Critical Analysis of Cancer Research UK's Campaign

Running head: CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CANCER RESEARCH UK’S CAMPAIGN
CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CANCER RESEARCH UK’S CAMPAIGN
Name of the student
Name of the university
Author note

1
CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CANCER RESEARCH UK’S CAMPAIGN
Introduction
It is important for any organization to pay importance to Public Relation or (PR) because
it focuses on the public or the customers, who form the most important aspect of an
organization’s success. Public relation means the method of strategic communication, which
companies, groups and individuals utilize to establish relationships with the people (Grunig
2017). On a more technical term, PR is the safeguard of an organization’s positive public image.
Campaigns are an effective strategy of PR that organizations use to create positive public image.
The aim of this essay is to study the PR campaign of Cancer Research UK, a research and
awareness charity, on anti-obesity in February 2018 (Cancerresearchuk.org, 2019).. The analysis
will attempt to understand the campaign from the perspective of PR theories and planning
processes. The essay will first provide the different public relation theories followed by the
planning processes involved in it. Then, the essay will present an overview of Cancer Research
UK’s campaign on anti-obesity. The chief objective of the essay is to explain the theories of
persuasion and relationship and link these to the campaign to find whether the campaign was
effective or not. The essay will then provide recommendations to the organization based on the
analysis to plan a more effective PR campaign in the future.
Public Relations Theories
Public relation is a part of the communication strategy that companies use to connect to
the people and therefore, most theories of PR are actually the theories of communication. The
fundamental aspect of PR is to give prominence to the receiver, one the most important elements
of the communication model, which was developed by Shannon and Weaver (Rogers and
Valente 2017). The model formed the foundation of communication theories that were

2
CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF CANCER RESEARCH UK’S CAMPAIGN
introduced in the later decades. The first model lacked two important elements that were added
in the later years when the theory was developed. The two elements were noise and feedback.
Noise refers to the disturbance caused in communication due to various technical, physical,
linguistic, cultural and emotional factors. Feedback, on the other hand, indicates the response
given by the receiver after receiving the message.
James E. Grunig then came up with the four models of public relations during the 1980s.
The four models included press agentry, public information, and two-way symmetric and two-
way asymmetric model. Press agentry model, also known as P.T. Barnum model follows mostly
the one-way communication system (Grunig 2017). One-way refers to the flow of information
through the sender to the receiver only. The second model is the model of public information. In
this model, as the term suggests, the information is disseminated to the public for improving the
organization’s image. This is also a one-way model in the sense that the receiver, that is, the
public, has no chance of responding to it. Press releases, news releases and video releases are
some examples of public information model. Two-way asymmetrical model is the third in the list
for public relation models. Here, the communication flows two-way that is, the sender has the
ability and opportunity to respond to the receiver. However, the information flow is unbalanced
because PR experts manipulate the minds of the target receivers to behave the the way the
company wants them to behave. As opposed to this model, the two-way symmetrical model of
PR encourages a more balanced information flow (Grunig 2017). Here, the PR experts rely on
the response or feedback of the users or target audiences to develop a better image by positioning
their brand as per the need of the audiences.
Apart from the above four models, the theory of persuasion also helps explain the role of
public relation experts and campaign. In fact, persuasion in public relation was introduced from