Although I’m not usually one to name drop,
I have to share that Justin Trudeau helped me in my bachelor of public relations class this semester.
PM Justin Trudeau |
“I’m not sure how to explain what PR is to
my friends and family,” said a second-year Humber College BPR student on the
first day of class, earlier this month. This came after I asked the strategic
communications planning class to define public relations.
While most students successfully identified
the core concepts of PR – strategic, two-way communication, of mutual benefit
to an organization and its publics – they weren’t really sure how to express
these concepts as a field of practice to which their community of family and
friends could relate.
We considered the differences between
advertising and PR. While advertising is
everywhere, foisted on us in all manner of vehicles, sneaking up on us on
Facebook, camouflaged in advertorials, grabbing us on television, PR takes a
different tack. PR is nuanced. To capture the essence of the PR
sensibility, I guided the students to one of Aesop’s fables, cited in a
decade-old business book, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR .
The story is of a contest between the sun and wind encouraging a
traveller to shed his coat. The sun’s
warmth prevailed over the bustling wind, analogous to the subtlety of the PR
approach versus the bullhorn of advertising. While I’ve used this story in the
past, often reading the one-page text aloud to the students, I was never really
certain that the story resonated.
This semester was different. To hammer the point home, I turned to Justin
Trudeau’s sunny political approach.
During his election campaign, Trudeau
frequently invoked the term “sunny ways”, channeling former PM Sir Wilfred
Laurier,
Sir Wilfred Laurier |
The following week, a student reported to
me that, over the weekend, a relative inquired about his studies and he shared
the sun and wind fable. The story did
the job. My student was pleased and I had the satisfaction of knowing something
was learned.
So, thank you Justin Trudeau, and our
political forefather Sir Wilfred Laurier, for modeling effective PR. And thank
you Aesop, for your fable. The role of
PR is clearer, and shines brighter, as a result.
How do you define PR?