Stakeholder, Audience and Publics theories

This weeks lecture presented by Michaela contained detailed information on the different theories on the above topic. Who are an organisation's stakeholders, audience or 'publics' and why is it important to study stakeholder, audience and 'publics' theories in PR? Stakeholders, audience and 'publics' can be defined as all the different groups of people who are affected by an organisation's activities. These people carry the the reputation of an organisation and an organisation depends on them to create and maintain their good reputation. In my opinion, PRO's need to know an organisations stakeholders in order to plan and create effective campaigns and communication strategies for all the different group for business growth. A typical structure of an organisation's stakeholders may include the groups shown on the diagram below.

I particularly liked Grunig and Hunt's situational theory which was discussed in class because it was easy to understand. I learnt it can be used to look at groups and what they think about an organisation at a particular time. They identify four 'publics' namely the non public, latent public, aware public and active public which an organisation may need to address or target for a particular campaign because they may be affected by this particular issue under discussion. (Grunig and Hunt 1984).

In my opinion, the use of Tesco trying to get planning permission for its new store as an example to explain the theory was practical and made it easy to follow. In this example I realised, the non public would be the people who have not heard of Tesco and does not care about it whilst the latent and aware publics are those who know of Tesco but have not made up their mind whether to support them or not. I learnt that in this situation, Tesco has to engage with both the latent and the aware publics as winning their support would be vital to getting the permission. The active audience on the other hand will be those who support Tesco in their bid for the new planning permission.

Broom and Dozier (1990) model was also quite interesting to follow. They identify nine ways to segment stakeholders.These are demographic, pyschographic, geographic, organisational membership, covert power, role in decision making, influencers, opinion formers and decision makers.

What I found most intriguing is that despite the fact that all theories can be used in combination, some theories are more appropriate for particular campaigns.

I later read Cutlip et al (2006) and I agree with their argument that "useful definitions describe program publics... on the basis who they are, where they live, what relevant organizations do they belong to, what they do that is relevant to the situation, and so forth" (p.321)

I also think Hallahan (2000) proposed five types of publics based on knowledge and involvement is brilliant. This is because the theory takes into account the inactive audience who seem to have been sidelined in Grunig's situational theory as they can still be important constituents for an organisation". He groups them us

• aware publics (high knowledge - low involvement)
• active publics (high knowledge - high involvement)
• aroused publics (low knowledge - high involvement)
• inactive publics (low knowledge - low involvement
• non-publics (no knowledge - no involvement)" (Tench and Yeomans 2006 p.153)

You can read more on it in his article, Hallahan, K., (2000). 'Inactive publics: The forgotten publics in public relations'. Public Relations Review 26(4): 499-515.