How Public Relations Differs from Marketing?

As a new learner in Public Relations, at the beginning, I was confused by the differences between Public relations and marketing. Now I found a good answer in a book called Public Relations: Strategies and Tactics, which is edited by Dennis l. Wilcox and Glen T. Cameron.

According to the author, the boundaries of public relations and marketing often overlap, for both of them use similar communication tools to help one organization reach the public and achieve its objectives. But there are still some points make them differ from each other.

James E. Grunig pointed out in Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management, a fundamental difference between marketing and public relations in terms of how the public is described. In marketing, professionals tend to speak of “Target markets”, “consumers,” and “customers”. However, in Public relations, practitioners tend to talk of “publics”, “audiences” and “stakeholders”. My understanding about this point is that the area of “publics” in Public relations is much boarder than in Marketing. PR has the responsibility to help organization to improve the relationship with all publics, including the relationship with government, media, suppliers and so on. But marketing focuses the relationship with the organization’s customers; this relationship is only a small part in the publics of public relations.

And, PR has different goal and responsibility with marketing. The goal of PR is to help organization establish and maintain a positive long-term relationship with publics and be responsible for building a hospitable environment for an organization. Marketing is the management process whose goal is to attract and satisfy customers (or clients), it is responsible for the organization’s economic objectives.

Last but not least, the measurement way of PR is also different from the marketing’s. In PR, whether the PR campaigns are successful or not, it depends whether they have fulfilled the objectives which influence the public’s attitude, awareness and behaviour. Regarding how to measure the marketing campaigns, sales data must be involved to judge whether the campaign has put a positive influence on organization’s economic benefits.

In conclusion, Public relations has remit for establishing and protecting the organizational reputation, marketing has responsibility for increasing the sales.