CAREER OPTIONS IN PUBLIC RELATIONS, ADVERTISING AND MARKETING

“I definitely want to work in Advertising.”

“ I’ve changed my mind…it’s going to be a Marketing job for me.”

“My final choice is Public Relations as I think I am more suited for it.”

To a novice Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations ( PR) are terms which get confused with each other. They do have a lot of commonalities, yet are distinct fields. Students of Mass Communications should be clear about these subtle differences to enable them to make right career choices.

Marketing, is a broad term and involves all activities a company undertakes to sell a product or service. The marketing team researches the market, creates profile of a target customer, sets a marketing budget, launches promotional campaigns, and evaluates them. The ultimate goal of marketing being to generate profits through customer satisfaction. The job involves working under pressure in order to meet the sales target. In order to reach the company goal of sales, help is often taken from the Advertising and PR professionals. They assist in the promotional activities and are a part of the Marketing Department.

While marketing identifies customer needs and determines how best to meet those needs, advertising promotes the company and its products through paid channels in order to increase sales. Advertising persuades target audiences to purchase the product by use of TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, hoardings, social media and many other innovative media. Any person wanting to work in advertising may work in client servicing (which involves finding new clients and keeping them satisfied), creative work (developing concepts, artwork and messages ) or media planning (ad
scheduling and negotiating with media).

Public Relations is often confused with advertising but there are a couple of major differences. Advertising is a paid form of promotion but PR is free. Generally advertising pushes sales of a product but PR focuses on maintaining good reputation of the company in the media. PR professionals have the task of writing press releases, contacting media houses and keeping them abreast of the positive aspects of the company. They persuade media houses to write articles with favourable references to their clients.PR is unique because it allows brands to build a relationship
with an audience through credible sources, like trusted news outlets. Even when their clients are battered by crisis they generate positive publicity for their clients to rebuild their reputation.

Marketing, Advertising and Public Relations are highly interrelated professions because none of these departments can work in isolation. They are like 3 strands of a rope—intertwined and working best while providing support to each other. Based on the research of the marketing department , the advertising agency prepares their ad campaigns and subsequently sales is carried out while referring to the advertisements of the company. PR, meanwhile, provides credibility to the entire process. Choosing a career path is never easy but knowledge of different career fields will help ease the passage.

Author:Suniti Kharbanda
Senior Faculty Member.