The true role of public relations in branding

• Posted: Sunday, July 16, 2006
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• Author: pradhana

By Dannielle Blumenthal is a public affairs specialist. Dr. Blumenthal is the author and co-author of several books and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Brand Management.

Public relations is better than advertising at building a brand, argued Laura and Al Ries in their prescient 2002 book, “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.” At the time they were right; advertising had indeed lost credibility while the media still had it. But in 2006, one can no longer be so sure: in an age when video news releases regularly substitute for real news, as the Center for Media and Democracy reports, people have learned to be skeptical about the media’s objectivity.

The media is constantly pressured to compromise its impartiality. For one thing, there is a constant need to produce news, sometimes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition, they are owned by mega-sized corporate entities who are in the business primarily to generate profit: the press survives by selling airtime and print space to advertisers.

These two factors together, in addition to any bias internal to the culture of the media entity itself (e.g. Fox News), leave the media vulnerable to press releases and other prepackaged content put together by private agencies hoping to get the word out about their clients, especially if those clients are willing to underwrite advertising time and space. People are not stupid. When a television segment on health is sponsored by the same entity that is featured in it, it causes the media producer that aired it to lose credibility.

If the media is compromised in terms of its trustworthiness, then Ries and Ries’ argument falls apart: no credibility = no brand.

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