Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
by Helio Fred Garcia:
For most of my 44-year career I have believed that PR people – even at the senior-most levels – fundamentally mis-define, and therefore marginalize, our role. We see ourselves, and are often seen by leaders, as the communicators. Some of us have some version of the word communication in our formal title. But every executive believes that he or she is good at communicating.
As a result, executives who wouldn’t dream of micromanaging the work product of the engineering or finance or corporate law departments have no problem micromanaging the work product of professional communicators. Or of bypassing the professional communicators until it’s time to distribute what has been drafted (often poorly) by others.
But when we do our best work, we’re valued not for our ability to string sentences and paragraphs and video together but for predicting how the stakeholders who matter to senior management are likely to behave. Or likely to behave if we subject them to stimulus A, or to stimulus B, or to stimulus C. Our central contribution – that leaders actually value and need – is that we understand, can predict, and can influence, the behavior of the groups who matter to our leaders.
I began teaching public relations at New York University in 1988. Since then, with my students, with my clients, and in my books, I’ve described our central value proposition this way: When we do our best work we function as an applied anthropologist.
Like an anthropologist, we do active fieldwork to understand a group’s social and power structures, values, predispositions, and behavioral triggers. We then make predictions based on these insights, helping clients understand how any given group is likely to react to any given stimulus. The applied part is then to organize activity to provoke the reaction we want, and then to be in active relationship with our stakeholders in order to provoke that reaction.
I was very proud of myself when I first articulated the model of applied anthropology, more than 37 years ago. But then I learned that I had been beaten to that insight by 65 years. And to make matters worse, it was by a prior New York University professor.
Edward L. Bernays was the first to call himself a “public relations counselor,” in 1919. In 1923 he became the first-ever professor of public relations in a university. It was New York University. Bernays described public relations as,
“the vocation of the social scientist who advises clients on social attitudes and on the actions to take to win support of the public upon whom the viability of the client depends.”
Note what is not in that description: nothing about communication; nothing about media.
In the 1920s the word “anthropology” was not well known beyond the narrow confines of academia, and Bernays never used the word. But Bernays essentially describes anthropology in his description of PR. He talks about a core anthropological discipline, fieldwork. In his 1923 book Crystalizing Public Opinion, Bernays writes,
“The public relations counsel is first of all a student…[whose] field of study is the public mind. His textbooks for this study are the facts of life… He brings the talent of his intuitive understanding to the aid of his practical and psychological tests and surveys.”
Bernays adds,
“The public relations counsel must discover why it is that a public opinion exists… must discover what the stimuli are to which public opinion responds most readily. To his understanding of what he actually can measure he must add a thorough knowledge of the principles which govern individual and group action. A fundamental study of group and individual psychology is required before the public relations counsel can determine how readily individuals or groups will accept modifications of viewpoints or policies.
Bernays’ description of public relations focuses on how those who matter to a company feel and think, and how to get them to feel and think differently. It focuses on social attitudes and on the actions a company must take to win support. Even the title of his book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, focuses not on the mechanics of communication but on the outcome.
Bernays’ description also recognizes that the most effective way to change groups’ perception is to act in certain ways; that communication needs to be grounded first in the action a company takes. He says that a public relations practitioner is
“as much an advisor on actions as he is the communicator of these actions to the public…He acts in this capacity as a consultant both in interpreting the public to his client and in helping to interpret his client to the public. He helps to mold the action of his client as well as to mold public opinion.”
And finally, Bernays notes that the interaction between a company and its critical stakeholders isn’t a one-time event, but rather continues over time, and each interaction is shaped by prior interactions and reactions:
“Action and interaction are continually going on between the forces projected out to the public and the public itself. The public relations counsel must understand this fact in its broadest and most detailed implications.”
Bernays’ description of public relations –– as a vocation applied by a social scientist who advises a client on actions to take in order to win support of the public on whom the client’s viability depends –– is the true differentiator of a public relations professional.
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Helio Fred Garcia is president of the crisis management firm Logos Consulting Group. He teaches public relations and crisis management at New York University, and ethics, leadership, communication, and crisis at Columbia University. He is the author of six books on reputation, crisis, communication, and trust, and is a #WeLeadComms honoree.
This essay is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Reputation Management: The Key to Successful Public Relations, Corporate Communication and Sustainable Organizations, Fifth Edition, by John Doorley and Helio Fred Garcia, to be published by Routledge in March, 2025.
Written by: Editor
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There’s a lot that I like about this piece. Coming from a social science background myself (political science and sociology), it’s hard not to see the organization as a social and political system rather than simply a top-down command and control machine that makes and sells things. The only thing I’ve found harder is convincing those who believe otherwise to at least consider this perspective.
Mike