to profit reminds the reader of what they already know: profit is a financial term for the use of capital while profitable seems a bit less capitalistic.

The terms new and continuing are also prescient to the common marketing word loyalty. Perhaps loyalty is a more pithy representation of the idea, but new and continuing are dynamic. Finally, relationship is defined as a two-way interaction, obviously augmented by Web 2.0, which allows for the conversation to occur on the Internet. This idea continues to be defined by public relations.

GENERAL RELATIONSHIP INTEGRATION

Most of the authors in this field have the idea that integration is more than a simple (although useful) combination of the fields of advertising, promotions, direct marketing, events and marketing public relations. The growth of integrated marketing communications (IMC) as a practical field was based on the initial value of this useful combination of communication tactics into a more comprehensive strategy. However, what is still missing from the general teaching and understanding of IMC is a broader understanding of the importance of integration and why public relations is the ideal professional field to guide and lead in integration.

First, PR will lead corporations and other organizations on several levels, including the integration of relationships with various stakeholders, the integration of corporate and organizational structures, the integration with industry and competitive groups, and finally, the integration with society. The integration of complex organizations demonstrates the range of leadership that public relations professionals can offer, from a macro level of interaction with society to a more micro level with individual stakeholders. This range of relationship building and management is what is ultimately appealing to many professionals in the field, with a broader view of the ultimate role of individuals and organizations.

STAKEHOLDER RELATIONSHIP INTEGRATION

The first level of integration relies on the PR professional’s intellectual and skill-based fostering of new relationships with valuable stakeholders to maintain and enhance the reputation of her organization. Stakeholders include individuals and organizations that have a stake in the failure or success of an organization.

As the name suggests, public relations manages relations with various publics. Rather than focusing on the important, but more narrow, relationship of marketing with customers, for example, public relations is expected to manage the corporation’s or organization’s relationships and reputation with many groups. More than other professions, public relations strengthens the outside–in perspective of an organization by managing relationships with many stakeholder groups inside and outside of the organizational boundaries. Borrowed from Chapter 7, with some modification from the energy industry, is a strong listing of stakeholders. In my experience, it is possible to double and triple the listings with specific names of stakeholder groups and individuals.

Stakeholders

Employees

Full-time

Part-time

Global

Contractors

Management and executives

Shareholders

Institutional

Individual investors

Government

Federal elected officials

State elected officials

Local elected officials

Staffs of elected officials

Non–U.S. Government

Elected officials

Regulators

Regulators

National, state, and local

Global

Traditional News Media

International

National

Local

Point-of-view journalists

Social Media, Blogging, Tweeting, Facebook

Industry bloggers

NGO bloggers

Fans

Employees

Competitors

Industry Associations

Integrated segment

Customers

Commercial

Retail

International

Retail Marketers of Your Product or Service

Company owned

Privately owned

Labor Unions

National

International

Local Community

Neighbors

Accident- or incident-affected residents

Nonprofits

International

National

Local

Nongovernmental Organizations

National, state and local

International

Relationship partners

MANAGEMENT FUNCTION INTEGRATION

Because public relations is responsible for stakeholders, this allows the practitioner to bring a tremendous asset to the boardroom. The second level of integration of PR is with other management functions, including marketing, finance, accounting, human resources and general management. PR also integrates with the legal profession.

The interaction of public relations practitioners with other managers will provide the men and women in the field the opportunity to assume a leadership role. A force driving this development is the downsizing of organizations, which has led to the expectation that all members of the organization are a part of a management team, rather than just staff. Because the lines between management and staff have blurred, projects must now be managed by qualified individuals, rather than by people with job titles or what used to be the necessary credentials. As you can see from Al Golin’s preface, over the past decade public relations has earned a place at the (management) table. Through the growth of management-level education of public relations professionals in universities, through professional societies, from corporate educational efforts and by means of individual commitments to learning, PR has become more managerial.

Public relations still offers its organizations the greatest experience and skill through the use of various communications-based strategies and tactics. Other management fields represented by the educational curriculum for the MBA in finance, management, marketing, human resources, production and accounting do not receive any serious level of communications knowledge or training. Although PR does not only use communications to accomplish its goals, the practitioners in this field have built their careers using, testing and recommending all forms of communications including written, oral and nonverbal. PR has used and refined all channels of communications, including advertising, speeches, press releases, Internet and intranet, direct mail, events and displays. According to most observers, PR has become the principal advocate of social media for management goals.

This level of PR integration also logically emerges out of the changes in the restructuring and design of organizations. Stress and demands on corporations and other complex organizations also force public relations professionals into a leadership role. In increasingly diversified corporate structures, where profit and management responsibilities have been given to strategic business units (SBUs) and separate profit centers, public relations must examine its role in all areas of management. The continued downsizing and leveling of the corporate hierarchy will force public relations managers to examine their roles in the management of divisions and at the corporate level.

As the chapters on the industries of oil, auto, and food and beverage show, the movement of power and responsibility away from the traditional headquarters toward the divisional level compels PR to examine its contribution to the marketing function, its ability to create relationships and drive employee communications as well as other diversified management issues at a more local level. For example, building relationships with the general media for a division president, strengthening specific trade press relationships for the products and services of the division, local community relations and other contacts must be moved from the corporate level to the SBU level.

