Putting Profit into Public Relations

Public relations should contribute to profits and society via the relationships between an organization and its stakeholders.

Public relations, while valuable at a campaign, functional, and organizational level, can also arise to having value on a societal level. That is because communicators can bridge an organization to collective influence through conscientious actions. Therefore, the new bottom line includes more than money; it’s environmental sustainability, ethical correctness, and corporate citizenship too.

Two suppositions of IABC’s landmark Excellence study are (1) morality and profits are not inherently incompatible and (2) companies are part of the society in which they operate.

Relationships before Profits
Besides profits, there are valuable and positive outcomes produced by strategic communications management, such as:
     o Building Awareness and Education for Product or Service
     o Bolstering Employee and Member Morale
     o Spearheading Community Conscientiousness
     o Forging New Alliances
     o Contributing to Public Policy Process
     o Achieving Business Goals

Public Relations’ Paradigms
Conceptually, public relations strategy is a balance between deliberate and emergent.


Deliberate strategy - a linear approach, being a pattern of decisions that uses communications as a strategic opportunity to achieve business’ goals.
Emergent strategy - an interactive approach, that uses communications to solve problems.

According to Steyn, “deliberate and emergent strategy (…) produce a profile that can be used to determine which stakeholders or issues should receive more or less emphasis (within PR’s strategy’s (…) focus of people and planet rather than profit).