Public relations and management

F or many public relations professionals, a sign of having ‘arrived’ is obtaining a‘strategic’ role signified by having a seat on the board. There is growing evidenceto suggest that public relations is a vital tool for strategic management (Dozier et al. 1995) and that it has had a significant role in building the reputation of some of the world’s most admired corporations (Skolnik 1994). Indeed, every company in the UK FTSE 100 now has a public relations department and the public relations industry on a whole is growing by about 17 per cent per year (IPR 2003).