Another integrated action might be to use zero-based planning and budgeting. This practice, long recognized in state and even federal governments, forces the managers to assume that last year’s programs are not necessarily going to be supported in the forthcoming budget. Under financial pressures in public and private organizations in this second decade of the second millennium, the concept may find a more appreciative audience. Although it is dangerous to try to zero-base the entire budget too widely because organizational leaders may find it difficult to rethink all activities at once, the selective zero-basing of several programs can be productive. This challenge to the management team will permit fresh ideas, new strategies and new tactics to emerge.

Selectively using the traditional notion of zero-based planning and budgeting with selective programs can mentally challenge an organization’s team not to think only incrementally. Although many organizations operate on a year-to-year basis, with budget increases or decreases of only 2 to 5 percent, such common instrumentalism does not provide a manager with the courage to totally re-examine the reason for the program, expenditure or objective. Just because we did it last year, as the saying goes, does not mean the conditions of the market or environment are correct for the same program or tactic in the coming year. A fresh, zero-based view of the program gives permission to the management team to make new assumptions and use new developments to plan totally new programs.

For example, Dairy Management, Inc. (DMI), the largest national dairy food marketer for its farmer members, initiated, under the direction of its CEO Tom Gallagher, a no sacred cows planning effort to create a zero-based attitude among its managers and members. The effort was symbolized by an image of a dairy cow with a halo over its head within a circle with the international symbol of a diagonal bar meaning no. Used on printed planning materials, and naturally on the ever-present corn seed cap, the symbol sent the signal to the organization that the future might not necessarily look like the past for DMI. The very best communications professionals know how to use communications for strategic change to build new organizational policies and plans.

The ability of the PR professionals to integrate the communications, product and corporate branding strategies, and generate a unified message to investors increases the operational level role of PR in the C-suite. Again, the ability to manage current issues and anticipate future demands on corporate resources enables educated and well-trained public relations professionals to assume leadership roles.

INDUSTRY AND COMPETITIVE LEVEL INTEGRATION

The third level of integration also logically emerges from the changes in the restructuring and design of institutions. Where there are mergers and acquisitions, there are opportunities for the role of PR, as discussed by Joele Frank in Chapter 12.

In early 2011, CNN reported that, global M&A has totaled $309.6 billion since January 1 (2011) according to data from Thomson Reuters. That’s a 69% jump over the same period in 2009, and represents the busiest start since 2000. Globally, they reported that the largest geographic gainer has been the Americas, up 97 percent year-over-year (including a 295% spike for U.S. M&A). European activity was up 90%, Asian activity up 1 percent, and both Africa and the Middle East experienced volume declines (−38% and −29%, respectively).¹

The merger of companies creates a constant redefinition of the boundaries of the industry, leadership in an industry sector and more. These mergers will force the restructuring of communications in many companies. More importantly, the dynamics of business and related sectors such as finance, health care, food, consulting, energy, entertainment and a long list of other subsectors to business will be radically changed.

The realignment of power within an industry sector, such as food and beverage, will send reverberations throughout the market. New stakeholder relationships will have to be defined without the previous players. The question of who is on first will be played out in the market, but also in the press. The addition or closing of merger-affected companies will affect all stakeholder groups, including local government, which will be affected by tax and employment changes. Some employees will be moved or let go and others will be newly hired. The press will have to find out who the new spokesperson is, and the spokesperson will have to develop new contacts. Experts and social media pundits will have to catch up on the change in leadership and policies. Industry associations, business conference planners and others will also have to adjust.

Industry integration has always been with us, but the driving forces of the economy, technology, regulation and the market will add another level of integration for public relations to manage, or at least direct, their response to the changes.

GLOBAL SOCIETAL INTEGRATION

Finally, public relations managers will lead their organizations’ relationships with a more global society. With the micro relationship built with many stakeholder groups, the corporate and organizational public relations professional will guide the corporate values that permit organizations to operate at a macro, global level.

Again, the education and training of the PR professional may equip him or her to reflect the dynamics between the legal, political and social expectations of society, corporations and other organizations. After years of listening to, speaking to and building relationships with various publics and stakeholder groups, PR professionals have the experience to manage the corporate response to society and societal changes. PR has always advocated the importance of using local contacts to understand how to build relationships in richly varied cultures.

In a graduation speech to my students, Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, noted (from his series of books and revisions on a flatter Earth) that the relationships have changed in the past decade from those between governments or companies to those between governments and companies.² Even more importantly, relationships have grown into those between individuals, governments and business in all combinations. Oprah Winfrey, in her last televised daytime show from Chicago, noted that she had visited 150 countries via her show. The global work of Bono and former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton is a remarkable statement of the changing nature of the role of the individual and organizations’ and society’s need for strong communications and relationship building.³ The work of Aidmatrix.org, reported in Chapter 18 by Ray Boyer and former Governor of Wisconsin, Scott McCallum, proves the importance of a global integration—in this case, using supply chain (logistics) software to raise nearly $2 billion in global aid each year.

The border-crossing role of public relations, in which the managers operate at the porous boundary of the organization, permits the PR professional to interact with a wide range of stakeholders, but it also creates an expectation that PR should be fully aware of the changing expectations of society and the matching of corporate purposes with societal goals. The ability of the PR professional to describe, explain and predict the societal pressures on the firm provides general management with a risk assessment and interpretation necessary to operate in a complex social setting. As Cornelius Pratt explains in Chapter 6 on ethics, having one more manager at the table with a vision of ethical and value-driven purpose and actions gives PR one more reason to be recognized for its leadership.

