Public Relations or Advertising – what you need and when!

Public Relations and Advertising are so similar. Public Relations and advertising are so different. Seems contradictory? You, bet! Yet both are true and both are needed.  Sometimes, together, right? So how does a product or brand know which of the two it requires and when?

There are no easy answers but there may be some good indicators. Here goes:

It’s about the money – If money is not a thing for you (which as we all know, is seldom true) you can explore more vividly with advertising. On the other hand, if you are on a budget, and you still want the whole wide world to know about your product or brand or both, then reach out to your friendly neighbourhood PR guy. She/he may get your brand the much needed media coverage or even your interview elaborating the merits of your product in helping reduce global warming! Mind you, this, at a fraction of the cost for a quarter page black and white ad in a respectable newspaper.

It’s about the credibility – all products ads are necessarily trying to sell you something. All brand ads are trying to tell you something, to sell you something. However, all P.R or Corporate Communication may not be directly trying to sell something. All they may be trying at that moment is to build a relationship with the consumer or to enable the consumer to trust your offering a bit more. As a result, the average consumer trusts a media coverage or an awareness campaign more than an in-your face plea to buy in the form of an advertisement.

That is not to say that everywhere it is P.R which will have an edge over Advertising. The experience of a product in its myriad dimensions is sometimes much more evocative in a TVC or even a print ad. However, if something is glossy and larger than life, you may immensely like it but not necessarily it may have an equivalent recall value. Sometimes an advertisement can be just another short piece of entertainment without engaging you with the product in a way that is the purpose of the advertisement.

By and large people like to be wary of advertisements. While an ad screams at the top of its voice, the consumer tends to think she/he knows better. There are no dearth of hugely expensive ad campaigns that have bitten the dust simply because someone had not taken the trouble to create a built-up for a product or brand or a buzz about its relevance in some way or the other. That is what a P.R guy would do from the word go!

Compared to Advertising, public relations tilts more towards strategy, in the sense that it tries to figure out if there are any gaps in the perception of the brand, its connect with its target audience and how to fix those issues.

Of course, advertising has its own set of strategies and insights about consumer behavior to cajole the consumer to buy but P.R would usually take a more subtle, systematic and usually one issue at a time approach. In advertising, your focus is on the purse of the consumer whereas in P.R it is on their mind space and to influence them in terms of their opinion and behavior.

Often PR brings the kind of credibility that is required, awareness about the product or brand so that the groundwork for an advertising to work at a later stage is in place.

In essence, PR is not so designed that it would show its direct impact on top line or the bottom line. However, a communication specialist cannot ignore the fact that the role of public relations & Media relations is next to none in building a brand, especially a national one through strategic editorial coverage and carefully targeted influencers for the ubiquitous and hydra headed social media.

Another major area of difference is the control over the media and the message. While in advertising you are paying for every inch of the costly ad space and hence you call the shots in terms of the media, the size of the ad, its location. In short, everything about it.

In the methodology of public relations, you essentially provide your story pitch to the media, who are the final decision makers on how and when to publish your matter and more importantly in what form. That is if they choose to publish it in the first place.

No wonder, PR professionals the world over, keep their fingers crossed, once they have shared their organic Press release or Story pitch to the targeted media. Compared to that in an ad you are sure that your material would be out there. However, this very uncertainty adds to the charm of PR and it gives an indirect validation to the consumer that what has been published has an inherent news of informative value, which make them take it that much more seriously.

The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.

Raja Ghoshal

Raja Ghoshal is a Business Journalist turned Senior Corporate Communication professional who is presently looking after corporate communications at the diversified Apeejay Stya & Svran Group. He was earlier working as a Deputy Director (Corporate communications) with industry chamber CII. An MBA in Marketing, Raja’s hobbies include creative writing, public speaking and writing poetry.