PR-Bridge

An article, ”For the Common Good,” in the Birmingham Business Journal discusses how companies can benefit from using an advertising agency-owned PR firm and offers local case studies of effectiveness.

The client perspective is given by Doug Schneider, vice president of marketing with Bayer Properties.

“The real reason to do something like this is that it’s the right long-term strategy for building your brand,” Schneider said. “By having your public relations and advertising in one location, you have a better likelihood of having a consistent message for a customer.”

What I like about Schneider’s comment is that he focuses on integration as a means of brand building.

I think that if more public relations and advertising scholars, as well as other communications academics, broke down the silos that make them so discipline-centric, there would be more cross-discipline (and potentially, applicable to the corporate world) work done. I assume that the challenge would then be who determined what branding is and which disciplines would lead the effort, similar to the debate around IMC. But, I can dream of a time in which we’re united in effort, right?

[TANGENT ALERT] As I sit here sipping my morning coffee, I’m imagining an academic colleague’s response to this post and wondering if he or she would question whether scholars should be doing work that ties closely with practitioners. Perhaps my desire to see a tight working relationship between scholars and professionals isn’t shared by most on either side of the fence.

What I have learned in the handful of years I’ve been an academic is that I have more time to really think about challenges that I faced over a decade of professional life. I can read and study problems with more focus because it informs my teaching and scholarly interests. The students benefit, obviously, but the breakdown I see is that it stops there, unless I go out and hustle for consulting gigs.

Maybe in a perfect world a link between professionals and scholars would be a form of knowledge management. We would be a source that practitioners could tap to solve challenges that they can’t. Currently, many scholars do have ties or consult for organizations, but I would like to see this institutionalized on both sides. There is real benefit for all.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 15:07 and is filed under Main Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.