The Relation of Psychology to PR

Quantifying public relations

It is well-known that PR practitioners are the ones responsible for establishing or consolidating a brand’s position, creating interest, and offering consultation with the aim to increase demand and interest in a brand. The question is: how can they precisely quantify the impact of public relations?

The main role of public relations is to effectively communicate a client’s message to the mass audience. If a significant amount of coverage is generated, a message will be received, but in order to establish how it influences the behaviour of the masses or if it was received positively, PR professionals must always review the quality of the coverage in question.

Another important fact that people in PR must be in tune with is the credibility of the outlets relaying messages for them and if they are providing exclusive coverage.

A positive impact for a brand on social media, for example, is recognised as a growth in relation to its own social media presence through an increased number of followers and more importantly, engagements.

Market surveys are also paramount to tracking a campaign’s success by yielding significant results that would validate your efforts. By surveying the market before and after a PR campaign, you can identify which factors had the strongest impact.

A well-tailored, effective PR campaign includes elements of evaluation due to a handful of reasons:

• Validating PR efforts for achieving clients’ objectives.
• Future plans – Measurement and evaluation tools help to note down campaign mishaps, in turn preventing the same error from occurring twice.
• Avoiding misunderstandings. People nowadays receive numerous messages from different organisations and companies. This is directly related to the number of social, traditional, and online media outlets.

When measuring return on investment (ROI), it is important to quantify and measure the impact of PR campaigns. It also highly reflects on a performance in both the present and future.

Furthermore, the psychology of public relations will remain of great importance to a practitioner and now that you see the strong relationship between these two practices that dates back to almost 100 years, I wouldn’t blame you if you were to find yourself interested in a psychology class to boost your PR and communication skills.

Omar Medani is Account Executive Intern at Cicero & Bernay Public Relations, an independent PR agency headquartered in Dubai offering new-age public relations consultancy to the UAE and across the MENA region. | www.cbpr.me