Public Relations & Transparency (CM2069)
Seminar Week 0 - Intro
What is PR?
-> Public relations, it has to do with image, perception, reputation, form of being nice, some sort of
self-interest, maintaining relationships with stakeholders, like employees, customers, citizens. With
whom you have a certain type of relationship which you want to maintain, defend, improve.
-> inspiring employees, inspired employees work harder for you and are less sick
-> if you are nice to customers, is like maintaining a relationship with family or friends, people will
trust and appreciate you more, give you money, vote for your party.
-> so quite important to invest in PR
Why is it still not understood by some people?
-> it has a bit of a bad reputation to some people
-> many people find it hard to develop a PR knowledge and development strategy, it takes time,
depends on priorities
-> people think of PR as something that is nice to have, but not a must have (like safety, money,
business, logistics, etc)
-> most money in communication goes to advertising
-> PR is small in terms of money, capacity and attention, because it is about dialogue, that’s more
difficult -> you can only have a dialogue if you are capable of listening to others and if you have a
story to tell. (has to go further than buy what I sell, or buy me because I am great, requires more
effort and communicative skills (dialogue instead of sending information))
PR IS ABOUT DIALOGUE THAT CREATES A POSITIVE IMAGE ESPECIALLY THROUGH EARNED MEDIA
(YOU HAVE TO EARN ATTENTION) -> CHEAPER AND MORE EFFECTIVE / MAINTAINING RELATIONS
WITH STAKEHOLDERS FOR MUTUAL INTERESTS
Seminar Week 1 – PR & Corporate Strategy
Transparency is about openness, not about showing everything you have, but about showing the
essence of what you want to achieve and what you think to a certain extent.
Total transparency doesn’t work -> information overload
Total opaque (ondoorzichtig) doesn’t work either
PR is everywhere and in every industry.
A lot of what people, organizations do is to give a certain impression, to get a certain effect on other
people, to manage a certain image or reputation. PR is a very important instrument to manage
perception, reputation and image, by what you say and what you don’t say, what you show and what
you don’t show, how you behave, how you cloth, etc
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TAKE AWAYS:
-> PR, like all social constructs, has many definitions. Classic PR-theory (Grunig) promotes dialogue.
-> In my take, PR:
- Follows business strategy (communication and boards should work together instead of act as
separate departments)
- Is perception management through positioning, promotion and publicity
- surpasses paid media in credibility and cost
-> it’s handy to realize that:
- publicity can be good or bad
- reality has many faces
,- facts can be messages (people mention stuff with a certain purpose)
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What is PR?
- Link with corporate strategy (=basis for PR)
- PR used to be the same as communications management but is getting smaller and smaller in
terminology.
- A PR person must be able to talk the talk of the boardroom, if you are not able to connect to
the management, in order to understand them (used to be an important need, decreased a
bit in last years-> long-term development of strategic issues for communication management
-> European communication monitor 2019)
- Increasing distrust towards authorities, communication plays a part in that, challenging to
convince audience that what businesses are doing is good
- If organizations do not look transparent, give the impression of having something to hide,
they risk being distrusted, which is impactful in this globalized world where it is quite easy for
customers to walk away and go to another company. PR can be very helpful in this.
What’s on the organizational mind?
-> www.hsleiden,nl/100plusmanagementmodels (also book)
-> video promo:
- eight dominant fashions in management science:
1. sustainability-> many kinds of sustainability and efficiency, waste of resources, sustainability
begins with resource efficiency, how can we use raw materials and energy far more sparingly
2. innovation -> combining values that are not easily joint, therefore scarce, therefore profitable. E.g.
making a fast car safe, or new technology pretty (apple)
3. strategy and positioning -> strategy is about creating a path towards your organizational goal, this
goal can be defined as a mission statement or vision statement. To find your organizational goal you
can look at your core competencies/market, competition, customers. Don’t forget to communicate
your goal, or your stakeholders won’t follow.
4. diversity-> Asia and Africa will become leaders in annual economic growth, its not a choice
anymore to think about diversity, it is about our reality.
