What is Public Relations?

Public Relations is similar to marketing in the sense that its main goal is to build a brand message that ultimately connects with one’s targeted audience. Without that vital connection, the effect of public relations is lost as the audience dismisses the intended message as regular advertising. Tactics such as news releases, social media, and media kits are tools used by public relations specialists to achieve their goal of connecting their message with their intended audience. Thus, while these tactics are an essential part of public relations, they are not the core foundation of Public Relations as a whole. Public relations have many different facets and can be conducted in several different ways, but at the heart of it all, public relations are about connecting one’s message with one’s targeted audience, which is done through these tactics mentioned above.

A prime example of this is seen in the article “How Martin Case Became Martin Story.” While the story ultimately reached national news through the use of news releases and headline pitches, it was the connection American audiences had with the details of the story that propelled it to national attention. Every American who had heard about the story could emphasize with Martin’s family because of how personal the message was: a mother grieving over the loss of her son, a family demanding justice as their son’s killer walked free, the racial injustice of how the case was being handled, these were messages that Americans could connect to by imagining themselves in the family’s shoes. So, while tactics like headline pitches and later social media were used to help give the story national attention, it was ultimately the connection the audience had with the family’s demand of justice that propelled the story forward and inclined Americans to share the story.

A public relations specialist can understand the means behind tactics that propel a message forward, but that message and effort is wasted if one does not understand their audience and how to connect with them properly.

The importance of not only finding the right audience but connecting with them properly is also seen in the article “Which is it, Hispanic or Latino?” In the article, Rodriguez details the complexity that lies within the Hispanic/Latin communities throughout the world, and how these complexities can pose a real problem to a public relations campaign. If even Hispanics and Latino’s themselves cannot understand the difference between the two terms and when to use them, it means that campaigning towards either of these groups requires an adequate amount of research and time to create a proper message they can connect to. Without this research and understanding, any effort towards pushing a message to either of these groups is for naught as there is nothing to make them want to listen or have to listen. In fact, without this proper connection, one could easily offend one targeted group and cause a distancing with another; a situation that could have drastic effects on other public relations campaigns that a company might choose to push forward in the future.

Overall, while one can have the means to drive a message forward to the proper channels, those efforts mean nothing if the message has nothing that ties it to the audience. The article “Engaging Generation Z: Marketing to a New Brand of Consumer” highlights this beautifully. Each generation within our society has unique characteristics that define it. Baby Boomers tend to be more conservative on politics and lean towards a more traditional way of life; Millennials tend to be more progressive and adaptive towards change while our Generation Z it defined by the new and constantly developing technology that is introduced into the market, different from previous generation as we can’t remember a time without IPhone’s and the 24 hour news cycle. As a result, a public relations practitioner needs to be aware of these differences and needs to take them into consideration when driving a message forward, as what might be accepted by one age group could be rejected entirely by another. The bottom line is, if there is no connection to one’s audience, all efforts are futile.

If someone were to come up to me and say that public relations at its core is about mastering tactics like news releases and social media, I would respond with the notion that they are half correct. While these tactics are an important part towards understanding how to reach an audience, that outreach needs to be supplemented by the understanding of how to connect with an audience. Different audiences mean implementing different connections within the message; different hooks that these various audiences can grasp and hold onto. Without the understanding that a message at its core needs a connection for audiences to hold, then one only understands a small part of the practice of public relations.