PR vs Marketing
Public Relations vs. Marketing In today’s society, the two terms, public relations and marketing, can get misread as being one in the same. ... According to Cutlip, Center, and Broom, some businesses use the same person to do both public relations and marketing without ever distinguishing between the two. They go on to say that some professionals’ business cards or firms maybe titled as “Marketing Communications”; both the functions of marketing and public relations combined. ... One very clear distinction between the marketing function and the public relations function is the goal of each function. Marketing’s most important goal is to help an organization achieve its goals of direct profitability (class notes). ... In short, the marketing’s main purpose of an organization is to sell that organization’s services or goods for money or services in return. ... That is the chief reason of why marketing is so important. Profit is most important because if marketing is not concerned with the company’s profit then the organization will make no profit and eventually shut down. ... The chief function of the marketing department of this basketball making company is to sell these basketballs for money. The marketing department has to make sure that the making and distribution of these basketballs costs less, obviously, than what they want to sell these basketballs for. ... Marketing then deals with the organization’s research, product design, packaging, promotion, and distribution of the basketballs they are selling (Cutlip 7). Through these different areas, marketing has to run and overlook all of these areas so they can have the most attractive, most affordable, most publicly recognized basketball over the other companies. ... The marketing people have to figure out how the organization can make the most profit through this concept of exchange. The marketing department has to be careful that they don’t spend too much money on the research, product design, packaging, pricing, promotion, and distribution, or the company will not make enough profit off of the basketballs. If marketing is not careful and does not spend enough money on the research, product design, packaging, pricing, promotion, and distribution, then no one will buy the organization’s basketballs for different reasons, which are: people do not know about the companies basketball, they are not in an easy place to buy, they are too expensive, etc., then the organization will again not make enough profit and the marketing people will have failed at their job. ... Then the PR department makes sure that every employee knows the mission statement of the company so they will know always what the company stands for. ... ” If the PR department makes sure the organization is being social responsible then the organization will never run into a organizational ending problem like Enron ran into. As Kotler and Mindak state, “Public Relations people are growing increasingly concerned with their company’s marketing practices, questioning whether they “square” with the company’s social responsibility (13).” The public relations make sure that the marketing department is doing their job with business ethics. ... The PR department wants the different publics to know that their organization can be trusted and is creditable. ... As stated earlier since marketing and public relations have different goals then they obviously focus on different publics. Marketing mainly focuses on just exchange relationships with the customers and the customers alone. The reason that marketing only focuses on the customers of the product or service that the organization is selling or providing is because as it was mentioned earlier the chief goal of marketing is profit.