Every time I mention that I am a PR student, I am most likely to hear that public relations is just another tool for businesses to sell their products to unsuspecting customers. In fact, most people don’t make much distinction between PR and marketing or PR and advertising.
How then, is PR different for marketing or advertising? Well, other that the fact that it is more to do with reputation management than actual sale of products, one aspect of PR that I came across is its ability to confer legitimacy to both businesses and governments. It has become increasingly crucial for businesses to be seen as acting in the interest of society. This is best seen in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies of companies that seek to promote the ‘human’ face of big business. Governments, too, promote themselves and their policies to generate support and the appropriate number of votes.

This is an interesting aspect of PR, which I think is usually ignored by most critics of the practice. PR is not just about selling products – although, of course, that is usually the desired end result – it is also about the need to project one’s company or their political party as being legitimate and, therefore, trustworthy.