On-line Readings in Public Relations by Michael Turney
	Public relations and marketing: On the way to Integrated Marketing Communication?
	©2001 Michael Turney	Table of contents	PR class home page	About the author

One somewhat superficial, albeit very telling, indication of the change in thinking about the public relations and marketing relationship is evident in three successive editions of Fraser Seitel's textbook, The Practice of Public Relations, one of the most popular textbooks on the market written by a current public relations practitioner.

The fifth edition (1992) had two separate chapters, one called Public Relations Marketing and the other called Public Relations Advertising, which dealt with various aspects of this issue. They clearly treated public relations and marketing as distinct fields even though their interests occasionally paralleled one another and their practitioners might, on occasion, use one another's tools.

The sixth edition (1995) had a single chapter entitled Communications Cross-Training which emphasized the public relations practitioners' need to understand and be able to work with marketing concepts, tools, and concerns. It also pointed out that marketers who wanted to be on the cutting edge of their field needed to learn about and be able to use public relations concepts and tools.

The current seventh edition (1998) has a single chapter entitled Integrated Marketing Communication which describes the "irrepressible intertwining of heretofore separate disciplines ... into a sometimes unholy alliance to win consumer support" and warns that future practitioners will need to use a far wider array of communication tools and strategies than in the past if they are to survive professionally.

The integration of communication became popular in the last decade.

Patterns similar to that found in Seitel's books can be found in numerous other textbooks, and one need look no further than the past several years' covers of PR Strategist, Communication World, PR Tactics, The Journal of Marketing, and any number of other professional journals for marketers and public relations practitioners to see a plethora of articles heralding the benefits of one version or another of combined and integrated communication functions. Among the terms that have been touted are product public relations, marketing public relations, marketing communication (sometimes called marcomm), and public relations marketing.

But, by far, the most popular term for combining communication functions has been integrated marketing communication (often called IMC). The details of its evolution don't need to be covered here; they're fully treated in any number of books, including the course textbook.

Integrated Marketing Communication may be a fine term, and an even better concept, but let's not become so enraptured with IMC or any other new terminology that we lose our perspective. As William Briggs and Marilen Tuason reminded us in a recent issue of IABC Communication World, "Marketing communication, regardless of its parentage, is a reality in many companies..." but then came the punchline: "Employers don't care what integrated communication calls itself as long as it gets the job done."

Perhaps, public relations practitioners shouldn't be overly concerned about what their profession is called either.

The preferred name for public relations is changing.

Public relations has never been the unanimous choice for what to call the process of managing organizational relationships, but in recent years, O'Dwyer's Directory of Corporate Communication has noted, "The number of companies that identify their internal unit for communicating with their constituents as public relations has dropped off dramatically." This is more fully discussed in a linked reading.

Whether integrated marketing communication, corporate communication, or one of the other popular buzzwords will ultimately overshadow public relations as the name of choice remains to be seen. They may all turn out to be short-lived fads. What will be far more important is whether the underlying integration of communication functions that these terms purport to represent will actually be realized and, at this point, the projections are anything but unanimous.

Practitioners' reactions to integrated communication remain mixed.