PR is not marketing.

I suppose that this sentence alone could be enough to summarize the readings for today. After all, PR is not marketing. But a more thorough reading of Bill Sledizk’s blog post about what PR is not tells us why PR is not marketing. The differences can be found primarily in the relationships that PR practitioners support and maintain that are outside of a marketer’s reach. Unlike many ill-informed people think, and what I initially thought about PR, the function of PR is not to merely to advertise, promote, publicize, or sell, rather it is to sustain relationships that make an organization successful.

While advertising, marketing, and PR all follow the same processes learned in chapter one (i.e. research, planning, communicating, and evaluating), PR is different because it focuses on many publics and doesn’t purchase specific placements to control it’s messages.

What is consumer-focused marketing and how is it different than PR?

Consumer-focused marketing is a new wave of marketing that uses media to form and maintain relationships with individual consumers. While it may sound similar to the idea of PR sustaining relationships, it is different in that it only focuses on the relationships between consumers. PR focuses on developing and maintaining long-term relationships with a broader, wider public that is essential to an organization’s success. While they are clearly two distinct professions, they are complimentary of one another and thus must work together in order for an organization to thrive.

Integrated marketing communications (IMC) is one of the most popular forms of consumer-focused marketing. Within this new form of marketing, the 4 P’s of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion) are consumer driven. That is, this form exists in order to reach out to the individual consumer and focus on their needs and wants, convenience for them, and active two-way communication. Although it sounds like an excellent form of marketing, IMC has it’s weaknesses. Some major ones being that if an organization becomes too focused on an individual consumer, some of the core values and goals of that organization can easily be overlooked, it can be difficult to measure results since the definition of success is determined by consumer relationships, and consumer and individual privacy can be hard to guarantee and maintain.