Role of PR in Crisis Management. The role of public relations was once defined by Xxxxxx X. Xxxxxxx, one of its pioneers, as “the engineering of consent.” The characterization is accurate, but out of context it oversimplifies and has been used to attack public relations as cynical and manipulative. The real tasks of public relations in the business world may focus on corporate interests or those of marketing products or services; on image creation or defense against attack; on broad public relations or straight publicity. In general, the strategic goal of public relations is to project a favorable public image, one of corporate good citizenship; but this cannot be accomplished with lights and mirrors in an age of investigative journalism, and the first responsibility of public relations is to persuade management that the reality must correspond with the desired image. Public relations is concerned with creating a favorable climate for marketing the client’s products or services, including maintaining good relations with merchants and distributors as well as placing product publicity and disseminating information to trade and industrial groups. This calls for the preparation of technical articles addressed to technicians and engineers and of others translating technical information for lay readers. It further includes publicizing praiseworthy activities by company personnel. Financial public relations involve relations with a company’s own stockholders (stockholder relations) as well as with the investment community. To a large extent, the job of public relations is to optimize good news and to forestall bad news, but when disaster strikes, the public relations practitioner’s task, in consultation with legal counsel, is to assess the situation and the damage, to assemble the facts, together with necessary background information, and to offer these to the news media, along with answers to their questions of fact. When a client is under attack, it is a public relations responsibility to organize the client’s response- usually involving several complicated issues-to be both lucid and persuasive. A government relation is often included in public relations under the general designation of public affairs and encompasses lobbying. Industrial relations (i.e., lab our-management relations), employee relations, and customer relations sometimes are accounted part of public relations. Community relations is important wherever a client has an office or plant. Modern corporate executives often do not ex...
