Larry D. Lauer

Every week someone asks me why the Schieffer School of Journalism changed the name of  its’ program in advertising and public relations to strategic communication.  If you put this question to my academic colleagues you no doubt will get different answers.

But I always have been amazed at how we continually fail to convince the public to see our profession as we do.  This is especially true when we use the term “PR,” or so I think.  I have found that people inevitably want to see PR practitioners as the servants who will send out your press release, print your brochure, plan your party, and “spin” positive stories. 

And even though we are the very professionals that claim to be able to define and communicate institutional brand identites, we have been a total failure at successfully branding our own profession. 

As a consequence, I quickly found early in my career that when I used PR in my title most CEO’s would see me as they defined the term, not as Idid. I wanted to be seen as the professional communicator who understood all the tools in the communication tool box. My role was to view the world as a collection of market or audience segments, and to know the right combination of tools for each segment, and for each situation.

So when my colleagues would get into arguments about what was more powerful, advertising or public relations, and would even treat them as separate disciplines, I was certain we were again shooting ourselves in the foot!

But I learned through trial and error that when I stopped using PR and used the term strategic communication to describe my profession, things changed. Senior managers could accept me as the one professional on the team who could help them plan comprehensive communication programs, solve real problems, deal effectively with issues, and handle crises.

Later in my career I would also find that using both strategic communication and “marketing” to describe what what I do would work even better. 

True, using the word “marketing”  is also problematic at first. But unlike my experience with PR, in today’s highly competitive world,  executives are eventually able to see that both strategic communication and marketing are sophisticated, comprehensive, executive-level functions.