American Public University
Public relation is a service for creating a communication between an organization and its clients and manages it. For an efficient public relation service, responsible public relation team needs to understand their clients and the changing conditions in their environment. Economic conditions are important for clients. Economic conditions influence clients’ social behaviors, economic behaviors, and psychology. While forming a proper communication with clients, public relation professionals should consider how their clients’ social, economic and psychological state is determined. Economic conditions have a priority among other factors influencing individuals’ lives.
For developing a relatively better understanding of how economic conditions affect our lives, we need to understand the term of economic conditions. Income, prices, quality of products, production volume, increasing world population, extended highly populated cities, increasing demand, and limited resources are included in the term of economic conditions. People work and expect to receive an income to survive and satisfy their needs. Increasing population and migration to the large cities have transformed our lives into a new form of living. Most of the world population lives in large cities. These factors increase the economic and social pressure on individuals. The increasing world population enhances the demand for all kind of services and products. Considering that the production capacity is limited under the given technological conditions and with the available natural resources, satisfying everybody’s need is a big challenge for the humankind. Subsequently, this system produces higher prices and inflation, and stress on people. They face relatively more complex problems in their lives over time.
Public relation service aims at understanding clients and develops satisfactory responses to convince them. Public relation also gathers information from clients and reports them to the relevant departments for improving the services and products provided to the market. Public relation management should monitor the changes in economic conditions because people might carry some problems to the public relation departments stemming from the economic challenges they face in their lives. If a public relation department tries to analyze the feedbacks from clients in a way by ignoring changes in economic conditions might cause many misunderstandings. A public relation professional has to know some economic information of clients including their income level, their consumption preferences, their tastes, changes in macroeconomic variables, industry-specific changes influencing clients’ lives and preferences. Having this information makes feedbacks meaningful for public relation professionals and organizations. Considering that organizations including businesses aim at reaching some goals relevant to people in general, they need to produce information about consumption, needs of clients, and products and services to monitor the processes in the organization and the production and prepare plans to improve them. Economic information is an important input for producing this information.
Understanding economic behaviors of people and being able to use some economic analysis tools to produce information for improving public relation service, products and services, and organizational structure are necessary for organizations. For instance, organic products have developed a new challenge for food producing companies. The organic food producing companies claim that the other food producer uses some health-harming ingredients in their food. The conventional food producing companies receive different critiques from individuals from different income groups. The public relation department professionals in the conventional food producing companies should see the differences between the feedbacks from customers regarding their income level. For instance, people with low-income are relatively less sensitive to this issue while individuals with high-income are relatively more sensitive. It is possible to give various examples of why economic literacy is important for public relation professionals. Developing public relations without considering the changes in the economic conditions at the local and the global levels would be vague.
