Exploring the Relationship Between Public Relations and Marketing and their Roles in Organizations

Abstract

Public relations is used for establishing and maintaining relationships between an organization and its public. Marketing uses various means to communicate and sell an organization’s products and services to its public. The role of public relations in management and its value to an organization has been debated for a long time by scholars. The debate has centered on the question of whether the role of public relations is to support marketing or whether it serves a broader social and political function. The debate has continued, however, and has become intense in recent years as both scholars and practitioners have debated the relationship of public relations to the concepts of marketing communication and integrated communication. The paper explored the relationship between public relations and marketing as there have been several arguments on how one is more important in organizational operations that the other by using empirical research literature. This paper argues that organizations are best served by the inherent diversity of perspectives provided by the separate functions of public relations and marketing functions. This study concludes that public relations and marketing are two distinct disciplines and neither of the two is a subset of the other, but that notwithstanding, they use similar communication tools in the execution of their functions and depend on each other most often to achieve the best results so there is the need for the two disciplines to should work together to ensure the effectiveness of both areas.