Here's an ad from a wireless telecommunications company that appeared in late January in The Washington Post: "Responsibilities include sales support, press releases, advertising, trade shows and product literature and image. Superior written and oral communication skills, interpersonal skills, ability to build vendor relationships, and fiscal responsibility are required."
It sounds like a mainstream PR job. But the job title is: "Product Marketing Specialist."
The terms "PR" and "public relations" appear nowhere in this ad, but we all know of many job descriptions for communicaions specialists, marketing communications representatives and PR managers that would match this one. If you think this seems to be pointing to a blurring between PR and marketing, you're right.
Let's face it: the tremendous growth in the PR field over the past few decades has been because PR has become the bride of marketing. While figures are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence certainly points to an accelerating use of PR for marketing programs, and overall, a closer working relationship between PR and marketing professionals.
Silos Breaking Down
Corporations are seeing that "marketing and public relations need to work together," said Kurt Stocker, a former corporate PR executive who is now an associate professor in the Integrated Marketing Communications graduate program at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. "Silos are being broken down" to create integrated communications departments including both PR and marketing, he said.
Sharon Voros, vice president of corporate communications at executive recruiting firm Ray & Berndtson, Fort Worth, Texas, agrees. "Organizations are becoming flatter. People are becoming more versatile, so there is a real opportunity for PR people to become involved in marketingespecially in business-to-business companies."
Any executive looking for a PR position today should have as strong a marketing background as possible, she says.
What's Driving It
Intense competition in the marketplace is one reason that PR and marketing are working closer together than ever before, believes Bob Schenkein of Schenkein/Sherman Public Relations, Denver. "The competition is so fierce that you have to hit the bull's eye the first time, and that almost forces everybody to work together so that they can get the biggest bang out of the resources [available]," he says.
In this environment, Schenkein is finding that PR staff inside companies or in supporting PR firms needs to work much more closely with marketing, and at best, be involved in the planning of overall marketing programs. This paves the way for more sophisticated implementation of PR tactics. "There is a lot more coordination between PR and marketing as products get launched," says Schenkein.
Teledyne Water Pik, Fort Collins, Colo., has found PR particularly useful during introduction of new products. "Introductions tend to be more newsworthy," says Sara Harms, vice president of oral health. During rollouts, "our products require a lot of education," a task for which PR is well-suited, she says.
Accountability Lessons Marketing
The demand for accountability has led PR to follow marketing's lead of showing results in terms of customers. "The concept is, you want to do more than just get good ink for a client or do something in the community just for the sake of doing it.
The idea is to impact a customer," says Tom Gable, who heads The Gable Group, a San Diego PR firm that also has offices in Los Angeles and Detroit. Working on marketing programs has forced PR departments and firms to invest more effort in front-end research and measurement of results.
While acknowledging that PR results are still "less predictable" than other marketing approaches, such as advertising, Harms says Teledyne evaluates PR's marketing cost-effectiveness in terms of reaching target audiences, changing awareness, the number of leads generated through 800 numbers, and "sales, if you can track it."
Marketing Corporate Image
The successful marriage of PR and marketing at the product and business unit level raises the question of whether PR at the corporate level is becoming marketing driven.
An interest in "corporate positioning and branding" is leading some corporations to focus on the marketing dimension of corporate communications, says executive recruiter Jean Cardwell of Cardwell Enterprises, Chicago.
This focus also plays into corporations' interests in a formal "reputation management program.
While in most corporations, reputation management ultimately is the responsibility of the CEO, Cardwell is finding some corporations are hiring corporate communications executives for a formal reputation management slot. (Stocker, 719/783-9660; Voros, 817/338-8247; Schenkein, 303/292-6655; Harms, 970/221-8278; Gable, 619/234-1300; Cardwell, 773/273-5774)
Tom Moore, former editor of PR News, operates Corporate Communication Studies, a Rockville, Md., firm that produces reports for and about the communications function. He can be reached at 301/279-9455 or by e-mail, at [email protected]