5. customer-> Who are our customers, how do we keep our customers satisfied, etc
6. HRM-> what is the added value of people? -> human ideas are essential to innovation
7. benchmarking & results -> we need instruments to know where we are, not only money defines
success, the challenge is to find the dashboard that helps to find the dashboards that helps your
organization to find the right path towards performance.
8. leadership-> most leadership approaches are culturally biased, the only thing that goes beyond
culture, is how leader recognize the difference between a problem and a dilemma. When it’s a
dilemma, they try to reconcile it on a higher level-> essence of leadership.
SEQUENTIAL EXCELLENCE MODEL (every means is an end, and vice versa)
Basic knowledge on those things, is advised
,The sequential excellence model can hopefully be translated into a vision, mission, strategy
or implementation.
- Vision = an idea of the future, how will the world develop?
- Mission = within this previous described vision, a mission is about the place which
you want to achieve as an organization or individual in this changing world
- Strategy = the plan on how to achieve this mission
- Implementation = ensuring your plan is executed the way to planned, monitoring the
way you are actually succeeding in implementing your strategy.
As an organization you have measurable success if you communicate your corporate
strategy, through:
- Paid media = space you buy in a medium like internet through a banner, commercial
on television, ad in a newspaper, commercial on radio, etc
- Owned media = media you control yourself, not depending on television networks or
other people that sell you space. Owned media is your website, your newsletter, your
congress room, also social media: own accounts. However, Facebook decides
whether you are allowed on the medium or not (so that is good to keep in mind)
- Earned media
Target groups:
- Internal communications: employees, keep them aligned and motivated to work for
the organization
- Consumers
- Wide public, opinion on who you are, are you sustainable enough?
How did PR became PR?
- In ancient history, rulers already had some sense on PR, power and money is almost
always dependent on the acceptance of the wider audience to grant you this power
and money -> to keep privileged you need to convince people that is belongs to you
(head on coins, so everyone got the impression: this is an important guy)knowing
someone increases possibility of respect, understanding, and maybe even sympathy.
- Middle ages: media became alive due to possibility of book printing, promoting a
certain message though publicity was a way for people who wanted to have power or
, were in power to create a perception for the target audience. PR is an instrument
that exists for thousands of years.
Product PR & Corporate PR
- PR as we know it arose through the industrial revolution, when mass production
came up, mass wealth and mass media
- Two forms are quite dominant: product PR and corporate PR
➔ Product PR: about promoting a specific product (Phineas Taylor Barnum:
“Without publicity a terrible thing happens – nothing.”/ “There’s no such thing as
bad publicity”, people like stories that are not necessarily true, but they sound
great, he told stories about the circus, so all people gathered from all over the
country to come)
➔ Corporate PR: issue management, wider audience, typically more negative,
fighting the opposition.
Michael O’Leary (multimillionaire who made Ryan Air great): “Short of committing murder,
negative publicity sells more seats than positive publicity.”
➔ He made a quote in the media once, about thinking about making customers pay
for going to the toilet on a flight, might be considered bad publicity, however it
placed focus on the cost efficiency of Ryan Air and worked in their benefit.
Banksy: “There’s no such thing as good publicity”
➔ Reflects opinion that everything you read in newspaper / see on the news is
basically bad news, otherwise it is not news. Good news is not news worthy.
(ourworldindata.org = combining numbers for positive news)
Most business leaders fear journalists, and think about talking to the media that they always
want to know how much they earn and talk about them not being sustainable enough.
It is normal now for organizations to be open and have a webcare team to stay in touch with
customers, otherwise they get frustrated and will go to other companies that do have a good
webcare team. But on top-level there is still a reluctance to publicity.
“The public be damned”- William Henry Vanderbilt (one of the richest people in the world in
the 19th century)
➔ He was confronted by a public opinion that was not positive about his
organization, he didn’t care
➔ This approach is luckily almost not possible anymore
➔ We now have to consider what the public thinks and try to get along to ensure
the best outcome (in your own interest) (constructive)
“Tell the truth, because sooner or later the public will find out anyway. And if the public
doesn’t like what you are doing, change your policies and bring them into line with what
people want.” – Ivy Lee (made a lot of money by working for rich people who had trouble
with the public opinion / journalists)
➔ One of the first people thinking like this
➔ This is still the core of what PR promises to do
➔ But there is still a credibility issue