نقش روابط بازار محور در روابط عمومی: دیدگاه های مختلف مدیران و پزشکان در ایالات متحده و تایوان

This study explored the role of market-oriented public relations. The study involved two surveys; one explored the perspectives of business managers and another of the perspectives of public relations practitioners, and compared their views concerning market-oriented and non-market-oriented relations. While business managers and public relations practitioners of non-market-oriented relations valued the contribution of market-oriented public relations to organizational effectiveness in terms of revenue generation and cost reduction, practitioners of market-oriented public relations ascribed their contribution to organizational effectiveness in terms of media publicity and exposure. This paper concludes with a discussion of practical applications and theoretical implications.

Public relations and marketing practitioners have generally underscored the premium placed on building successful relationships between organizations and their publics. In the field of marketing, relationship marketing developed into a leading theoretical and practical paradigm during the 1990s (e.g., Aijo, 1996). Empirical research in the field of public relations suggests that public relations increases organizational effectiveness by building stable, high-quality, long-term relationships with strategic constituencies (Bruning and Ledingham, 2000 and Huang, 2001b). Despite considerable research on how public relations and marketing contribute to strategic relationship management at the corporate level, there is little agreement on how public relations contributes to the critical stakeholder relationship (i.e., market-oriented relations). There are two main problems. The first one concerns the potential overlap between public relations and marketing. At one extreme, Harris (1998) identified public relations as a key element in integrated marketing communications and defined marketing public relations (MPR) from the perspective of brand management: “The purpose of MPR is to gain awareness, stimulate sales, facilitate communication, and build relationships between consumers and companies and brands. The principal functions of MPR are the communication of credible information, the sponsorship of relevant events, and the support of causes that benefit society” (p. 21). In a similar way, corporate marketer and academic Levens (2012) defined marketing public relations as seeking “to achieve specific marketing objectives by targeting consumers with product-focused messages” (p. 233). Levens (2012), however, contrasted marketing public relations to corporate public relations and acknowledged that public relations is two-way communication with stakeholders inside or outside the organization, but from the perspective that public relations is a marketing tool, whereby the marketer influences or is influenced in some way. On the other hand, and adopting the perspective of strategic constituency, which emphasizes that an organization is effective to the extent that it satisfies its stakeholders, Grunig and Hunt (1984) considered public relations to be an independent function in an organization, defining public relations as “management of communication between an organization and its publics” (p. 6). J.E. Grunig (1992) maintained that one of the main factors differentiating the function of public relations from that of marketing is that public relations is expected to fulfill the need for maintaining positive relationships with various stakeholders or strategic publics, rather than merely with consumers, customers or clients. The second area of debate concerns the inconclusive measures for assessing the performance or value of a particular function in an organization. In the discipline of marketing, measuring business performance is complex because of the multidimensional nature of organizational performance (Lenz, 1981). In the field of public relations, measuring public relations effectiveness has focused media publicity and coverage exposure (Bissland, 1990 and Lindenmann, 1993). Heath's (2001) theory used two paradigms to define the value of public relations to organizational effectiveness (i.e., revenue generation and cost reduction). Heath (2001) and Huang (in press) further argued that public relations practitioners are interested in a revenue-generating paradigm, whereas scholars are interested in a cost-reducing paradigm, so that the values which are often invisible would be accounted for. These abovementioned considerations suggest a number of interesting questions. From the view of business people and public relations practitioners, what is the value of public relations in general? How does public relations contribute to market-oriented relations in particular? More specifically, how is market-oriented relations associated with the value of public relations with regard to media publicity, revenue generation, and cost reduction? Finally, are there any perception gaps between the perspectives of public relations practitioners who focus on market-oriented relations and those who do not? Two surveys, which explored perspectives from both a business management and public relations view, were conducted as part of this study. The first sample included 143 respondents from an Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) program in Taiwan and the second utilized 225 public relations practitioners who are members of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). The Taiwanese executive MBA program, similar to executive business degree programs in the United States, requires students to have at least at least eight years of professional business work experience at the manager or above level when admitted to the program. The PRSA sample was divided further into two independent data sets in order to compare the views of public relations practitioners who focus on market-oriented relations and those who do not. The research design, depicting a holistic methodology, allowed simultaneous and multi-views tests to secure this study's theoretical advancement in four respects. First, the study takes the concept of public relations effectiveness to a higher conceptual and operational level by illustrating and theorizing the complex correlations between market-oriented relations and the value of public relations. Second, by investigating market-oriented relations, it extends the scope of previous studies which have focused on community relations (Hall, 2006), activist relations (Reber & Kim, 2006), employee relations (Stein, 2006), government relations (Liu and Horsley, 2006 and Wise, 2006), and media relations (Reber & Kim, 2006). Third, it extends the theory of marketing public relations (Harris, 1995), as well as enriches the theoretical knowledge of relationship marketing and relationship management. Finally, because it was designed to reflect the real-world perspectives (a) of managers and practitioners, and (b) those who work in market-oriented relations and those who do not, its findings provide practical and relevant guidelines for public relations practitioners.

