Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Theories of Publics, Audiences and Stakeholders

Wednesday 13th February, 2008


'Theories, concepts and models of audiences, stakeholders or publics, public relations and communication are important because they help us understand and explain our public relations campaigns and the situations these campaigns address. They determine how we plan and conduct public relations. Thus the different theories we hold will lead to different ways of planning and practising public relations'. (Source: Exploring Public Relations by Ralph Tench and Liz Yeomans)

In this lecture we learnt the theories of Publics, Audiences and Stakeholders and in a situation it can be done in many ways. Firstly there is 9 ways to segment stakeholders which is a very useful and effective in many situations. They are Demographic, Psychographic, Geographic, Organisational memberships, Convert power, Role in decision making, Influencers, Opinion formers, Decision makers. Secondly there is the theory of Grunigs’ situational theory which includes Dynamics, changing publics, situational theory: non public, latent public, aware public and active public. Lastly there is the social marketing approach in which there is a table of people adapted from social change media: Advocates/sales force, Influencers and Decision makers.


During the lectures we always have an exercise session which helps us to look into the situation in a practical manner and this further helps us to understand the situation in an industry. This time we were given a campaign about healthy success for Manchester festival and we had to apply the theory of social marketing approach. In this kind of a situation this theory does not help too much as it does not apply to the main target groups and we cannot come to conclusions with this kind of method.

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