PR PROCESS INTEGRATION

Although the initial analysis of public relations above requires integration at various levels between stakeholders, business and society, the other powerful dimension of PR is the development of a more integrated process within PR itself. One of the fastest growing strategies associated with public relations and public relations communications tactics is integrated marketing communications (IMC). Pioneered by the faculty of the Department of Integrated Marketing Communications in Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the field has flourished in the past 22 years in increasing practice and theoretical development. A definition of IMC was developed for a national study for industry at Northwestern:

[IMC is a] concept of marketing communications planning that represents the added value of a comprehensive plan that evaluates the strategic roles of a variety of communications disciplines—general advertising, direct response, sales promotion and public relations—and combines these disciplines to provide clarity, consistency and maximum communication impact.⁴

IMC emerged out of an academic department that, for several decades, had been recognized as the number one advertising program in the country (and perhaps the world). The department’s integration team was initially led by Professors Jack Scissors, Stanley Tannenbaum, Don E. Schultz and me. The department had also redefined public relations and direct marketing education with a strong managerial approach to traditional staff functions. One goal was to change the position of the new field from a service or staff function in organizations to a management function. Based on my MBA teaching and educational experience, the new curriculum included many of the core elements of an MBA curriculum. This unusual action in a traditional journalism school allowed us to position the PR and advertising students to sit at the management table with financial, organizational, marketing and general management knowledge skills.

The leadership of the school was again demonstrated when the faculty, administration and students integrated the existing power of the advertising, sales promotions, direct marketing and public relations courses and knowledge. The combination of the fields provided businesses and organizations that hired the graduate students, interacted with the faculty and read the research with a competitive advantage over the traditionally nonintegrated and functionally separate operations. Although the curriculum has fluxed from time to time under pressures of temporary market changes and changes in leadership, the field continues to fill an important void in business education. However, IMC has not been given as much attention from the academic community as it has from the practical professional community in PR, sales, marketing and advertising.

IMC proves that educators can take a new direction with the traditional elements of advertising, direct marketing and public relations education. The distinct elements provided corporations and other organizations with compelling reasons to re-examine their business processes. The reinvention and re-engineering of marketing, public relations and direct marketing as a more fully integrated process has offered public relations professionals the most significant opportunity for advancing the influence of the profession. As a number of authors have shown, IMC and integrated communications will permit PR to take the leadership role it deserves based on the range and depth of the field, its attention to multiple stakeholder groups, and its experience and strength using communications as an important management tool.

INTEGRATED MARKETING OR MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS?

Early in the creation of the discipline of IMC, I speculated on how long it would take for the word integrated to be dropped in favor of marketing communications (already used in business and business courses). It also became increasingly clear with the work of relationship marketing researchers that the term might gain favor.⁵ Later, the even broader term integrated marketing began to gain momentum in the literature and references in the profession. The latter was recently explored by Kondo and Caywood to show that the movement in theory and research has moved toward the term integrated marketing several times more than the volume of research work and published thought on IMC suggested.⁶ In other words, both integrated marketing and PR outpublish IMC. IMC was also outpublished by the concept of relationship marketing. Additionally, both the traditional fields of marketing and PR outflank and outpublish the still thin blue line of IMC, challenging the more established intellectual and professional practice disciplines. As long as IMC was considered a marketing subfunction rather than a communications function, the term seemed to have an expected shorter shelf life. This book is one of the most successful publishing efforts in IMC to date. It has demonstrated the ability of integrated thinking to strengthen the communications function through stakeholder relationships. Without this perspective, it seems clear that the term IMC will fall into disuse, in favor of integrated marketing without more academic leadership.

More than 15 years ago, the use of the term integrated communications was an attempt I made to bridge the gap between academic communications, public relations and advertising by not using the m word (marketing). There was a healthy debate in the 1990s over the rapacious function of marketing taking over and subsuming the PR function in organizations, spearheaded by Professor Martha Lauzen, Ph.D.⁷ Although there was some truth to it, its advocates’ narrow definition of marketing communications as solely consumer oriented, and the still more narrow definition of marketing as being only consumer focused did not worry most business-oriented PR academics or practitioners. PR has thrived, as this book will show, with its wider agenda and growing powers.

For this edition of the Handbook, I have asked many of the authors to address their relationship with marketing, which has become more prominent since the previous edition. So, in keeping with some tradition and risk, we are using the descriptive phrase Public Relations & Integrated Marketing & Communications. It still uses the transitory label of integrated, but it assumes with more ampersands that public relations, marketing and communications must be integrated together in more than one combination.⁸ Finally, on this seeming nuance, but useful distinction, which separates this book from others in public relations, I ask a somewhat obvious question that still might predict the future use of the hopefully unnecessary word integrated as the field matures. The question that will be answered time and time again in the book is, What else would you want: a disintegrated management process?

FINAL THOUGHTS

This book explores the power, depth and breadth of the field of public relations, with its sister fields of communications, integrated communications, integrated marketing communication and marketing, as a professional field of study and practice. PR is a highly applied discipline in the wide range of businesses and other organizations. The book’s authors have recognized that, with their multigenerational perspectives, advanced education and broad experience, public relations does not operate in a vacuum.

