Is the Term "Public Relations" Going Away?

If you were to look at the top 10 PR agencies from the past year or two, you would see that the vast majority of them to none of them have the term "public relations" in their name. Look at All Points, we kind of have it in our name but it's just the "PR". It seems that the term public relations is losing ground in PR agency names and even a bit in vocabulary.

There was a time that someone in a Chicago PR agency or any other major city that they would exclusively work with PR directors and executives as part of their client list but today, you will see that there are many franchise PR practitioners who work with companies who don't even have departments labeled "Public Relations", you'll likely see them called "Communications"; even working with people at large companies or small companies typically means working with someone who does not have the term in their title.

Multinational companies like Airbus, American Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, etc. might have PR departments but most of them do not, they have people who do PR work but have titles without PR in them. Another common label for them are things like, "Corporate Communications", "Internal Relations" or "External Relations", things like that.

It seems that companies are switching from using the "public relations" name in favor of the other ones mentioned because they feel it allows them to have more boundaries, despite the fact that those who started as PR agencies still use PR as a main tool. What is popular now is to combine PR efforts with paid advertising to really get the message to all those it needs to reach.

With all that being said, the term still carries a lot of power and is still popular; the business is going nowhere, it might have a different label if the trend continues.

Why Your Small Business Can Use Franchise PR

Every small business looks to grow; they look for new and creative, yet effective, ways to grow. One great way to grow is by using franchise public relations to help your brand build a presence in the world, both online and in person. So what are some specific reasons to use a PR firm, like a Chicago PR agency? Well, we have a few reasons.

When you use a PR team to help your company, what happens is that your company is building a general exposure online and in person. A constant growth factor is in play. The job of a franchise PR agency is to get your name in front of people, mainly journalists, so people get to realize that your company exists and what it does. That is a big part of what PR people do, they work to get you noticed by people. Yes, you can try to accomplish this task on your own but here's the thing: a PR agency will have a lot of connections to people, especially those in the media, who are able to really take a story about you or an interview and run with it; this gets your name in front of a lot more people than just submitting your own article to the online version of your local paper. One way the PR people get your name out there is via press releases.

When your company is having a general exposure constantly being built and your name is being put in the media for people to see, this means people are seeing an objective third party talk about you. This is huge for business growth. When people see someone talk about a company and that person has no incentive to do so other than they want other people to enjoy it as well, that speaks volumes. News outlets get no money from a company to run a story about them or to do an interview; the news outlets do this because they think the story is worth telling. Having a news outlet decide a story is worth telling is not always an easy thing.

Going with franchise PR is that it is an alternative to advertising. While they can be very similar, PR is often cheaper, yet can be just as effective. The perk to ads is that you can get them to be placed anywhere, you just have to pay for it. The perk to PR is that it is seen as more genuine and thus the products or companies doing it are more easily accepted by the public, ads are more likely to be ignored.

As a Chicago franchise PR agency, All Points PR is all about building brands through effective PR efforts.