What is Marketing Sociology?

One of my favorite books is Bill Cantor’s Experts in Action. Cantor assembled a group of public relations experts and had them write about the practice of public relations. The book came out in 1984.

Recently on Ragan.com, Vic Morales lamented about public relations, “After 10 years in the profession, your family and friends still don’t understand what you do.”

In Experts in Action, Merton Fiur, president, Center for Public Communications, states one of the problems for public relations is there’s no standardization. It is true.

Marketing is founded on the 4-Ps –

Product

Place

Price

Promotion

Journalism has a formula for a newspaper story, besides the inverted pyramid

Who

What

Why

where

How

Public relations has a formula, too. Yet ask 10 public relations practitioners what it is, and 9.5 out of 10 will not know.

R

A

C

E

Ask 10 public relations practitioners a strategy and you’re going to get 8.7 different answers because most come out of different fields. Last year’s real estate agent went into public relations when the economy went south. Watch any beauty pageant and 9 out of 10 are going into “communications,” in other words, public relations. At one point public relations professionals said PR should report to the top person in an organization. Can you see former Miss USA Shanna Moakler reporting to Steve Jobs of Apple or Doug Parker of US Airways? Uh-huh!

Fiur states, “Combining the respective techniques of marketing and public relations will improve the effectiveness of both.” That’s what a Marketing Sociologist is. Someone who has a journalism degree, writing for newspapers like The Denver Post when it was the largest paper in the Rocky Mountains (think it still is). A journalist for music trade publication Billboard. Add to that working in the corporate marketing department for a branch of AT&T when it was the world’s largest company. An MBA with marketing and computer information emphasis. That is a Marketing Sociologist.

Someone who can look at your organization and pinpoint where to realize greater revenue streams.

If you want to know what the RACE formula is, contact Marketing Sociologist at MediaRelationsExpert.com MediaRelationsExpert@yahoo.com