In fact, the power of public relations is its ability to relate and develop productive relationships with other business functions and with multiple stakeholders. PR has not just been introduced to the notion of integration in the last decade, it has defined the concept and practice over many decades of leadership. If the future of public relations is not integrated, then the future will not be as bright as the authors predict in the following pages.

As the editor of this book, I promise you that all of the authors are individuals you would want to spend hours with, talking about the topics that they have generously summarized for this book. If you remember conversations about important subjects with your favorite teacher, professor, peer, boss or brightest friend, you will realize that these authors reflect the very highest levels of thought, trust and ability to recommend. If they were readily available, you would want to ask their opinions before making a decision.

My objective was to permit the voice of each author, as a leader in the field, to speak with his or her own point of view and style. Even with editing, the book tries to maintain the tone of each person’s work and its details. Collectively, these chapters represent their willingness to share with you their experience and current thinking about how to manage, work and think—now and in the future. It is not their cumulative experience that makes these authors’ ideas so powerful (although their total years of experience are significant); instead, it is the vitality and currency of their ideas that has permitted them to be successful during their entire careers, through change after change in the environment, market conditions and society.

To summarize, the book is organized around four key sections:

1. The first highlights the areas of professional practice in public relations that focus on specific stakeholder groups important to an organization. This area has been greatly expanded to show the importance of a stakeholder model in business and other organizations.

2. Many of chapters provide an extraordinary view of the practice of corporate communications and public relations in numerous specific businesses, nonprofit and government sectors including hospitality, technology, health care, consulting and many others. Again, this section has been broadened to give readers an even greater choice of topics relating to their targeted business or organization.

3. The book also includes several chapters related to research, law, career development and the history of the profession to provide students and professionals with a clear background to the field.

4. Finally, the book expanded the sections on how to create great communications with stories, speeches, virtual meetings and much more. All the chapters from the first edition have been substantially rewritten since 1997. The reader will find the wait worthwhile because so much has changed that empowers and redefines the professional and practical role of public relations.

This book was designed as both a professional project and a work of art and social science. The project dimensions were clear to the original publishers as we discussed the depth and breadth of the field and the range of experts necessary to define the field. The coordination of 70 authors on more than 50 topics was an intellectually stimulating challenge.

Based on an agreed structure for each chapter, the authors were asked to use their experience and knowledge of the field to produce chapters that (1) define their area of PR, (2) describe the strategic approach that their company and other organizations have taken to the field, (3) discuss and list tactics that have usefully implemented these strategies, (4) describe in one or more detailed case studies the best practices in public relations, and (5) discuss future trends relevant to their industry or area of expertise in PR. This format proves useful to the reader searching for specific ideas across industries. The organization of the book also provides a strong sense of the future from a wide range of authors and a wide selection of case examples illustrating the practice of PR.

The book also proves to be a resource for general knowledge about public relations. It is designed to serve the needs of the professional business book market, and it may be one of the longer entries in this category in 2012.

The first edition was, for a time, the third best-selling textbook in public relations. To all my colleagues who have encouraged me to design this book with two audiences in mind—the student and the professional—I appreciate their vote of confidence. At this point in my career, writing a typical textbook does not interest me. I believe the next generation of public relations professionals, management, marketing students and a host of others will find this book both instructive and helpful. Time and time again, the authors demonstrate their depth and breadth of knowledge about the field of PR. Seen as personal essays from individuals with experience and credentials, the chapters provide extraordinary insight to a wide range of organizations and PR practices. The authors are highly credible sources of information about their topics. In addition, many of the authors have relied on research from their organizations and others to document specific issues. The book serves as a source of personal insight, research and parallel discussion of key issues, industries and activities in public relations and management.

Without overpromising, I know that you will learn from the authors and enjoy their insightful perspectives on the field of integrated public relations now and throughout your career in the twenty-first century.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Define public relations for a manager who is trying to decide if public relations could be of value to a new business that has innovative software.

2. What are the stages of the evolution of integration in public relations? What is the value of knowing in what stage your company might be?

3. Explain to an interviewer what you might bring to a company with knowledge of public relations.

4. What does the stakeholder concept bring to the discussion of the role of public relations in business and other organizations?

NOTES

1. Primack, Dan. Gonna Be a Blockbuster? M&A Off to Best Start Since 2000. The Term Sheet: Fortune’s Deals Blog Term Sheet. Fortune Finance: Hedge Funds, Markets, Mergers & Acquisitions, Private Equity, Venture Capital, Wall Street, Washington, finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/04/gonna-be-a-blockbuster-ma-off-to-best-start-since-2000 (May 31, 2011).

2. Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.

3. Clinton, Bill. Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World. New York: Knopf, 2007. Print.

4. Caywood, Clarke L., Don E. Schultz, and Paul Wang. 1991. A Survey of Consumer Goods Manufacturers. New York: American Association of Advertising Agencies, 1992.

5. Godson, Mark. Relationship Marketing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

6. Kondo, Kimihiko, and Clarke L. Caywood. 2011. IMC as an Innovation: Toward a Theory of Integrated Marketing Using Theoretical Propositions, Presented in June 2011 to the American Academy of Advertising 2011—Asia Pacific Conference, Brisbane Australia.

