Strategic management

Once again: organizations use strategic management to relate their missions to their environments. They use strategic management to identify oppor­tunities and dangers in the environment; to develop strategies for ex­ploiting the opportunities and minimizing the dangers; and to develop, implement, and evaluate the strategies. Without strategic management, organizations have little choice other than to "live from day to day and to react to current events."

Organizations plan public relations programs strategically, therefore, when they identify the publics that are most likely to limit or enhance their ability to pursue the mission of the organization, and when they design communication programs that help the organization manage its interdependence with these strategic publics.

In contrast to this strategic approach, most organizations carry out the same public relations programs year after year without stopping to determine whether they continue to communicate with the most strate­gic publics. As time passes, however, organizations forget the initial reason for the programs and continue communication programs for publics that no longer are strategic. Public relations then becomes routine and ineffective because it does little to help organizations adapt to dynamic environments.

We will look at each of the stages in the process in more detail. First, however, we contrast the strategic planning process for public relations with the strategic process for marketing. Note that the first three steps in strategic planning for public relations are described as "stages" rather than "steps," because they describe the evolution of publics and issues.