What is PR?
Having just moved into student housing, where everyone is getting to know each other – their backgrounds, their interests and their tastes. We also want to know what each other’s courses are and the question I get asked the most is “what is PR?”
PR or Public Relations is still growing in the UK educational system. It’s not taught before university level, and on its own is only offered at 8 universities across the UK. There are, however, 195 courses that offer minors in PR with major subjects including journalism, international relations and politics.
However the public relations industry is massive and is still growing – and growing very rapidly. For its not just graduates from public relations courses that are entering the very lucrative graduate market, but its students from all courses and all across the UK too.
Considering this, I find it almost baffling that when telling people I’m studying public relations, they look at me with a blank expression and utter the words “what’s that?”. Most people seem to think its marketing or advertising and ashamedly I don’t how to respond in a way that they’ll understand.
So, what is PR?
So I wonder, how do I explain what PR truly is? My course leader describes it as “ideas management”. Another lecturer describes it as “reputation protection” but that makes it sound more like a branch of the police or a team you’d see in a bad movie. Mark Borrowski said that “successful PR is about making other people do your work, but making sure the credit is yours”.
Having only been studying the subject for a month, to me, PR is fantastic. Without PR we may not have seen the likes of Tom Cruise or Angelina Jolie. Their careers are largely down to good PR – talent, yes, but there are plenty of talented actors or actresses that won’t ever get a break.Without public relations, would we have the politicians, the singers or the producers we have today? Or is it all simply good PR? Would brands we know and love be as popular or as successful if they hadn’t used PR to get ahead?
It seems public relations is permanently confused with the likes of advertising, marketing and journalism, where actually it’s a cross of all three, and maybe taking the best parts of each along with it.
In my mind, public relations is definitely not advertising or marketing. Advertising sells products. Public Relations sells brands. It really is that simple, and yet explaining this to people seems so complicated.
I can’t wait for the day when I don’t have to explain to people what course I’m studying at university.
