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After almost 50 years of operating as the Public Relations Consultants Association, the PRCA has launched an industry-wide consultation into whether it should change its name. They will consider whether to drop the \u2018C\u2019, which is deemed too inclusive for an organisation that has members from across the entire breadth of the industry, and also \u2018PR\u2019, which is considered to be a redundant term in a sector of wide and varied specialities. Go the \u2018A\u2019 Team!<\/p>\n
The public consultation raises the question over whether \u201cPure PR\u201d still exists. According to The ‘A Team’, public relations is the intersection between people and a brand, and is primarily concerned with \u201creputation\u201d and \u201cgaining trust and understanding\u201d between an organisation and its various publics – whether that’s employees, customers, investors, the local community – or all of those stakeholder groups. PR professionals use a variety of techniques to achieve this, and differ from marketers because they secure \u2018earned\u2019 media rather than \u2018paid\u2019.<\/p>\n
But there are very few PR professionals left operating so rigidly. “As the dividing lines between practices have blurred over the years, many within our industry no longer term themselves as offering pure PR,\u201d the PRCA statement read, \u201cthe industry has changed in nature\u201d.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re not the only ones to notice. As Fifth Ring\u2019s Katherine Fair says, \u201cit is getting difficult to pinpoint exactly how communications, marketing and public relations differ from each other\u201d, which, according to Ogilvy\u2019s Stuart Smith, means there is a rush to be \u201cTHE agency\u201d that can \u201cown the insight, the big creative idea, produce the content and optimise the channel: paid, owned, earned media\u201d. The definition of PR as being focused on getting a good press \u201cis close to being redundant\u201d, Alastair Campbell says. PR is now about marrying several disciplines to achieve numerous objectives.<\/p>\n