Optimizing the Integration of Public Relations Into the Marketing Mix

Introduction

These days, it's received wisdom that PR is fundamental to an effective marketing mix. Gini Dietrich’s PESO approach (paid-earned-shared-owned) has, in one form or another, become an essential strategic alchemy that is used to generate a multi-channel brand ecosystem that drives brand equity and reaches consumers where they live, work and play.?

The growth of digital - and especially social media - has contributed significantly to the elevation of PR in the marketing mix. PR’s capacity to manage two-way conversations, build relationships and successfully navigate “uncontrolled” communications environments, makes it increasingly valuable to today’s marketers, whose goal is not simply to drive leads and sales, but to build long-term brand equity. As the AMA notes: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large (Approved 2017).” (https://www.ama.org/the-definition-of-marketing-what-is-marketing/).

PR’s Contribution to the Marketing Mix

If we look more closely at what PR can bring to the marketing table, we can understand why the two disciplines are increasingly working in collaboration.?

• PR is rooted in developing strong relationships between the enterprise and a host of external stakeholders – especially consumers and those who influence them. The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) notes that “Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” (https://www.prsa.org/about/all-about-pr). This approach is especially valuable in driving broad consumer trust, affinity and a desire to engage with the brand.?
• PR is skilled at cultivating two-way conversations. This goes hand-in-hand with relationship building and, at its best, can deepen and enrich relationships between the brand and consumers. In today’s multifaceted communications environment, these conversations complement more traditional “push” or one-way approaches in the marketing mix.?
• In a burgeoning social media environment, where consumers are increasingly exposed to the opinions of influencers who are not affiliated with the brand, marketing can benefit from deploying PR professionals who are skilled in engaging with such broad, dynamic and “uncontrolled” mediums.
• PR professionals make it their business to be on top of the drivers of cultural and social trends, as well as the prevailing “news of the day.” They are constantly seeking opportunities to elevate the brand by associating it with the most fruitful of these trends. This expansive approach can serve marketing by introducing unconventional synergies into campaigns and by helping leverage the cultural power of celebrities, social causes, cultural icons, etc. that might not have been obvious choices for brand partnerships. PR’s affinity with the winds of popular culture not only adds to the creativity of marketing outreach, but can also help ensure that campaigns do not inadvertently strike a false note.?
• The PR profession has traditionally been focused on “earning” equity for the enterprise and brand. As Jean-Louis Gassee of Apple has said: “Advertising is saying you’re good, PR is getting someone else to say you’re good.”? At the heart of “earned” is the capacity to persuade third-party influencers of all kinds to advocate for the brand. This has always been of huge value to brands, but even more so today, as customers increasingly demand and seek out reasons to identify with the brand that go far beyond the quality and price of its products and services.
• Earned equity is generally achieved through one or other form of “storytelling.” This sometimes underappreciated skill involves crafting a brand story that engages the listener in such a way that they see value in incorporating it into their own story. The most obvious ways in which this works are in pitches to journalists and the media at large as well as the development of robust “owned” content. Today, this approach also supports marketing in the form of compelling corporate narratives, breakthrough thought leadership platforms, robust employee value propositions, innovative corporate responsibility initiatives and more.
• Finally, crisis management has conventionally been the purview of PR professionals. Their skills are especially valuable when the brand faces an unexpected threat to its equity in a fast-moving, sometimes hostile communications environment. Today, the power of external stakeholders and the ubiquity of social media, mean that issues are more likely to arise for brands, ranging from a hostile social media post, to deliberate disinformation designed to harm the brand. In all cases, if the marketing mix contains skilled PR professionals, the brand should be at least a few steps ahead of the game.

The Challenges of Effective Integration

It’s clear that there is much to like about the integration of Marketing and PR. So, why do we continue to hear dark murmurings about the effectiveness of this in practice? These include turf battles over resources, strategy and territory (particularly over who “owns” social media and influencer engagement); a lack of strategic integration (e.g., using PR as a tactical “bolt-on” after the campaign is baked); PR not meeting marketing standards for analytic rigor and ROI; and an under-utilization of core skills.

Achieving Operational Integration

The first thing to recognize is that effective strategic integration requires meaningful operational integration. Many companies have taken decisive steps to achieve this, such as elevating the CCO to the C-suite, bringing the PR function under the CMO, or creating a new hybrid CMO/CCO role under a different name. For other organizations, it remains incomplete, at best. This may be partly because of the organizational upheaval and investment required to restructure a communications team aligned with the demands of the 21st century communications environment. This includes rewriting job descriptions and restructuring reporting lines and organizational hierarchies, while investing in the development of new processes. This is compounded by the difficulty of changing the engines while the plane is flying - the demands of the enterprise don’t take a vacation while the marketing and communications function is re-engineered. Despite the obstacles, it's critical that executive leadership (across the C-suite, but especially CMOs and CCOs) recognizes and supports this effort. This will go a long way towards enabling communications teams to develop the operational alignment that will facilitate effective marketing initiatives.?

Achieving Strategic Integration

In addition to structural realignments, here are some other ways to achieve effective integration of PR into the marketing mix. These are equally important and often easier to implement in the first instance.?

