By Lucy Elbaridi
As a young PR professional, I am thankful to have been exposed to a number of courses outside of the major. This past year I added a minor of Marketing to my curriculum and I found it to be one of the best decisions for my future career. Not only do I have a new skillset, but I also believe I have learned valuable lessons to apply to my future in public relations.
One of my most interesting courses outside of public relations was MKG420: Integrated Marketing Communications. This course highlighted the importance of bringing together strategically planned media, in order to best reach a target audience. I personally believe this is extremely useful for someone in the field of PR, as it can be applied to almost all aspects within the industry. For instance, PRSA defines PR as, “… a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.” With this being the basis of PR, I found it interesting that after taking the course in Integrated Marketing Communications , we (as in PR students) had not learned a big portion of what this course teaches It provided me with a new outlook on the strong relationship that public relations and marketing share; they have a lot more in common than I initially realized.
Building strong and strategic relationships is one of the biggest underlying themes I found within both of these majors. Public relations more specifically focuses on publicity, if I were to strictly differentiate the two. However, integrated marketing communications is essentially a more broadened horizon, as it incorporates multiple media platforms. For this course, my group selected a brand and each week we dug a little bit deeper into its defining characteristics to uncover a well-formulated plan to reach our target audience. It was a long and tedious process, but in the end it proved to be extremely successful in enhancing my abilities to better understand how to cater to a specific group.
One of the main reasons why I believe this course should be included within the curriculum for PR majors is because it provided me with a realistic experience. As I mentioned, each week was built off of the last and each week we gave a short presentation on our findings. Not only was the process helpful, but we were also given many opportunities to sharpen our public speaking skills, which is extremely important for a PR professional.
Over all, I think it is important to recognize how an integrated approach to communicating can be beneficial to the world of public relations. There is an element of marketing involved that often goes under the radar. Marketing is also an exchange of relationships, so as young PR professionals we should take strategic approaches to creating relationships, integrating our communication efforts and understanding how to better communicate with our world.
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