Global Impact of Public Relations
Many corporations in the world, today, recognize the importance of public relations as a tool that influences positively the buying behavior of the customer (Giannini, 2010). Public relations has widely been used as a strategic marketing tool by many multinational corporations around the globe. The paper will cover the impacts of public relations with reference to the U.S based Coca-Cola company that has grown to cover a large market in the world.
Public relations whether used as part of an integrated marketing campaign or used alone can cause an increase in sales in many ways as explained below. As used by the Coca-Cola Company, it has influenced the behavior of the customers of beverages at every stage of purchasing process.
The company has used public relations to increase the awareness or familiarity of their services and products. Awareness has caused many customers to have the knowledge of their products, hence the customer simply needs to quote the famous name of the company to insinuate the products that are needed. PR has also been widely used by the company to influence the perception of the key benefits that makes their brands different from the other products of their competitors.
PR has also enabled the company to build an ongoing preference for their services and beverage products. The ongoing preference has made the corporation penetrate and get hold of the many market niches across the world. The achievements of the corporation can, therefore, be attributed solely to the use of positive PR to influence the behavior of the customers while purchasing the products.
Business, Sports, Tourism, and Entertainment
PR professionals encounter challenges when educating the media on the professionalism in their industry (Deirdre, 2005). Though, there are several challenges that have been encountered in this field, there is a need to intensify the education campaign so as to save the victims of blackmail from the unethical news contents that are derived from the media houses. The following is an evaluation of how a U.S based corporation, Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), seeks to regulate and provide guidance to their members in the media on ethical news broadcast.
The association has commenced campaigns that mainly target the social media. The social media offer a promising channel through which they can reach the public. Various technologies such as web 2.0 technologies have been put into active use to enable the generation of ethical news contents by the internet users and the media houses as well.
The main users of social media have also been targeted by the initiatives made by the professional educators in public relations. The graduates have been found to contribute to the release of unhealthy news content through the social media. Therefore, the association in collaboration with the educators have taken up the role of producing graduates who are professionally sound as opposed to the type of graduated who are vocally competent. The approach of targeting graduated who are major users of social media has some prospects of success. When the users of the media is rightfully trained on how to deliver news content, there will be no chance for creating a poor public picture of the corporations that are in the society.
The association has initiated a campaign to shape the way in which the stakeholders in the media and the graduates are introduced to the media. They have conducted thorough training that have enhanced the users to give keen considerations of the impacts of the news that they release to the public and how it can affect the image of the corporations involved.
The inclusion of social media in PR curriculum, in the learning institutions will serve to enlighten the graduates on the importance of developing professionalism when it comes to usage of the social media in passing information to the public.
References
Deirdre, Q. (2005). Public relations, education, and social media: issues for professionalism in the digital age. Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal, 11(3), 20-36.
Giannini, G. T. (2010). Marketing public relations: a marketer's approach to public relations and social media. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
