Noah Hansen Creative Solutions

A month ago, my definition of public relations was the communication between an organization and the people who have a relationship with the organization. PR is a tool to keep people in the know about a given business, company, or entity. PR also acts as a filter to clarify positions, opinions, and facts regarding the organization. After learning more about the immense influence PR has on not only a business and consumer level but on a societal level from Public Relations (Kheller, 2020) and Public Relations Campaigns (Luttrell & Capizzo, 2021), I now understand that PR is much more than just simply communicating to a specific audience with a specific relationship. Public relations encompasses all relationships associated with an establishment, even those relationships that are not direct or immediately seen. PR is the necessary glue that binds together the faceless operation and the people involved.

There is certainly an element of public relations that is uniquely personal in the sense that it creates an official bond between the establishment and the many publics that interact with the establishment. Accurate information and honesty is what consumers and clientele value, and the challenge comes in presenting accurate and honest information in a way that resonates deeper than just “official” words on a screen. Strong relationships result in strong trust, which results in strong participation. Without PR, there would be no way to successfully implement business strategies into a highly-social and digitally-integrated world. Companies must have the ability to effectively communicate their ideas to a variety of audiences, each with different values, wants and needs, and styles of communication. Public relations professionals provide the voice that an establishment needs.

The role of a PR professional is to effectively communicate with and build the trust of the stakeholders that dictate the direction the organization should go. To effectively communicate, PR professionals must be able to convey messages in relatable and digestible ways that can be understood by many different audiences and demographics. Storytelling is at the heart of public relations, and PR strategies often involve crafting applicable narratives that resonate with audiences and deliver a clear message about the organization. Whether communicating from business to consumer, business to business, business to media, and so on, there are different kinds of relationships to be tended to, and different ways to tell the same story. Depending on the circumstances, a PR professional needs to consider the various methods and mediums that could be used to present the narrative in an appropriate and effective manner.

Public Relations acts as the bridge between the strictly-business corporate world, and the fluid, ever-changing “real” world. Without PR, there would be no sense of direction, and no way for people to effectively navigate the often confusing, information-riddled consumer landscape. Relationships between businesses and other operations rely heavily on the effective communications of PR professionals, and results are often based upon how the information is presented. PR provides the proper insight and conversation that allows all parties to make better-informed decisions, and taps businesses into the potential that their consumers provide via mutually-beneficial communications.