What Are Public Relations? PR Functions, Types, & Examples

If a renowned public relations agency in Sri Lanka as a speacialist in the field drafts a specialised marketing strategy and uses advertising and other direct and indirect mediums to build and sustain a favorable brand impression and a good interaction with the target audience.

The key objective of public relations in Sri Lanka is to maintain a positive reputation of the brand and maintain a strategic repour with the public, prospective customers, partners, investors, employees and other stakeholders which eventually leads to a positive image of the brand and makes it look truthful, effective, meaningful, and significant.

Public relations is separate from ads. Public relations firms don’t buy advertising, they don’t write reports for writers, and they don’t concentrate on enticing paying advertisements. The primary role in public relations is to support the brand by using editorial material appearing on magazines, newspapers, television outlets, portals, blogs, and TV shows.

Some of the functions of public relations include;

• Anticipating, analysing, and interpreting the public opinion and attitudes of the public towards the brand and drafting techniques which use free or received media to impact them.
• Drafting plans to help the brand’s every initiative and new step through editorial content.
• Planning and conducting special civic outreach and media relations events.

The types of public relations;

• Investor relations - Handling investors events, publishing accounting reports and securities filings, and handling investors, analysts and media inquiries and concerns.
• Media relations - Establishing a strong relationship with the media outlets and serving as their information provider.
• Government relations - Representing the brand to the government with respect to the fulfilment of policies like corporate social responsibility, equal competition, customer protection, employee protection, etc.

Public relations have credibility that public values the message emanating from a reputable third party rather than the branded content.