7. Lauzen, Martha M. Public Relations Roles, Intraorganizational Power, and Encroachment. Journal of Public Relations Research 4.2 (1992): 61-80.

8. Tybout, Alice M., and Bobby J. Calder. 2010. Kellogg on Marketing. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

ADDITIONAL READING

Caywood, Clarke. 1995. Integrated Marketing Campaigns. In Integrated Marketing Communications Symposium, edited by Ron Kaatz. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books.

Clinton, Bill. 2007. Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World. New York: Knopf.

Lauzen, Martha M. Public Relations Roles, Intraorganizational Power, and Encroachment. Journal of Public Relations Research 4.2 (1992): 61-80. Print.

Schultz, Don E., and Heidi Schultz. 2003. IMC the Next Generation: Five Steps for Delivering Value and Measuring Returns Using Marketing Communication. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Thorson, Esther, and Jeri Moore. 1996. Integrated Communication: Synergy of Persuasive Voices. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Tybout, Alice M., and Bobby J. Calder. 2010. Kellogg on Marketing. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Vocus White Paper. Measuring the Marketing ROI on Public Relationships. www.vocus.com/codies/Marketing_ROI.pdf (Accessed 5/2/2011).

Wang, Paul. 1995. Measuring ROI. In Integrated Marketing Communications Symposium, edited by Ron Kaatz. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books.

Weiner, Mark. Beyond ROI. Institute for Public Relations. www.instituteforpr.org/2007/08/mark-weiner-beyond-roi/ (Sunday, August 19, 2007 at 12:45 pm).

CHAPTER 2

COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH: Foundational Methods

Anders Gronstedt, Ph.D.

Chief Executive Officer

The Gronstedt Group

Clarke L. Caywood, Ph.D.

Professor and Past Chairman, Department of Integrated Marketing Communications

Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Communications

Northwestern University

The public relations (PR) profession is under increasingly intense pressure to justify its existence and to demonstrate accountability. Nobody questions the need to have a sales, accounting or manufacturing department. The senior vice president of sales can show up for top management meetings with sales statistics. The vice president of manufacturing can bring productivity numbers, defect rates and cycle time reduction data. The chief financial officer can dazzle senior management with budget forecasts and cash flow analyses. However, most senior public relations or corporate communications directors do not have the hard data to demonstrate their value to the corporation. In the last decade, the percentage of respondents to the University of Southern California Annenberg General Accepted Practices (GAP) study who report directly and exclusively to the C-suite has increased to 42.5 percent, with 57.5 percent reporting to other officers. Among smaller companies, it is likely that the percentage reporting to the C-suite is much smaller.¹ Previously, it was thought that the small number (25 percent) of public relations or corporate communications managers in the United States who were also members of the senior management team may have kept public relations from helping make the decisions that have an actual impact on the organization.²

Demonstrating accountability through research is necessary not only to get behind closed doors but also to avoid being outplaced. Public relations has been a prime target for workforce reduction and elimination during the cost-cutting and downsizing mandates of the 1980s and 1990s. The good news is that in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the growth of PR will be more than twice that of new and replacement work in advertising and promotions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact, PR is estimated to grow by 13 percent, while advertising promotions will decline by 1.7 percent. To put this category of advertising, marketing, promotions, PR and sales management in perspective, the employment size of sales management will continue to be six to seven times that of PR, and marketing management will be three times that of PR. PR will continue to present 27 percent more jobs than advertising and promotions and increase to 45 percent more by 2018.³

To reaffirm the central, strategic role of public relations or corporate communications, we need to be vigorous and persistent in systematically capturing and analyzing information from key stakeholders and in keeping the organization informed and focused on the stakeholders’ needs. We need to be the organizational radar, taking soundings and providing early warnings to help the senior management team steer clear of public relations problems and charting the course to building a desired corporate reputation.

The focus of this chapter is on developing public relations strategy and objectives on the basis of insights from research and on using research to evaluate progress toward predetermined objectives. In survey after survey, public relations professionals rank measurement and accountability as the number one priority of the profession,⁴ but few public relations managers walk the walk and talk the talk. Most public relations research decisions are still based on gut feelings, speculation and hearsay. More than 50 percent of recently surveyed public relations managers rarely or never budget for research.⁵ Experts in the industry recommend that at least 10 percent of the public relations budget should be allocated to research.

Lack of funding is the most frequently mentioned reason for not doing public relations research.⁶ The more appropriate question is how anyone can afford not to do research. There are instances in which PR departments have tripled the outcomes of their efforts because of research-based planning and implementation.

Historically, the research most PR departments conducted was tactically rather than strategically oriented and was designed to legitimize decisions that had already been made rather than to gain new insights. In the words of the advertising luminary David Ogilvy, research is used like the drunkard uses the lamppost, for support rather than illumination. Because public relations is largely intangible, there is a strong tendency to focus the research on what is most tangible and easy to count, like the number of print publication clips about the company. Two-thirds of all public relations managers in one survey listed count clips and broadcast placements as the research approach of first importance.⁷ Such research is not exactly the fabric that strategy-building insights are built on. It is like a VP of sales citing initiated sales calls as the number one measure of success. Clip counting was a more important measure of success in the past when the number of media outlets was small and people still trusted media. Besides, there were few other research methods available in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, we have more sophisticated methods at our disposal. Chapter 3 will discuss online systems, but to know what questions and what data are needed for making decisions in management, public relations must take a leadership role in social science research or research that studies the response and action of consumers and other stakeholders to organizational messages, products and actions.

