PUBLIC RELATIONS: HOW TO CREATE MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN AN INDUSTRIAL INFORMATION SERVICE AND ITS CLIENTELE

The Institute of Public Relations defines the practice of public relations as ‘the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organization and its public’. Although this definition is clear and concise and its implications are readily understood by people active in the field, it does not really make clear that public relations is primarily concerned with people as individuals. In any kind of social activity or investigation it is very tempting to divide people into groups. Group identification is a useful preliminary to further activity and research. Such identification is certainly useful to an industrial information service since the clientele is divided into groups almost automatically by the reason of their function, e.g. accountants, engineers, executives, managers, metallurgists, research scientists, technologists and so on.