An Overview of The Public Relations Function, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 8

Public Relations Research

The Key to Strategy

Although public relations is an exciting and dynamic field demanding people with strong communication skills and adept at social media, the key to strategic public relations and communication management is ­research.¹ We can argue that as much as three-quarters of the public ­relations process (detailed in Chapter 9) is based on research knowledge: research, strategic action planning, and evaluation. There are four reasons that research offers the key to strategy for communication:

1. Research contributes to ethics because it makes communication a two-way process by collecting input from publics (rather than using a simple dissemination of information).
2. Research makes public relations activities ...