Public Relations vs. Communications--Are We Still Debating Terms?

There are still many people who expend greats amount of enegy to attempting to argue why the term public relations should be used instead of communications. I have heard people claim that public relations is a higher-order than communications, i.e, communications is a sub-set of PR. I completely disagree.

Humans communicate, they do not public relate. The higher term is communications, that subsumes all activities such as PR, advertising, etc. It is a term that should replace promotion. Promotion, which in marketing is one of 4Ps, is a terrible term. It suggests an inside-out or push-type activity that does not have much utility in today's world. We communicate with one another.

Public relations is a totally misunderstood term and has so many wrong associations with it--press agent, events management, etc.--that I get tired of trying to define it. To spend a lot of time arguing for the proper definition of PR seems like a waste of time and energy, at least to me.

I have never been one to be concerned with definitions, because I found them constraining. I wanted to be engaged in things I considered important. If people called those PR or communications or marketing or advertising, it wasn't of great importance to me as long as I was engaged in activities I thought were meaningful to the larger enterprise. Power from my perspective is the ability to leverage influence, not run an organization called one thing or another.

I have never found marketing people getting hung up on what to call themselves. Marketing has been hurt by the misperception that it is about advertising or promotion. It is a strategic function. It also is wrongly classified by those on the PR or communications side as being focused only on selling something to a customer. That may be the case in many organizations, but that is not what marketing should be about.

The great philosopher Humpty Dumpty said: "words mean what I want them to mean, nothing more, nothing less". We all have definitions, some right, some wrong, in our heads. If we find that people we deal with have a wrong definition of a term, we can certainly spend most of our time explaining the proper use of the term, or we can adopt a different term that provides greater latitude of action and activity. I find the latter to be much more productive.