EACH group of stakeholders has an image of your organisation; and such an image can be negative or positive.
Therefore, strategic Public Relations (PR) management should aim at ensuring that most, if not all, stakeholders have a favourable image about your organisation.
Do all stakeholders have a positive image for your organisation?
At the beginning of each year every organisation with a purpose for existence makes resolutions. With a fashion of strategic plans, such resolutions are supposed to be in line with an organisation’s current strategic plan and objectives. Therefore, such resolutions serve as objectives in that year.
And from PR point of view, such objectives should be from reflecting on how an organisation performed in the previous one or so years. Such a reflection helps an organisation to assess whether it is improving on its image in the eyes of the stakeholders or not.
To conduct such an assessment and reflections effectively, a renowned PR author, Frank Jefkins (1998) states that a normal organisation has at least eight (8) PR publics. PR publics are an organisation’s stakeholders. Employees, customers, suppliers, local community, investors, government, legislators, etc are among an organisation’s stakeholders.
For an organisation to improve on its image in the eyes of such stakeholders, a respective organisation should know the needs, interests and expectations of each group of such stakeholders. Such a point emphasizes the need for and importance of regular PR research in each organisation. Do you conduct regular PR research in your organisation to know the needs of your stakeholders?
An organisation should tirelessly monitor the perception and moods of each of such stakeholders in relations to their respective needs, interests and expectations.
What are needs and interests of workers? Have you critically addressed customers’ main concerns? What do investors need? How do you relate with legislators? Do legislators support you in advocating for specific laws; and lobbying government and other stakeholders to support your operations? Which group of stakeholders is working against your objectives?
How many of these are satisfied and happy with policies, procedures, systems and operations of your organisation; and therefore support your organisation?
Out of, say, 10 stakeholders, how many are satisfied with your goods and services; and therefore support your organisation? Why do some stakeholders not support your organisation? How can you ensure that majority PR publics support your organisation?
To ensure that majority stakeholders support your organisation, identifying the needs and expectations of every stakeholder; and addressing them accordingly is critical in effective PR management. Achieving such effective PR management approach demands strategic PR practice.
Noonan Russo Communications chief executive officer, Anthony J Russo, ‘The Art and Science of Public Relations’ in The Art of Public Relations (2001) states that the golden rule of PR is ‘Think strategically; and not tactically’. Dr Russo argues that all the movement in the evolution of PR has been centred on this principle.
From Dr Russo point of view, one realizes that strategic PR revolves around and involves all the commonly known seven Ps in marketing (product, price, place, promotion, people, process and physical evidence). This further implies that just high publicity for an organisation is not strategic PR; but tactical PR.
With such an explanation, one might wonder whether tactics have any room in effective PR practice. When an organisation starts with strategic PR, it is easy for PR tactics to fall in place effectively whenever need arises. But one cannot base an organisation’s operations on tactical PR alone as is common in most organisations in our country.
It is difficult to suddenly bring in strategic PR when an organisation operates only on tactical PR. In fact, when an organisation uses only tactical PR, it is actually in fire-fighting gear. Fire-fighting is not PR. PR is pro-active. And it is only strategic PR which is pro-active; not tactical PR.
Therefore, to win the support of many different stakeholders, an organisation must be strategic in its thinking, planning and timely implementation of such plans. To achieve this, an organisation should spread all its operational tentacles into the needs, tastes and feelings of each group of stakeholders before, during and after each strategic operations which aim at addressing stakeholders’ needs, interests and expectations at all times.
This is the only way an organisation can move with most, if not all the stakeholders at all times.
From such a background, conducting a PR research gives an organisation’s top management a clear picture of which stakeholders are happy with an organisation; and which ones are not. Reasons for being happy and or for being sad can also be known from such a PR research.
From such a PR research, each positive or negative situation affecting an organisation should be tallied with a respective group of stakeholders. Creating a table of issue, stakeholders and factors causing such an issue can be helpful in analyzing and addressing such issues.
According to Jefkins (1998), the common negative perceptions an organisation might have from its stakeholders are categorized as hostility, prejudice, apathy and ignorance . With such perceptions in mind, which PR publics do you think are hostile to your organisation? Which ones have prejudice against you? Why? Which stakeholders have apathy against your organisation’s operations? Why? And which ones are ignorant about your policies, rules, regulations, vision, values, goal and objectives? How does such ignorance affect your organisation?
And when a respective organisation discovers such negative situations with specific PR public, it is supposed to transform such negative situations into positive ones. And the negative situations such as hostility, prejudice, apathy and ignorance with respective PR publics should be transformed into sympathy, acceptance, interest and knowledge in that order. This is what Jefkins calls ‘The PR transfer process’.
It is from such issues that an organisation is supposed to plan strategically to address each group of stakeholders’ concerns; and transform each negative PR perceptions into positive one for most, if not all stakeholders to have sympathy, to accept, be interested in and develop enough knowledge about organisation’s rules, procedures, policies, goal, objectives and its operations.
Achieving such sympathy, acceptance, interest and knowledge from most, if not all different stakeholders culminates into favourable image for an organisation. If such a positive image is sustained, it ignites support and eventually generates goodwill for an organisation because there is mutual understanding and mutual benefit between an organisation and each group of its stakeholders.
Therefore, the more an organisation transforms the negative situations with respective stakeholders into positive situations; the more an organisation improves on its image.
As it has already been alluded to, considering that an organisation has many different stakeholders from different backgrounds; and with dynamic needs, interests and expectations, an organisation needs to consider not just sending persuasive messages to different audiences; but should also improve on its branding. And effective branding includes attitudes of workers, quality; and therefore performance of products to customers’ expectations, reliability on stocks, delivery dates and promises; and many other factors that affects the image of an organisation in the eyes and minds of the stakeholders.
Therefore, before an organisation implements its annual plans, it should conduct sound PR research to have a clear picture of the needs and moods of each group of stakeholders. Assuming that you conduct such PR research every year, assess which perceptions are common annually; and with which stakeholders. Ask yourself why such negative situations are prevalent every year with some or most stakeholders.
Then, plan your PR programmes to strategically address those issues in that year and beyond for the benefit of both the stakeholders and your organisation.
The author is a Media and PR Trainer and Consultant.
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