Persuasion in Public Relations

Running head: PERSUASION IN PUBLIC RELATIONS
PERSUASION IN PUBLIC RELATIONS
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1PERSUASION IN PUBLIC RELATIONS
There has always been a raging debate among the scholars and researchers regarding
the role played by Public Relations (PR) in society. On one hand, the critics of PR like Ewen,
Stauber and Miller, have claimed that PR in both past and present, undermines democracy
and at the same time, distorts the debates. Whereas, the defenders of public relations like
Gregory and Dozier on the other hand tend to minimise the historical roots of public relations
in the propaganda. Excellence project has the commendable aim of improving the PR practice
by means of emphasising on the best and at the same time, demonstrating how other people
can improve. Notwithstanding this fact, there has been a long tendency of marginalising the
role played by persuasion in this regard. Most of the people consider public relations to be
inherently unethical and to be honest, most of the public relations practises are actually
unethical. Persuasion plays a significant role in this context.
Public relations is widely regarded as the well-planned persuasion of the people in
order to make them behave in the ways that further the objectives of its sponsors (Ferguson
2018). Persuasion refers to the process of communication that is designed for influencing the
actions and judgements of other people (Kelman 2017). According to Chari (2016),
persuasion is an ‘anathema’. It is something that is considered to be a slippery slope which
skids through the publicity and ends up with the propaganda. Most of the academics of PR
claim that persuasion is the goal of majority of the PR programmes and therefore, it forms its
dominant practise. As per Perloff (2010), “Persuasion is “a symbolic process in which
communicators try to convince other people to change their attitudes or behaviours regarding
an issue through the transmission of a message in an atmosphere of free choice”.
Communication is the key of PR function. According to Baylis, Smith and Owens (2017),
“Stripped to its fundamentals, public relations means communicating with others”.
Expanding on this view, “PR people also use the process of persuasion, compromise,
bargaining and negotiation in search of compliance and problem solving”. Although the

2PERSUASION IN PUBLIC RELATIONS
persuasive communication processes often co-habits with the propaganda and all its implied
connotations, the pivotal element of the ethical persuasion is actually “truthfulness”. It is to
note that truthfulness needs action and intentions that does not deceive, mislead or misinform.
As stated by Evans et al. (2017), ethical persuasion is “the attempt through communication to
influence the knowledge, behaviour and attitude of the audience through presentation of a
view that addresses and allows the audience to make voluntary, informed, rational and
reflective judgements”. The definition provided by Braddock and Dillard (2016), further
highlights the overlapping in between the public relation and propaganda as the process that
attempts to manage the symbolic control over the environment claiming that both effective
public relations and effective persuasion are synonymous to each other. Notwithstanding this
fact, the modern PR practise have sought for making itself different from that of propaganda
because it has become significantly claimed as unethical.
According to Thompson (2018), in the field of PR, persuasion is a very important
element of everything that the PR Practitioners do. Right from building relationship,
managing the crisis and reputations in the work place, creating compelling content, public
speaking to media and blogger outreaching, getting clients and colleagues to support the
strategies and connecting with social media, everyone make use of liberal doses of
persuasion. There are individuals who regard persuasion to be a form of art, whereas, there
are others who consider it to be a science. According to Fitch (2016), there are a total of six
psychological principles that are considered to be the integral pieces of the process of
influencing. They are- the principle of liking, the principle of reciprocity, the principle of
social proof, the principle of Authority, the principle of consistency and the principle of
scarcity.
PR Practitioners make use of the concept of liking in the blogger and media relations
in order to build online communities as well as for working for organising the event