Functions of Public Relations - MKT438

In today's global work environment organizations must depend on their targeted publics to support their strategic objectives, goals and policies. The role of public relations is to serve as an organizations advocate for building and maintaining positive relationships with their diverse publics. As such, many different functions of public relations exist; two of these examples are organizational or societal functions.

Organizational functions include those functions that benefit the organization from within such as communication management and employee relations, while societal functions are those functions which benefit the organization from the outside and include corporate and social responsibility. In short, the two functions work together to facilitate the communication with their many publics: to create and maintain a positive image for both internal and external publics. "In public relations, more specifically, a public is a group of people with a stake in an issue, organization, or idea" (Seitel, 2004, p. 9).

Allstate Northern Ireland, the new name for Northb...

Allstate Ad Concept

English: An Allstate store in Moncton

Sunday Odedele, managing director of Petros-Faith Public Relations Consulting, defines public relations as a management function that, "…helps in defining and achieving organizational objectives and philosophy, adapts to a changing environment and facilitates organizational change. PR practitioners communicate with all relevant internal and external publics in the effort to create consistency between organizational goals and societal expectations (Odedele, n.d.).

OrganizationThe Allstate Corporation, founded in 1931 and first publicly traded in 1993, is the nation's largest publicly held personal lines insurer and second largest personal lines insurer in the United States. A Fortune 100 company, with $156.4 billion in assets, Allstate sells 13 major lines of insurance such as automobile, property, life and commercial. In addition, Allstate offered retirement, investment and banking services. Allstate is widely known through the "You're In Good Hands With Allstate®" slogan.

Organizational IssueAs a result of an Allstate requested homeowner rate increase, which was subsequently denied,