Growth and Change in the pr Industry

The work and the writings of Ivy Lee, George Creel, and Edward Bernays inspired many people to get into the public relations business. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, large corporations turned to public relations counselors to help restore them to favor in the eyes of a population that was disillusioned with and angry at big business. Companies such as Carl Byoir & Associates and Hill & Knowlton came into existence and grew in this environment. World War II gave yet another boost to public relations. During this time of national crisis, the U.S. government called upon PR practitioners to use as many techniques as necessary—interpersonal and mass media, news and entertainment—to explain the war and encourage citizens to do their part to help win it.

Ralph Nader began to earn his reputation as a crusader taking on major corporations forty years ago when he was catapulted into the national spotlight as a young Harvard law graduate whose stinging book Unsafe at Any Speed challenged the safety of the Chevrolet Corvair and American cars in general.

The number of public relations practitioners continued to grow after the war, as companies and governments increasingly realized the importance of getting and keeping the public on their side. Two types of public relations practitioners emerged. The first worked in PR companies that acted as long- or short-term counselors to a variety of organizations. The second type—far more numerous than the first— worked full time doing PR for government agencies and private organizations. The titles of these practitioners—press officer, PR specialist, communications manager— depended on their activities and where they worked.

During the 1960s, public relations practitioners felt forced to rethink their approach to their audiences. The “scientific" model that they used, although two- way, saw target audiences as groups that were to be studied so that they could be manipulated. There was little room in public relations for suggestions that the government and corporate leaders for whom the industry worked would actually change their strategies or activities in response to research on what people wanted.

It was in the 1960s that that attitude began to change. It was a time of resistance, fueled by the Civil Rights Movement, the war in Vietnam, and a fiery consumerism movement sparked by Unsafe at Any Speed, a book written by Ralph Nader that revealed major safety problems in the rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair. The press—and public—outcry that accompanied these revelations became a PR night­mare for Chevrolet's parent, General Motors.

In the years that followed, many corporations, afraid that consumer anger would lead to lost sales, beefed up their customer relations programs. Some began an even more basic re- evaluation of their public relations strategies. Talk in the PR industry was of a more “symmetrical with the public. In this approach to public relations, research would be used not only to shape messages aimed at audiences but also to figure out how the organization could position itself to most please its target audiences. The new role of public relations practitioners, in this view, would be to serve as go-betweens, as mediators between clients and the public.

Sometimes PR practitioners found that they had the attention of top management and could, therefore, follow this business model. Much of the time, however, one of the other three model – that of press agent, public information distributor, and social-scientific persuader-held sway. Moreover, all of the models raise ethical issues that people in the industry and media-literate people outside it must confront. We explore this topic soon as well. First, though, it will be useful to investigate the basic working of the industry.