THE CONVERGENCE OF MARKETING AND PR - WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSIONAL

http://www.stephendebruyn.com The Convergence of Marketing and PR

The emergence and rapid evolution of digital media channels is accelerating the convergence of marketing and public relations.  I call it a paradigm shift.

 While marketers have traditionally been engaged in one-way communication with prospects and customers with an eye primarily on branding and revenue generation, PR professionals were involved in more of a dialogue with stakeholders such as the media and investors, building and safeguarding the company’s corporate reputation.   The Web is increasingly blurring these distinctions. 

 In their excellent book Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications, Paul Argenti and Courtney Barnes point out that “developing a valued brand and sustaining a strong corporate reputation is increasingly becoming a joint effort between marketing and communications executives.”  Increasingly, companies restructure reporting relationships to facilitate between the marketing and communications functions, and this cooperation is often referred to as integrated marketing communications. 

 Of course it has always been important for organizations to integrate their messaging across channels and present a unified brand across departments, but the need for cooperation between corporate communications functions in order to achieve these goals has never been more critical than in today’s networked world. 

 Take today’s press release, for example.  This is evolving more and more into a device that combines a multitude of information sources and provides links to relevant content delivered via different channels.  It’s no longer intended primarily for the media, but for a variety of audiences including customers, prospects and investors.  The content of the various components of the release have ideally been optimized for the search engine spiders in order to maximize exposure and generate inbound links.  All in all, it represents expertise which historically belonged to either the PR or marketing department, but in order to achieve results of this nature, it’s essential they closely cooperate.

 This cooperation is also clearly required in a networked, conversation-oriented world, where dialogue is no longer limited to interviews with the media or the investment community, but where it takes place continuously, via a variety of channels, with all types of stakeholders, including clients and prospects.  Brand perceptions, opinions about products and purchasing decisions are shared with others instantly and continuously.  While this creates the potential for crises to flare up within hours, it also provides phenomenal opportunities to the savvy marketing/PR professional, one who is able to listen to the conversation, adapt messaging strategy, and insert herself into the conversation intelligently.

 It is certainly also possible to bring advertising into this convergence mix.  The traditional advertising models are in retreat, increasingly replaced by the delivery of relevant and ideally engaging content via online video or in the form of white papers or ebooks.  This is another area of opportunity for the PR professional to work together closely with marketing in devising message strategy and delivery.

 Surely no corporate department is untouched by the evolving networked world, where two-way communication is continuous.   Customer services and product development are two arenas which have just begun to tap the enormous potential inherent in ongoing communication between an organization and all its stakeholders.  There is an evolution towards a corporate environment where ALL employees routinely communicate externally with clients, prospects and other stakeholders, a world in which corporate communication is no longer the exclusive territory of the PR or marketing departments. 

 A number of large organizations have recognized this convergence of the corporate communications functions, and are acting accordingly.  IBM, for instance, decided last year to merge its marketing, public relations, and corporate responsibility functions.  In a fascinating address to the Institute of Public Relations at New York’s Yale Club in November 2009, Jon Iwata, Senior VP of Marketing and Communications at IBM, reflected on IBM’s perspectives on the changes we see around us.  According to Iwata, IBM initiated this integration not because of the need to speak with one voice – even though of course important, in his view it is not necessary to structurally integrate to achieve that – but because the company saw as critical the need to combine its culture with its brand, and having its values as the foundation of both.  In a world where people increasingly care about what companies stand for, and where employees can freely exchange opinions and perspectives with customers, partners, investors and every other audience imaginable, IBM saw it as increasingly essential to redefine its corporate brand and value system and to make sure that every employee is grounded in the values of what the company stands for, and knows what it means to think, perform and be like IBM.  At the core of this stands a central idea, which defines the company’s brand.  And truly great companies attract audiences, constituencies, to this central idea – in IBM’s case, according to Iwata, the core idea of transformation which appeals to the forward-thinker in everyone. 

 In this address, Iwata comes in my view closest to a definition of a concept that is heard only too often lately, but rarely means much: authenticity.   In the end, the discovery and definition of an organization’s true values might be the greatest challenge for today’s integrated communications professional…

Comments

[Armil]

I've gotta agree with your idea. It's somehow true on whichever angle you'll see.

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