As the CIPR celebrates its 75th anniversary, practitioners need to own public relations as a management discipline and move beyond communication tasks. A recent Deloitte report shows the opportunity.

My use of the term public relations in practice and within management has become a personal form of idolatry. A variety of alternative terms are frequently used to describe practice such as brand communication, corporate communication, corporate affairs, and integrated marketing communication. There’s an even longer subset of roles focused on audiences and channels.

What’s important is the management viewpoint of public relations. The importance of the management of relationships is understood as an aspiring area of management practice and a growing body of knowledge. It’s also a developing professional sphere.

It's unhelpful that the public relations is often defined as a communication role. This relegates the role of practitioners to writing press releases, making posters, and organising parties. These can all be part of the tactical function, but it fails to realise its strategic potential.

Public relations makes use of communication to understand, engage and influence relationships and the behaviour of individuals. The outcome is trust, reputation, and behaviour change. It is expertise in communications in all its aspects, including understanding social and societal factors, listening and the development of strategy, the creation and telling of stories, and an understanding of the potential and weaknesses of different communications channels.

The CIPR and PRSA have different viewpoints that spotlight the issue. The CIPR defines public relations as the business of reputation defining it as “the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.” The PRSA calls it “a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organisations and their publics.”

You’ll understand why I side with the CIPR.

You can’t blame the professional associations although they have a leadership role. Public relations is often misunderstood. I would caution you against asking a public relations practitioner to provide a definition of what they do as you’re likely to get a variety of answers. It's an age-old issue.

Public relations historian Dr Rex Harlow interviewed 65 practitioners for a paper published in Public Relations Review in 1976 and unearthed 472 definitions. That must have been a mind-numbingly dull project, but he made the point.

A recent report by management consultancy Deloitte examined the role of corporate affairs directors. Through a series of 30 interviews with senior practitioners in FTSE100, Fortune500, and Euronet organisations, it described the role as managing the relationships around an organisation. It sets out the same thesis as my PhD study that the role of public relations has been elevated to the highest levels within management during the pandemic.

The Deloitte report is an excellent piece of work for several reasons. It’s notable that a management consultancy is legitimatising the role of public relations at the most senior level in management. It also describes its priorities as supporting growth, employee engagement, and navigating social change.

Deloitte says that public relations is a strategic management function first and foremost. The means for practitioners to optimise their value to an organisation is to contribute to research, planning and decision making. The tactical communication activity begins once this work is done, and plans are implemented. That’s the press release, poster, and party role.

The CIPR celebrates its 75th anniversary this week. Its purpose, set out in a Royal Charter in 2005, is to promote professional public relations to practitioners and public understanding. It sets standards among practitioners that are well defined and understood by management. These include an ethical code, education, training, and qualifications. It’s a long-term project.

In my view as both practitioner and researcher there is a latent insecurity within public relations practice because of a lack of management knowledge, professional standards, and fear of public misunderstanding to own the term public relations.  Instead, we use alternative phrases. That’s a mistake and leaves us vulnerable to encroachment from other professions and critical attack. Public relations cannot possibly fulfil its potential until it overcomes this issue.