I am getting so tired of the continues battle between PR and Marketing. This turf war is hurting both disciplines and instead of using our energy to fight we should cooperate (… that last sentence felt a bit like: ”Make love not war”… sorry about that).

Too me it looks like the battle is about three things:

• Value
  By value I mean what works best to achieve the organisations goal. Does a commercial ad work better than a published press release? The problem is that it is so difficult to measure – and using AVE is not really the solution…
• Form
  Form is about the fight over who is better to engage with the customer. The big dialogue. According to PR all marketing is good for is doing big mass media campaigns to a big mass market. But marketing is also mainly about creating a dialogue, and we use DM, CRM and many other tools that is pretty good at achieving just that…
• Channels
  Based on the form, PR thinks that Social Media should be their channel because this is about connecting to the audience and engage. But again this is a vital channel for marketing too since we can both do traditional ad marketing in social media and it’s a great way of building the customer base. And social media is growing into traditional marketing channels like CRM.

So what is the answer? Well I don’t know. But one way of looking at it could be this:

1. If both marketing and PR can agree about the brand promise and the strategy, they can both start creating message strategies based on their disciplines tools. As long as they are true to the overall strategy the messages would support each other and even make the two solutions even stronger
2. Just forget about form. Both want to engage. Just do it they way you feel works best.
3. And forget about channels. You can use the same channels without destroying the others message (if one manages to hang on to the first point above). So both can use social medias and maybe even create a richer experience for the audience.

But this is just my thought; if we cant establish a level of trust between us it will never work…and posting blog posts that just fuels the war will just continue build walls.

Like this one…(Even the title is annoying)

By the way… I am the marketing guy… 🙂