Research question 1 investigated the extent to which public relations is valued by business managers and public relations practitioners who focus on market-oriented relations, and public relations practitioners who do not focus on market-oriented relations. The differences within and between groups are compared. Table 2 provides an overview of the means, standard deviation, and correlations of the measured constructs in three independent samples.The results revealed that, across the three samples, media publicity/exposure was always rated as the greatest value that public relations can contribute to an organization (EMBA: M = 3.39, SD = .57; market-oriented public relations: M = 3.70, SD = .39; non-market-oriented public relations: M = 3.73, SD = .42). Beyond media publicity, for the EMBA sample, cost reduction was rated second in respect to its public relations contribution (M = 2.93, SD = .59), followed by revenue generation (M = 2.62, SD = .61). In contrast, except for rating media publicity as the highest contribution, both market-oriented and non-market-oriented public relations practitioners all reported that public relations contributed more to revenue generation (market-oriented public relations: M = 3.35, SD = .62; non-market-oriented public relations: M = 3.30, SD = .61) than to cost reduction (market-oriented public relations: M = 3.08, SD = .68; non-market-oriented public relations: M = 3.04, SD = .70). Paired-sample t-tests also indicated that the mean differences for each pair of the three dimensions of public relations values within each sample were statistically different at the .05 level across the three independent groups of participants. In summary, the results revealed both congruent and divergent assessments of public relations values between management and public relations practitioners. Both business managers and public relations practitioners considered media publicity/exposure to be the major component of general public relations’ contribution to an organization, but business managers thought that public relations made a more valuable contribution to cost reduction than to revenue generation, while public relations practitioners reversed this ranking. Research questions 2-1 to 2-3 explored the extent to which public relations’ contribution to market-oriented relations is associated with three aspects of public relations value, viz. media publicity/exposure, revenue generation, and cost reduction. The results revealed discrepant perceptions among three independent samples. Business managers indicated that market-oriented relations correlated most strongly with revenue generation (r = .33, p < .001 and r = .32, p < .01, respectively), and then with cost reduction (r = .23, p = .05 and r = .23, p = .05, respectively), but not with media publicity/exposure (r = .04, p = .772 and r = .01, p = .92, respectively). Similarly, public relations practitioners involved in non-market-oriented relations tended to associate market-oriented relations with the contribution to organizations’ revenue generation (r = .23, p < .01), and then to cost reduction (r = .16, p = .05), but not with media publicity/exposure (r = .03, p = .716). The group of public relations practitioners who focused on market-oriented relations associated customer/consumer/client relations with media publicity/exposure (r = .299, p < .05), but not with revenue generation (r = .158, p = .279) or cost reduction (r = .218, p = .140). The convergent and divergent statistics revealed very interesting similarities and contrasts. Convergent results across EMBA and PRSA practitioners who focus on non-market-oriented relations indicated that the relations with customer/consumer/client stakeholders had the significantly strongest correlations with revenue generation, and then with cost reduction, but not with media exposure/publicity. By contrast, public relations practitioners who were primarily involved with market-oriented relations seemed to associate the contribution of customer/consumer/client relations merely with the value of media publicity and exposure.