Importance and Power of Public Relations

PR (Public Relations) are one of the most often used expressions in the business and marketing world today.

Since public relations are not clouded with direct (paid) advertisements, they represent a marketing activity that presents in the awareness of the consumer an image element that defines the final image and stance about a concrete product, service, brand or company.

Public relations thus often represent a crucial moment that can indirectly convince a buyer to buy a product notwithstanding whether this product is necessary to him. Such direct advertisement would not only be exceptionally expensive, but sometimes futile and time and money are of the essence in today’s demanding consumer society.

Moreover, apart from being able to convince a buyer that he truly needs this product, that he really needs a certain brand, PR can indirectly create an image about a company or create a name that buyers will differentiate from other, competition brands that offer a product of more or less the same characteristics and quality. This ‘name’ is today’s precondition for survival on the market and for the financial success of business.

The power and importance of public relations can be depicted with a historical example of the ‘father’ of public relations, Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was the first to popularise the use of psychology theories with the goal of campaigns to convince the public – in the beginning for primarily political purposes and later economical purposes.

Expanding the tobacco market to the female population

Back in the 1920’s, the ‘male’ tobacco industry turned to Bernays’s help to expand the market to the female population. Women smoking in public was then considered a taboo.

Bernays’s first task was to create a need that did not (officially) exist yet and so create a habit of smoking by women in public. Only with such an act could he help his clients and enable the expansion of the tobacco industry market. Psychology theories enabled him to understand the significance of cigarettes for women: a symbol of manhood that gives women a feeling of greater equality in the then still non-emancipated society. The ideal chance was at a march-past in New York in which debutantes, young women of the high society, participated, who, at Bernays’s sign lit their cigarettes at the same time.

With this simple, well thought-out and planned act with the help of numerous newspaper articles, the taboo of women smoking in public was eliminated. The cigarette became an integral part of everyday lives of men and women around the world and led the tobacco industry to today’s status of one of the most powerful and most lucrative industries in the world