Public relations professionals frequently bemoan that senior managers do not understand public relations when, in fact, the real problem is that many PR professionals do not understand management. Our profession needs to develop tools and measures of accountability like our peers in other departments. When senior management asks, What have you done for me lately, we need to have the hard data to support our answers.

One answer has been to change the educational definition of public relations. At Northwestern University’s Medill School and the University of Colorado-Boulder’s School of Journalism, the traditional journalistic curriculum was merged with advertising, promotions, direct mail marketing and public relations. Education and training in advertising and PR go back to the beginning of the 1900s when newspapers depended on advertising dollars and journalists often worked in PR after leaving the newspaper. By cross educating and training students, the focus on using communications as a strategic advantage is apparent.

By adding business courses in management, accounting, finance, statistics, marketing and communications research and marketing management, communications students are better equipped to address business and organizational challenges. The integrated model provides a superior knowledge of communications over the traditional approach of advertising or public relations, which taught the subjects separately in two different majors. The challenge would be that many small marketing communications agencies and smaller companies needed more professionals. After all, what marketing communications program would want to be considered disintegrated?

Historically, communications has not been a serious topic of study for schools of business, despite criticism by their own accrediting council.⁸ In 1980 and 1983, the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business held seminars on the teaching of business communication. In the 1980 seminar, three graduate programs were presented. These programs emphasized memorandum and report writing, visual aids and oral presentations. The graduate programs described at the 1983 seminar were much broader, emphasizing writing letters, memorandums and reports; oral presentations; interpersonal communication; interviewing; and organizational communication.

Since then, the topics have become more strategic and complex, but the criticism of the master of business administration and executive master of business administration programs still stands that communications is not taught as a strategic tool or management advantage to the next generation of business managers (Figure 2.1).

FIGURE 2.1 The Role of Research in the Four Interactive Steps of Effective Public Relations Practice

Effective public relations should be practiced in four iterative steps, as illustrated in Figure 2.2: (1) research, (2) planning and goal setting, (3) implementation and monitoring and (4) evaluation and acting on the evaluation to make improvements. This approach is analogous to the continual improvement cycle of plan–do–check–act prescribed by W. Edwards Deming and other total quality management proponents. It is also similar to the Silver Anvil process for strategic public relations programs. The Silver Anvil process was refined by the chapter authors when Caywood was co-chair of the committee and Gronstedt was a consultant to the committee. New training standards for the 100 or more judges who evaluate the Silver Anvil awards for the Public Relations Society of America were developed, which included a more research-oriented process. In fact, of the maximum 40 points (10 points in each category), 30 points were specifically related to research methods, discussed in this chapter and in the next chapter (see Figure 2.3 from Silver Anvil). We will briefly describe these steps and then give examples of how they are applied to research different stakeholders.

FIGURE 2.2 Silver Anvil

FIGURE 2.3 Design to Distribution Employee Satisfaction Compared with a Benchmark

RESEARCH

After 20 years of education and training in graduate, undergraduate, and professional education, the field acknowledges that research is a more critical part of the strategic process. The leadership of social science researchers in business, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), education, and government has provided support for public relations practitioners to apply research to their PR programs.

The challenge to PR is to be able to use:

Secondary research: existing research perhaps collected for another purpose that can be applied to the current issue or program or

Primary research: newly developed, custom research directly inquiring about the questions and issues facing the organization

As we will discuss in greater detail, the first questions for the research- and planning-oriented PR professional, according to the Public Relations Society of America Silver Anvil standards are as follows:

1. How thorough and relevant was the research to overall planning and audience identification?

2. Did the research reflect a clear need or opportunity?

3. Was original or secondary research undertaken to achieve the desired results?

4. How clearly were a baseline and/or process defined by which to gauge the program’s success?

As the questions suggest, the judges look for evidence that the program strategists in PR are precise in their understanding of the stakeholder or audience groups involved so that programs and messages will be carefully targeted. The research should be important and reflect a profitable or critical opportunity for the organization. Part of the business teaching is to set priorities, and careful research and planning will give the PR program a stronger justification. Finally, the initial research to understand the market, the audience and the challenge should rely on both primary and secondary data. It should also set a baseline or a clear level of previous support, performance or other metrics to allow the program to show progress with the new efforts.

PLANNING

Every carpenter knows that you save time, aggravation and money by measuring twice and cutting once. The same holds true for public relations and overall business planning. Research helps to frame issues, to identify key stakeholders and to set the objectives that the public relations program can be measured against.

Public relations research should support the planning of not only the PR programs but also the overall business strategy. Research can be used to redefine the organization’s strategic direction in response to changing conditions in the environment. The researcher’s involvement in strategic management processes ensures that public relations plans and objectives are aligned with overall business plans and objectives. In fact, one study indicated that 83 percent of public relations or corporate communications managers make no separation between corporate goals and public relations goals.⁹

To support the strategic management and strategic public relations planning processes, public relations professionals need to research the following issues.

WHAT ARE OUR MOST SIGNIFICANT STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITIES AND THREATS?

