Increasingly, scholars and practitioners are defining public relations as the management of relationships between organizations and publics. Because relationships can be difficult to measure, public relations practitioners often have struggled to demonstrate the influence that public relations activities have on consumer perceptions, evaluations, and behaviors. The current investigation sought to examine key public members’ perceptions of the personal, professional, and community relationships they have with a bank and to relate those perceptions to evaluations of satisfaction. The results show that key public members’ perceptions of their personal and professional relationships significantly influence evaluations of overall satisfaction with the organization, accounting for 75% of satisfaction variation. A discussion of the implications these findings hold for the study and practice of public relations are provided, a management framework, SMART Public Relations, is suggested, and areas of examination for future research are presented.
Dr. Bruning is an associate professor and Dr. Ledingham is a professor of communication at Capital University, Columbus, Ohio.
Cutlip, Center, and Broom defined public relations as the management of the relationship between an organization and key publics.1 Historically, many public relations scholars and practitioners have assumed that using effective press relations to manage issues enhanced organizational image and created a sense of goodwill among key publics.2 Moreover, many practitioners and managers believed that effective press relations, and the purported goodwill that resulted, positively influenced key public members to be favorably predisposed toward the organization, inferring that enhanced organizational image is linked to key public members’ behavior.3 As a result of its journalistic heritage, public relations has generally been practiced using a mass communication perspective in which message creation, dissemination, and measurement was the primary focus of public relations research.
Although the focus on press relations has been practiced widely in the field, Grunig argued that practitioners must be concerned not only with symbolic relationships between organizations and key publics (often managed through the use of press relations), but more important, with the behavioral relationships that result.4 More recently, Gronstedt argued that most public relations programs do not evaluate the influence that programmatic initiatives have on key public members’ behavior, but rather tend to focus on clip counting and broadcast placements.5 Moreover, Gronstedt stated that
In today’s world, people are actively seeking information they believe to be relevant. They are active, interactive, and equal participants of an ongoing communication process, rather than passive sponges. The role of the communicator is increasingly to make information available to stakeholders in a user-friendly way, rather than shoving it down their throats, and to support an ongoing relationship rather than transferring information.6
Recently, public relations scholars have argued that the relationship management approach may be more appropriate for studying and managing organization-public relationships.7 Recent research has shown that organizations and key public members have at least three types of relationships: personal, professional, and community.8 The following section provides an overview of public relations research that has been conducted by examining the influence of organization-public relationships on key public members’ perceptions and behavior.
The research question examined the influence that professional, personal, and community relationships have on key public members’ satisfaction. Scale reliability for the professional relationship dimension was 0.85, the personal relationship dimension was 0.84, the community relationship dimension was 0.88, and the overall organization-public relationship scale was 0.91. Scale reliability for the six-item satisfaction scale created for this investigation was 0.92. A least squares multiple regression analysis was computed to determine whether evaluations of satisfaction were related to respondents’ perceptions of professional, personal, and community organization-public relationships and to determine the relative degree of contribution of each relationship variable to the respondents’ satisfaction scores. The respondents’ perception of the professional, personal, and community relationship variables served as the independent variables, and respondents’ satisfaction with the organization served as the dependent variable. The results show respondents’ perceptions of the professional, personal, and community relationships combine to influence key public member evaluations of satisfaction with the bank, with respondents’ perceptions of the personal and professional relationships significantly influencing satisfaction evaluations. Moreover, the three types of relationship indicators helped to explain 75% of the satisfaction variation. Table 1 reports the least squares regression, adjusted R2, β, and analysis of variance results.
