Examining the “Publics” in Public Relations

1. Examining the “Publics” in Public Relations

2. Six Different Types of Publics • 1. Traditional and nontraditional • 2. Latent, aware, and active • 3. Intervening • 4. Primary and secondary • 5. Internal and external • 6. Domestic and international

3. 1. Traditional and Nontraditional • Traditional: Groups with which organizations have ongoing, long-term relationships. • Examples?

4. Traditional Publics • Examples include: • Employees • News media • Governments • Investors • Customers • Multicultural community groups • Constituents (voters)

5. Traditional and Nontraditional Publics • Nontraditional: Groups that usually are unfamiliar to an organization. • Can be a challenge because nontraditional publics are hard to study/research. • Example: Kablooie Microwave Popcorn Scenario

6. Nontraditional Publics • Other examples of specific groups of people that companies, in the past, have not marketed to?

7. 2. Latent, Aware and Active Publics • A. Latent Public: A group whose values have come into contact with the values of an organization, but whose members haven’t yet realized it; the members of the latent public are not yet aware of a relationship.

8. Latent, Aware and Active • B. Aware Public: a group whose members are aware of the intersection of their values with those of an organization but haven’t organized any kind of response to the relationship.

9. Latent, Aware and Active • C. Active Public: recognizes the relationship between itself and an organization and also works to manage that relationship on it’s own terms. • Opening scenario, the teenagers are the “active public.”

10. 3. Intervening Public • Def: Any public that helps you (the organization) to send a message to another public. • Examples:

11. 4. Primary and Secondary Publics • Primary: A public that can directly affect your organization’s pursuit of its values / goals – this type of public is of great importance (i.e. investors). • Secondary: A public whose ability to affect your organization’s pursuit of it’s goals is minimum – but you still want to have a good relationship with them (i.e. local stores that sell microwave ovens) • They are indirectly affected but you still need to “clean things up” with them.

12. 5. Internal and External Publics • All publics are either internal or external (either inside of our outside of your organization).

13. 6. Domestic and International Publics • Domestic: Publics within your own country. • International: Outside of the country. • Considerations with international publics?

14. International Considerations • Example: • You have a plant in the US but a branch in Mexico. • Does manager (or someone) speak English? • Do you (someone) speak Spanish? • Colander issues • Time zone changes • ??

15. Things We Need to Know about ALL the Publics • 1. How much can the pubic influence our organization’s ability to achieve our goals? • Is the public primary or secondary? • Key to successful business is to focus efforts on those who have the most impact (don’t have time, money, resources to focus on all publics).

16. Things we need to know.. • 2. What is the public’s stake in its relationship with our organization? • A relationship begins when an organization and a public share the same values and goals. • We need to identify what specific goals this public has that has brought them into contact with our organization (what attracted them).

17. Things we need to know.. • 3. Who are the opinion leaders/decision makers for the public? • Once we (our organization) identifies who these people are, we as public relations practitioners must focus our efforts on them.

18. Things ….. • 4. What is the demographic profile of a public? • Demographic profile: • Who is the public? • How many members does the public have? • Age, gender, income, education level, and number of children per family within the public?

19. Things… • 5. What is the psychographic profile of the public? • Psychographic information tells us what members of a public think, believe, and feel. • Are they liberal? Moderate? Conservative? • Are they religious? Atheist? • Do they like technology? Avoid it?

20. Things… • 6. What is the public’s opinion of our organization? • The opinion the public holds of the organization is crucial. • Finding out what their opinion is tells us how to approach them (as friends, foes, etc?)

21. Things… • 7. What is the public’s opinion of the issue in question?

22. Co orientation • Def: The research process that public relations practitioners use to discover where our organization agrees and disagrees with important publics on a particular issue. • Can eliminate damaging misperceptions about what each side believes.

23. Co-orientation • Done by asking and finding the answers to four questions. • 1. What is our organization’s view of this issue? • 2. What is the particular public’s view of this issue? • 3. What does our organization “think” the public’s view is? (is it accurate?) • 4. What does the particular public “think” our organization’s view is? (is it accurate?)