What is Public Relations?
Advantages:
1. The promotional techniques used in public relations are relatively cheap in comparison to other marketing methods.
2. Public relations campaigns can provide potential customers with more information on a product or company than many other marketing techniques are able to. For example, a story in the media which describes a product in a positive way can provide more detail than a small advertisement in print or a television commercial can.
3. In many cases, an audience is more likely to read a news article than an advertisement which can be skipped through and lost amongst many others.
4. The methods that public relations experts use to promote a product are often seen by the public as being more trustworthy than other forms of advertising. The media outlets that provide favourable coverage of a product or company are often viewed as third parties offering an independent and unbiased point of view.
5. One advantage of public relations is its ability to expand its influence beyond the reaches of its original campaign. This can be seen in forms of media promotion such as magazine stories. The original story mentioning a product or company, once published, may then be used by other media channels in order to write their own story on the same subject.
6. The effectiveness of a public relations campaign is often felt to have a greater longevity than many other marketing methods. A positive impression will usually last until proven otherwise and a favourable company or product image helps to minimise any future problems that may occur.
Disadvantages
1. Problems can occur if an organisation’s public relations and marketing departments work independently of each other and do not communicate with each other effectively. If there is a lack of consistency in the messages that a potential customer is receiving, the promotional efforts of all departments may become less effective.
2. The level of a control that a public relations expert has over their promotional campaigns is less than that of other marketing professionals. For example, a person who is promoting a product through public relations strategies could spend a great deal of time talking to a journalist who is writing an industry article but, upon publication of the article, find that the product or company that they have been promoting has not been mentioned at all. This differs from other marketing professionals who can develop an advertisement and be in complete control over what the public sees and when and where they see it.
3. Another risk of promoting a product through another person’s story in the media is that the intended message can be lost or distorted as a result of the information being re-told by a third party.