The first step in any planning is an environmental scan, in which the researcher is charting what is happening in the environment. One useful format is the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis, which analyzes the company’s strengths and weaknesses in meeting the opportunities and threats in the external environment. The opportunities and threats have to be prioritized and strategies developed to leverage the company’s strengths and address its weaknesses.

A less well-known but obvious application of SWOT is threats, opportunities, weaknesses and strengths (TOWS). The reason for the switch of the acronym is that an outside–in perspective is often more useful in PR and stakeholder work. Our experience has been that the planning process will focus initially on the internal strengths and weaknesses and spend too much time listing and talking about subjects familiar to the planners. By the time the planning exercise is coming to a close, the effort on the less known external threats and opportunities loses momentum. By starting with the external factors, the analysis illustrates the advantage of PR as an outside–in management process.

The environmental scan needs to be ongoing. By monitoring issues, opinions and corporate reputation over time, the researcher uncovers dynamic complexity,¹⁰ that is, recurring processes of change that the organization can act on. In contrast, most research in the field today consists of the occasional snapshot survey with hundreds of variables that create detailed complexity without discerning any patterns. The research process needs to anticipate and prepare for events that are likely to affect the organization in the future, such as evolving debates over political issues or changes in customer preferences. Organizations that enter a communication process at an early stage are more likely to affirmatively manage issues.

One approach to make the environmental scan ongoing is to set up an issues anticipation team composed of employees from different parts of the organization who meet on a regular basis to discuss emerging issues that will affect the organization.¹¹

WHO ARE OUR MOST IMPORTANT STAKEHOLDERS?

When the SWOT/TOWS analysis is completed, it is important to identify the key stakeholders and rank their relative importance to the organization. The stakeholders can first be ranked generically—customers, employees, investors and so forth. The next step is to identify the specific groups and individuals that have a stake in the organization’s purpose. If at all possible, the stakeholders should be segmented on the basis of behavior. Examples of behavior segmentation among customers are nonusers, light users and heavy users. News reporters can be divided into categories on the basis of whether they have written negative stories about your organization, neutral stories, positive ones or no stories.

The development of relational database technology makes behavior segmentation manageable. Companies in the airline, hotel and mail order industries have massive amounts of individual consumer data, for instance. The relational database plays an important strategic role in public relations as well. The public relations department at Walmart, for instance, uses a database to track individual journalists. To build a stakeholder database, start with internal sources: the rolodex, the Christmas card mailing list, the billing list from the accounting department and so forth. Next, consider renting outside lists to enhance your database. The process of incorporating different databases with each other and deleting duplicates is called merge or purge.

The database can identify the critical few, the small number of stakeholders that cause most problems or accomplishments. For instance, 80 percent of sales usually come from 20 percent of the customers. This phenomenon is called the Pareto effect, after the Italian economist Wilfredo Pareto who concluded that 80 percent of wealth was owned by 20 percent of the people. The Pareto effect is true for any stakeholder group. Most organizations will find, for instance, that 20 percent of all journalists account for 80 percent of the media coverage of the company, and 20 percent of all shareholders own 80 percent of the company. The critical few are, in most cases, the most cost-effective group to target with communications.

If behavioral data is not accessible, the segmentation can be based on demographic criteria such as sex, age, marital status, race, education, income or geographic region. Alternatively, segmentation can be based on psychographic criteria, such as opinion or lifestyle.

The researcher’s responsibility goes beyond just defining a target audience by sterile behavioral or demographic data (which will probably tell you that the average audience member has one testicle and 2.2 children). They need to bring the target audience member to life by describing that person in qualitative terms. Celestial Seasonings, the herbal tea manufacturer, has even given its target customer a name, Tracy Jones. Tracy is a 35-year-old professional woman who enjoys relaxing in the evening with a soothing cup of herbal tea. During any meeting, employees will ask, What would Tracy Jones say? or Would Tracy like that?

WHAT ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT NEEDS OF EACH OF THE STAKEHOLDER GROUPS THAT OUR ORGANIZATION CAN ADDRESS?

For each prioritized stakeholder segment, the research must identify its most important needs. The critical questions to ask to identify these needs are as follows:

Customers: Why should I buy from company X?

Employees: Why should I work for company X?

Investment community: Why is company X a good long-term investment for me?

Regulators: How will changes in regulatory policies and practices which favor company X also provide benefit to customers or the general public?

Local communities and public at large: What makes company X an asset to my community and my country?

When the critical needs are identified, the public relations function needs to collaborate with the departments responsible for respective stakeholders to address these. Employee needs are addressed in collaboration with the human resource department, customer needs with marketing, and shareholder needs with the finance department. Thus, public relations research is supporting not only changed behavior by the stakeholder but also changed behavior by the organization.

WHAT ARE THE BEHAVIORAL AND COMMUNICATION OBJECTIVES?

On the basis of the stakeholder needs analysis, behavioral objectives should be developed for each targeted stakeholder group. The behavior objective for a consumer segment of brand switchers can be to turn them into loyal users, for employees it can be to recommend the company to a friend as a place to work, and for investors it can be to obtain the largest current shareholders to buy more shares in the company. When behavioral objectives for each stakeholder group are determined, communication objectives can be developed to support them.

WHAT IS THE PERSONAL MEDIA NETWORK OF A TYPICAL TARGET AUDIENCE MEMBER?

