The relationships between an organization and its publics represent a central concern for the research and practice of public relations: “Public Relations are the management of communication of an organization and its publics.” (Grunig & Hunt, 1984: 7). Ströh defines Public Relations as “the umbrella function that manages the communication between an organization and its publics to build and enhance healthy relationships to the benefit of all parties involved.” (Ströh, 2007) Cutlip, Center and Broom define Public relations as „the management function that identifies, establishes and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the publics on whom its success or failure depends.” (Cutlip/Center & Broom, 2009: 5) Ledingham and Bruning (1998) describe relationships between a company and its publics as “state that exists between an organization and its target publics, where the actions of each part produce an impact on the other parties’ economical, social, political or cultural state.” (1998: 62). Ward (1998) asserted that successful public relationships not only expand economic opportunities, but could also save an organization immeasurable dollars by preventing, minimizing or resolving conflicts and crisis. In the following years the relational perspective has been applied to a variety of public relations areas such as crisis management, customer-service providers, and symbolic and behavioral influences of employee volunteerism (Coombs, 2000; Ledingham & Bruning, 1998, 2001; Wilson, 2000). Public Relations are seen as one of the most important ingredients for an effective organisation. Relationships influence the success or failure of an organisation (Harrison, 2003; Ledingham & Bruning, 2000b; Robbins & Barnwell, 2002). Why have relationships become so important for companies and for PR?

  • Reach corporate goals: To reach their goals, companies and organizations need the support of people or groups of people, so called publics. The most common publics are employees, customers, journalists and politicians. Through PR a company tries to convince and motivate their publics to support the corporate goals with their own specific contribution. In order to achieve this, the company offers a clear and rewarding relationship to these targeted audiences based on communications. This is expressed in the terms Employer Relations, Customer Relations, Media Relations, Investor Relations and Political Relations. James E. Grunig argues that “in order to have public relations valued inside organizations, the PR practitioners must be able to demonstrate that their efforts are part of reaching the objectives of organizations by building long term behavioral relationships with strategic publics” (Grunig, 1993: 136). Hon and Grunig consider the fundamental purpose of public relations to be the creation and development for ongoing or long term relationships with key audiences of an organization. They argue that no matter how important it is for an organization to measure the effects and results that apply to the PR work, it is even more important for an organization to measure the relationships (Hon, Childers & Grunig, 1999).
  • Positioning in market and society: more and more companies recognize the potential relationship management offers for differentiation from competitors in the market place but also in society. In times of saturated markets and interchangeable products, rewarding relationships are the only opportunity for a clear positioning.
  • Relationships within the company are key. They enable employees to build a clear picture of what their company stands for and in turn an understanding of what their work contributes to accomplishing corporate goals.
  • Relationships outside the company are important because the emotional proximity to customers, journalists and financiers increases with each exchange. The reason is that intense exchanges call for a mutual level of commitment and understanding. The more intense the exchange between company and stakeholder, the stronger the trust toward the company grows. We know the phenomenon from relationship psychology. The identity of the self and of the other move nearer to one another and ideally reconcile.
  • Shaping relationships to customers of services is clearly essential to the success of a company. One reason for this is that the service provider is often in direct contact with the customer. Another reason is that there is no physical product to serve as perceptual anchor. A properly maintained relationship translates as corporate accountability. Perceived risk of disappointment sinks in the eyes of the consumer and other stakeholders.Developing relationships as a management process   Public Relations as management of relationships between a company and its publics puts public relations on the level of a strategic management function because it can influence the way stakeholders support the company’s goals. The importance of the company’s relationship has given rise to relationship management (Ledingham, 2003). The management process of developing relationships with publics is systematic and long-term. It consists of analysis, planning, creation and control. The goal of Public Relations is to create and develop a clear image in publics’ minds. Impact studies show that the vividness of a company’s image is the superdimension of image management (Herbst & Scheier, 2004).