Leslie Budd on... the public image

Watch

Listen

Read

At the end of the 20th and the start of the 21st Century the rise in prominence of public relations appears to be a revenge on the author Douglas Adams, who in his famous book, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, despatched all the public relations executives and advertising executives, management consultants and estate agents onto a spaceship to a far away planet on the pretext that the Earth was about to explode.

Is public relations the organisational equivalent of reality television? Should the PR industry and its exponents be banished to a restaurant at the end of the universe and be forced to sup with the devil wearing cheap high street fashion?

It seems to me that this is another example of blaming the messenger, or shooting the messenger, because you don't like the message. Let’s go beyond the caricature.

Public relations provides a useful front of house service to businesses and organisations, undertaking functions like managing reputation, combating falsely misleading information and influencing the business and regularity environment.

For example Toyota is currently suffering problems to its reputation because its public relations failed to reassure its customers and the car market as a whole, in response to the recall of a number of models because of faulty parts.

Indeed, public and charitable organisations rely on public relations and it's crucial to getting their social message across to a wider world and a range of stakeholders.

Many people object to political lobbying by PR companies. But in a system dominated by interest group politics this objection is a bit like blaming religion because it hasn’t eradicated sin.

Public relations can act as a useful check and balance to the actions of the state in the sense that some of the unintended consequences and possible perverse outcomes of this kind of activity can actually generate benefits to the public at large.

For example, if you lobby on behalf of, say, the nuclear industry this may create a greater state commitment to alternative forms of energy, but the idea that public relations decides elections is somewhat overdone in my view.

The late cultural theorist, Marshall McLuhan, stated that the medium is the message, in that any message is embedded in the media which produces it. In the case of PR messages it is the public relations itself as a medium which is crucial.

But it seems to me that the bottom-line is that if you rely on public relations and popular media to create and disseminate information it leads us to fail to understand society and its businesses and change them for the better.

That's my view. You can join the debate with the Open University.