The final step of the planning process is to develop a media plan for each target group. Research plays an important role in identifying the personal media network of a target audience member. By mapping a typical day in the life of such a person, the researcher can identify when—during the year, month, week and day—and where the target audience member would be most receptive to your message. The advertising agency DDB calls these windows of opportunities media apertures (which is the opening in an optical instrument that limits the amount of light passing through). The agency has, for instance, found that people are more susceptible to home mortgage offers on Monday mornings, and the best media aperture to advertise diapers is right after the birth of a new baby. Sophisticated companies ask its most important stakeholders when and how they want to receive information to tailor the communication to each individual’s need. New owners of a Lexus car, for instance, are asked how they want information from Lexus—if they like to get a call or a letter, if they want to be contacted at home or at work and so forth. The next issue is what combination of media vehicles can be used to communicate with the target audience at the times and places when it is ready to hear it. This zero-based media approach, where the media are selected from the target stakeholder’s point of view, is dramatically different from traditional approaches where the planning team picks the tried-and-true media vehicles (like events and press releases) that have worked well in the past and that they are most comfortable with.

INSIDE–OUT VERSUS OUTSIDE–IN PLANNING

The approach just described is an outside–in approach to strategic public relations planning, which can be contrasted with the traditional inside–out planning model.¹²

The inside–out approach starts with the organization’s objectives, which determine cognitive, attitude and action objectives. This model builds on an almost 100-year-old communication model of cognitive, affective, and behavioral response from the target audience, or think–feel–do.¹³ That is, communication will put information in the consumers’ minds, change their attitudes and get them to act. There are endless variations of this learning hierarchy—awareness–interest–desire–action is one of the most commonly used. Every self-respecting research firm and public relations agency has its own in-house version of the model. There is only one little problem with this theory: the last 50 years of research indicate that the model is wrong!

The think–feel–do model is built on the assumption that communication is like injecting a hypodermic needle into someone; people will uncritically absorb messages, later develop a feel for them and eventually act on them. In reality, the different steps of the hierarchy might even be in conflict. United Color of Benetton’s advertising, for instance, gets attention for reasons that make many consumers develop a negative attitude toward the brand; a different message focusing on an important product difference might be persuasive but fail to get the target audience’s attention in today’s cluttered media environment, as suggested by Patrick Jackson at the 1995 PRSA national conference. Another problem with the approach is that it treats the action as the culmination of the communication process, instead of treating it as the beginning of an ongoing relationship. The model does not address the issue of how communication can support a relationship with customers, employees, shareholders and other stakeholders, only how to attract new ones.

The traditional inside–out approach to public relations research is the product of a time when more than 90 percent of the U.S. population watched the three television networks and the rest of the world watched government-controlled TV stations. In today’s world, people are actively seeking information they believe to be relevant. They are active, interactive and equal participants of an ongoing communication process rather than passive sponges. The role of the communicator is increasingly to make information available to stakeholders in a user-friendly way, rather than shoving it down their throats, and to support an ongoing relationship rather than transferring information. The purpose of communications is not necessarily to influence stakeholders but to add value to them.

Rather than focus the research on what communication does to the stakeholder, we need to focus on what the stakeholder does with the communicated messages. This is the focus of the outside–in or behavioral approach to research and planning. The outside–in approach begins with the key stakeholders’ needs and then determines behavior objectives of the organization and the stakeholders. Research is essential in this process to determine what is the stakeholder’s value, to monitor how well their needs are being met and to measure how their behaviors are changing.

DESIGNING THE RESEARCH STUDY

Several sources should be drawn on to answer the research questions. Every organization has internal sources of information such as records of customer service calls, market research and product performance data that need to be tapped. Most importantly, it has internal databases that can be used.

In addition, there are several external sources of information that can be tapped at low cost and with little effort. Trade and popular press and academic journals are readily available through computer (see Chapter 3 on online research methods). There are several syndicated research studies that companies can subscribe to. Examples of such studies in the United States are Simmons, MRI and Nielsen for consumer information and media usage data and the Yankelovich Monitor and Roper Report for public opinion data. In addition, external databases can be purchased and overlaid onto the company’s own database.

The analysis of existing information inside and outside the organization will determine what new research information is needed. The type of information that is needed and the budget and time frame determine the design of the research study. The most effective research design in most situations is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.

Qualitative methods like focus group interviews, in-depth interviews and observation are valuable to help determine the target audience, to frame the issues and to develop key messages. Box 2-1 briefly describes these methods. The aim of such research is to get insights into the hearts and minds of key stakeholders to formulate the PR strategy.

The strength of a qualitative interview is that the interviewer can probe the underpinnings of the interviewees’ standpoints. That is important because most people are unable to describe or are unaware of their underlying feelings and motives. There are various creative questions that can be used in an in-depth interview or focus group to make it easier for people to talk about their feelings, like If company X were an animal, what animal would it be? or If it were a country… When Apple did focus group studies in preparation for the launch of its Macintosh, it found that people associated IBM with Big Brother, which sparked the idea of the famous 1984 commercial in which IBM was portrayed as author George Orwell’s Big Brother. Such questions require a lot of creativity to interpret. The continued higher share of heart of Apple’s iPhone, iPad and Macs frustrates Microsoft and other competitors who have a relatively high share of mind with Apple but cannot grab the soul of the consumer. Paying attention to continuing research seems to keep Apple ahead of their competitors with their communications and business strategies.