I would be happy as a starting point for more alignment of marketing and PR plans. Working in PR too often we are asked for the PR plan without the detailed marketing (or business) strategy.

Its a shame marketing is so often confused with advertising and its a bigger shame so many marketing departments and marketer’s are the ones confused.

To quote the ever incorrect Wikipedia
“Marketing is an integrated communications-based process through which individuals and communities discover that existing and newly-identified needs and wants may be satisfied by the products and services of others.”

This debate should be labelled advertising VS PR.

The funny thing is that so many marketing departments are actually really advertising departments, which I believe is due to the fact that their budgets are generally heavily geared towards buying media – therefore buying media & creative for those media placements gets all the attention (internally). So why are they heavily geared towards media? It’s easy, low risk/low reward, and seems to have been working for the last 50 years?

In many businesses there is no real ongoing PR issue (a manufacturer for example just wants to build brand and sell stuff) while others are dealing with issues on a daily or hourly basis and only use “marketing” as a back up to help keep the wolves from the door (governments especially like to do this to show they’re ‘doing something’) or re-gain lost ground.

This is certainly the case in large corporates and government which, if marketing has too much of a say the real issues get lost in the traffic and too much attention goes to getting a good vibe going.

Unfortunately few people in marketing have a real understanding of PR or issues management and because it is high profile (and budget) have an un-deserved sense of its importance. Where they become elevated to head communications / Corporate Affairs sections but in the ‘wrong’ environment, great care is needed to ensure the correct balance is maintained. In these sorts of businesses marketing activity is just a tool and should never have the keys to the car.

Your feedback has provided plenty of prompts for a further post/article. There certainly isn’t space (or probably the desire to hear) the sort of response these comments deserve. Maybe Tim will tolerate further discussion…

Just one thing, remember that, when operating at its optimum level, public relations professionals advise organisations on how the organisations can not only communicate more effectively with their stakeholders, but how they can evolve themselves so they more closely meet their stakeholder needs and wants.

So, not just about external change, but about organisational change.

Upshot: organisations that operate in a manner more attuned to society and, by extension, a better world for us all to live in.

And yes, I am serious.

(forum falls over in disbelief)

I used to work for Lion Nathan. Corporate Communications answered directly to the board, and was in fact in a different building. The Corporate Communications manager had his own PR company on call.

However, the marketing team also had their own PR companies that answered directly to the brand managers, who in turn answered to the director of marketing.

So I think we have FINALLY got to the crux of the matter here…the difference between PR and Corporate Communications, the latter standing outside, and potentially above the marketing function, the former working with/for the marketing team.

Now if only we’d worked this out at the start, we could have avoided all the tears.

Incidentally, Andrew Keen is a GREAT read and a wonderful commentator. I disagree with just about everything he says – and have told him that personally – but I love his ideas. I believe he’s nailed a column for the Daily Telegraph in London recently. Would love to get him to Australia…

Corporate Comms reports to either the CEO, CFO or COO. External corporate messaging has nothing to do with product marketing and is the sole domain of corporate comms, working with senior executive and Board.

eg Johnson & Johnson’s response to cyanide found in Tylenol wasn’t led by the marketing function. It was led by the Corporate Communications and Legal.

eg. financial calendar PR for listed companies isn’t handled by marketing – it’s conducted by media relations working with investor relations.

if you’re talking about a firm’s wider marketing function rather than just the narrower product marketing function, it’s fair to say that Corporate Comms isn’t just a component – it is usually fully responsible for “corporate marketing”, or the various ways in which the entire corporation is ‘marketed’ to its constiuencies.

i think this is what Craig was driving at with his original article – which is not so much his provocative opinion as simply a description of the communications hierarchy within modern corporations

Any outward communication (product, npd, brand, pr, campaign, customer service) is still the primary function and responsibility of the marketing department.

Re: Corporate Comms, the direction may come from the board level, but it’s still the marketing professional who shapes and crafts to actual communication.

My point is, PR / Corporate Comms is still a componant of the wider marketing function.

notionally sitting over this is PR as practised in the Corporate Communications function, particularly where listed and/or diversified companies are concerned

CC sits across the company to help manage an organisation’s sometimes conflicting communications objectives, and will have knowledge of matters that marketing functions aren’t exposed to (eg investor concerns or regulatory sensitivities)