The Persistent Question: What is PR?
Public relations is a broad discipline that is often misunderstood. This post answers the question “what is PR?” and how is PR different from marketing or advertising.
Explaining what you do for a living is a lot easier for a dentist, police officer or bartender. When I tell people I’m in public relations, the result is often an awkward pause followed by, “So what is PR exactly?”
A LinkedIn poll many years ago found that PR Manager was among the top 10 most misunderstood positions in the workforce. (The poll asked parents to explain what their son or daughter did for a living, and 42 percent of respondents couldn’t accurately describe the PR profession. I’m never sure my parents understand what I do, either.)
Yet public relations has its own arena and should not be lumped together with other professions.
To answer the question, “What is PR?,” PRSSA developed this crowdsourced definition:
“Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.”
Today, a more nuanced and up-to-date definition for PR today is:
“Public relations is the practice of earning trust and informed awareness through clear, accurate and consistent communications targeting important audiences like customers, policymakers, investors, the media and even AI models.”
What is the Difference between PR and Marketing?
Similar to a marketing professional, a PR professional wants to improve a client’s image and, often, move customers and other groups through a marketing funnel from awareness to purchase, but PR is relational while marketing is often more transactional. When PR does its job well, marketing’s job is much easier.
PR invests time in relationships that make a difference and use them to best help brands, institutions and nonprofits, among others. When we earn media coverage, for instance, we create awareness. The key messages we develop earn interest from potential customers, donors, investors and others because they’re research-backed and relevant to those groups and their beliefs and motivations. And when those messages consistently show up in a brand’s behaviors and policies as well as other communications, they drive consideration which leads to action such as a purchase, a donation, enrollment or support. Over time, when a brand’s relationship with its customers, donors, investors and others stays aligned with its values and the audience’s expectations, the brand earns the trust of the people it serves.
What’s the Difference between PR and Advertising?
Sometimes our goals are the same as an advertising campaign’s, but rather than paying to put our clients’ messages out, we earn people’s attention by being exciting, fresh, unique or relevant to their interests. Put another way, an advertising campaign pushes a message out to audiences while a PR campaign pulls audiences in to a message. An advertising message assumes repetition and frequency are required before it will sink in to the target’s mind, whereas audiences consume media coverage in a more mindful manner often internalizing a news story’s content or a media reviewer’s recommendation.
Sometimes PR’s goals are the opposite of an ad campaign and we’re helping our clients manage unwanted attention. That’s often the role of crisis communications. When things go wrong, contrary to popular belief and pulp fiction, public relations professionals don’t cover things up but instead attempt to explain the issue in a timely, transparent and ethical way. In crisis communications, it’s essential for a company to stick to its values and communicate with its impacted audiences in a consistent, accurate fashion that helps them manage their expectations and demonstrates that the company’s leaders are aware of the issue, taking steps to address it and proactively keeping people informed as they learn more about the situation and their next steps.
Today, the public relations team at (W)right On Communications is not just earning attention and managing reputations through media exposure and special events, but through clever and strategic social media, content creation programs and AI PR strategies that treat artificial intelligence platforms as an audience much like the media in order to earn citations.
Although PR is a very misunderstood profession, it’s an essential part of business today for brands to survive and thrive.
Julie Wright is President + Founder at (W)right On Communications and 2025’s San Diego Press Club Andy Mace Award recipient for her outstanding contribution in public relations. Looking for authentic storytelling that builds relationships and trust? Let’s talk: (858) 886-7900 or info@wrightoncomm.com.
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