Looking through subject related blogs I noticed that in English speaking countries the separation between PR and marketing doesn’t seem to be that strict.
When I studied public relations seven years ago we learned that PR and marketing were two different things. PR was defined as a management function supposed to create confidence in an issue, company or person by using strategic communication (see my previous blog “What is PR?”).
Marketing instead is defined by the 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Which means it is about advertising, distribution and selling (see details on Wikipedia). In my studies I was still told that marketing was a subordinate function to PR executing the communicative stragtegies that had been decided by PR and management.
Btw. Wikipedia also mentions a mixture of both called MPR (marketing public relations)!
In Germany the abbreviation PR often gets mixed up with the term “promotion” instead of identifying it as “public relations” (German: Öffentlichkeitsarbeit). Promotion again is a part of marketing though.
But back to my introduction: Are PR and marketing in English speaking countries considered to be different at all? What is your experience with that?
Hi Annette!
If languages can have a certain degree of influence?
Hummm… You rise an interesting point in your post..
If we look at Europe, an extremely fragmented environment from the linguistic point of view…languages play an important role. You gave a good example talking about Germany, but I guess that there might be similar other cases…
In my opinion languages and different cultures might influence but not change the nature of certain terms (like public relations and marketing). The ‘nature’ might actually change primarily because of other factors present in our environment…
My thoughts about marketing and PR here:
http://www.andreavascellari.com/blog/?p=603
But again… it’s a very good point, I kept thinking about until now
Let’s see what other readers think about it too.
Cheers!
Andrea
Terve Andrea!
Yes, I’ve read your blog and commented there too. We have both blogged about the same subject at almost the same time.
I don’t know in practics about the way PR is made in other countries. I only can judge from what I observe and from the way people react on my PR in other countries. So far this has been German speaking countries, UK/Ireland, France and Norway (and a bit Italy).
I’m very interested in getting to know about the different approaches and find your comment about the impact of language and culture very interesting. Let’s follow that!
I found you by googling PR whilst looking for press release sites (free preferaby) and read the post.
Public Relations and marketing only cross-pollinate in the UK if the company allows it. Some examples of these would include health products that rely on feedback from customers and the skin creme industry that has “invented” things like the British Skin Foundation so that they can get awards from, in the end, themselves.
Thanks.
@Annette: I might end up blogging again about language issues in future then
Andrea
Thanks for the insight @broket. That’s interesting to see!
@vascellari Yes, please do that! If you need my opinion, let me know.
[...] tools to perform this kind of work have changed. PR and marketing – two terms that were defined as strictly separated from each other when I got into the business – are now said to melt into one (see also Andrea [...]