• Marketing and communications professionals could benefit from a deeper understanding of the skills and approaches that each discipline brings to the table. Too often, there is an assumption that PR professionals understand marketing, and vice versa. However, there are many ways in which this is not yet the case. For example, the term “influencers” is often interpreted very differently by the PR and marketing professionals sitting around the same table. The executive leadership of today’s integrated communications functions should consider investing in regular experiential training for their integrated teams, to give marketers and PR professionals the opportunity to walk in each other’s shoes. The power of experiential learning is such that good trainers and facilitators should be able to achieve results relatively quickly. The NYU Executive Master’s in Marketing and Strategic Communications aims to equip leaders to facilitate just this kind of integration – to ensure that their experts in digital marketing, sales enablement; PR; advertising; promotions; social media; etc. around their strategy tables have a real understanding of the value of the contribution of each, and real enthusiasm for each other’s ideas and efforts. The benefits extend to enhanced synergy of ideas, outstanding levels of innovation and creativity, and overall employee satisfaction and engagement.
• The success of a PR initiative or idea tends to be very hard to anticipate ahead of time. As a discipline that relies on generating “earned” equity, PR works with unpredictable outcomes. PR professionals instinctively know whether a creative idea, a major collaboration, or a fresh initiative has legs, but they would be irresponsible to guarantee results. There are many examples of PR-led campaigns that have delivered massive advantages to the brand, but which required somewhat of an act of faith on the part of the companies involved. State Street’s “Fearless Girl” is one. Marketing’s use of advanced analytics, audience research and pricing models, for example, makes its bets generally more predictable. This means that when executive leadership evaluates the role of PR in an integrated campaign (especially a campaign that is led by a PR idea), they should do so with criteria that allow for the unpredictability (but also the potential) of PR ideas.?
• PR has always had difficulty measuring and demonstrating its ROI. Even the most successful PR campaigns have difficulty linking “outcomes” (or changes in consumer behavior), to PR efforts. Various forms of marketing mix modeling have struggled to give credit to PR in integrated campaigns. PR’s ability to influence through third parties, is one reason its impact is difficult to evaluate. For example, customers can generally recall and evaluate an ad, or respond to a product or packaging change, but it’s harder for them to recognize that a blog piece or a tweet from a CEO has helped them feel an affinity for the brand. This means that leaders of integrated communications need to develop ROI measures and resource allocation strategies that allow for the less tangible contribution of PR to the marketing campaign. Without this, PR ideas and initiatives might be under-resourced or will have less opportunity to contribute to brand equity.?
• PR contributes to brand equity in ways that don’t often overlap with marketing. This includes Public Affairs, which focuses on cultivating a positive regulatory environment by building support across local, state, and federal government, and by engaging with community and activist groups on relevant socio-political issues. It includes Investor Relations, which is focused on the capital markets and creating a favorable environment for investors. These specialisms deliver their own value to the enterprise, but they also enhance brand equity. There are even times when they might have an outsized role to play in marketing campaigns - such as when political issues dominate consumer sentiment. CMOs can benefit significantly from the strategic integration of these PR specialisms into marketing initiatives - when required. This often happens defensively in a crisis situation, but at its best it should happen proactively too.

Conclusion

The strategic integration of marketing and PR that we are witnessing today, reflects the realities of the consumer and, at its best, delivers a comprehensive and multidimensional brand experience. In this case, diversity is strength, and today’s CMOs and CCOs can benefit significantly from taking steps that help optimize integration. These include enabling operational realignment; building genuinely integrated teams; reassessing methods for resource allocation and determining ROI; and, leveraging the various PR specialisms to optimize their contributions to the marketing mix. It's not easy to weave cloth from different materials. But when you get it right, it can have outsized strength and impact.

A New Curriculum for the CMO and CCO and their teams is needed that is both Human-Centered and Data-Driven, balancing the spreadsheet and the story, or the poetry and the plumbing, or the math and the meaning of an integrated approach to marketing and communications.??And this education needs to be rooted in a sense of personal and professional purpose and authenticity and founded on a platform of lifelong learning. At NYU’s School of Professional Studies, we have recently recommitted ourselves to some guiding principles about the role that a globally-recognized academic institution and an applied professional education can deliver:

• We believe that Marketing and Communication leaders have a unique role to play in driving growth for an organization.
• We believe that the success of a leader is driven not just by what they do and how they do it, but is also built on a foundation of purpose.
• We believe that successful growth leaders have the biggest impact when they are human-centered and data-driven.
• We believe that the best way to educate executive growth leaders is through an application-based curriculum taught by leaders and scholars of business who have successfully led and advised top brands themselves.
• We believe the strength of a program is catalyzed by the strength of the cohort of students with a lifelong network of peers, learning and support.

We believe the best programs are designed to meet continuously changing market needs—to help executives lead business transformation, drive innovation and achieve long-term, sustainable growth.

This Fall, NYU’s School of Professional Studies will welcome the first cohort in its Executive Master's in Marketing and Strategic Communications designed to address the needs of professionals in marketing and PR on the path to C-Suite leadership.?Leading marketers like Antonio Lucio, the former Global CMO of Facebook, and public relations and corporate relations professionals like Kathryn Metcalfe, CCO at CVS Health have already been moved to praise the effort.?

We are delighted to be pioneering a new form of education and engagement for our industry, this Fall of 2022.

To learn more about the program, please visit sps.nyu.edu/execms.

Jennifer Scott is a Clinical Assistant Professor for the?Integrated Marketing & Communications Department?in the Division of Programs in Business at NYU School of Professional Studies.

Related articles by our faculty:

• The Transformation of CMO and CCO?by Michael Diamond
• Driving Innovation from the CMO’s Chair by Bahriye Goren
• Do CMOs and CCOs Need Data to Drive Growth? by Milos Bujisic