Publics, Audiences and Stakeholders

Public relations largely depends on the understanding of Publics, Audiences and Stakeholders. This in turn helps in planning and carrying out effective Public Relations campaigns.

There is a slight distinction between the meaning of stakeholders and publics although the terms are sometimes used synonymously. Stakeholders are those who have a stake or interest in an organisation and influence or are influenced by the organisation’s activities. They can include employees, customers, suppliers, local community, government and the media (Tench, 2006).

Grunig’s Situational Theory (1984) however distinguishes publics as stakeholders that have an issue with an organisation. Thus stakeholders are potential publics with the critical factor being the start of a problem or issue.

Stakeholders are very critical in the strategic management of an organisation’s reputation and should be the primary concern for Public Relations. Grunig cites that communication at the stakeholder stage helps develop a stable and long term relationship that an organisation needs to build support and manage conflict when problems arise and this helps in preventing them from becoming publics. Grunig further classifies publics as latent, aware and active publics. Latent publics are the ones that have not yet recognised that an organisation has a problem, aware publics recognise the problem exists and active publics discuss and respond to the organisation’s problem. It is thus in a company’s best interest to address an issue while it’s still at latent or aware stages rather than wait until it gets to be active public.

Audiences on the other hand are often classified into two groups: Passive and Active. The passive audience passively responds and accepts media content. A good illustration of a passive audience is the perceived influence of violence on TV shows on children and teenagers. An active audience is the opposite of a passive audience in terms of it is a reflection of what the audience does with the media rather than what the media does to the audience. Active audiences are selective in terms of media to be used to satisfy individual needs.