The Strength of PR as a Marketing Tool

By Oyindamola Abdulazeez
Wikipedia defined Marketing as the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling the product or service. It is a critical business function for attracting customers.

Marketing, the big mother of them all has many children which include: public relations, advertising, activation and branding among others.

These tools are all essential to the success of any product or service as they perform different roles. Personally, I consider advertising and public relations as the most important tools of marketing but People often over emphasis the value of advertising neglecting the great importance of public relations towards the success of a product or service.

Public relation is the process of establishing and maintaining mutual lines of communication between an organization and its public. It is often aimed at persuading the public, investors, partners, employees, and other stakeholders to maintain a certain point of view about an organisation’s services and products/brands.

Advertising on the other hand, is any paid for communication through a selected media as part of an intentional and systematic effort to affect individual attitudes and choices towards the consumption of goods or services

At a glance, you might think they are same, but they are not. Advert cost a fortune, depending on the frequency and value/worthiness of the materials. But public relations would cost you less but with intense value on the product that can skyrocket the business.

Adverts are not always credible, sometimes the sole aim is just to increase sales figure but any public relations work, be it press release or coverage is more credible, because for a media to publish or broadcast your work, it means one is doing something worthwhile. This goes to say that media houses only publish or broadcast a feature that is news worthy to the general public.

Adverts are more concern about a specific product but public relations covers the product (brand) and the corporate image of the organisation.

When the timeline of an advert expires, the ad automatically dies especially if the message was not well assimilated by the target audience.  Though it is often believed that adverts have longer life span but in reality, it is not true. With the advent of the new media and with most media upping their game online, PR news/photo stories are always available for people to read and revisit no matter the time frame.  

Unlike adverts that clients and agency agree on a particular time to fly the materials, news/photo stories can run continuously on different media channels. These channels take it from a special angle that suits them but still communicate the objective of the client to give target audience more excitement and understanding.

In crisis, an advert cannot redeem the image of a company but a public relation campaign can always do by sending out the right message to the general public.

Public relation is a far stronger tool in marketing communication because it has a whole lot of activities as it can easily promote and fast track media materials. While advertising takes more time and efforts to get creative materials ready before producing them for either printing for outdoor or electronic media.

However, the entire marketing tools are interwoven such that they run pari passu to achieve one common goal for the client.