In the world of small business, PR (Public Relations) and Marketing often get mobbed up, thought of as the same thing. Chiropractic offices often have PR assistants whose duties are more marketing than PR.
It’s been said that PR sows the field, Marketing reaps. True enough but let’s clarify. Public Relations includes all the actions to create and manage your reputation. But there are really two types of PR – corporate and product.
Corporate PR is all about the image of your company, having friends in high places, that kind of thing. Businesses promoting how green (environmentally friendly) they are, for example. That really doesn’t do much to create sales. It just helps ensure no one is going to legislate your company out of existence, believe attacks on you in the papers, or raid your offices on a rumor.
Product PR is all about creating the kind of image that makes people want to buy. That of course very much includes publicity like Madonna wearing your T-shirt or being interviewed by Bill O’Reilly in a friendly fashion if you’re an author.
Then marketing can come up behind that and make sure your product is easily available, use advertising to let people know where they can buy it, help crank up the word-of-mouth, and so on.
Al Ries wrote a great article on this back in the 70’s called “Positioning in PR.” In short, the ideal campaign strategy is run PR for a while, first. THEN do your marketing launch while you keep the publicity machine cranking away.
Notice that movie studios regularly pursue that strategy with their real blockbusters. You start hearing about the movie even one or two years before its release, long long before any advertising starts on it. If the buzz builds on it, that guarantees distribution (opening in lots of theaters). The advertising when it kicks in then finds millions of people saying to themselves “I’ve heard about that. It sounds good. Think I’ll go see it.”
By the way, movies had their best year ever in 2009 despite the economic downturn. So maybe there’s a lesson to be learned.
The same principle can be applied in many many other industries.