Quick read: recently as part of my involvement in the Chartered Institute of public Relations Council we have been working on a horizon scanning scenario planning exercise. It take a selection of long and short term issue attaching variables and imagining best and worst case outcome and mile-markers along the way.
My involvement (and others, I am sure) with the CIPR over the years is conditional on the popularity and importance of ‘public relations’. Do people want to be associated with PR or might they prefer other terms, like ‘communications’?
Google Trends is a good proxy on the popularity terms and this graphs sets out the use over the past 5 years within the UK compared to other terms…. like ‘Communications’, ‘Chartered’ and ‘Spin’.
I think it reasonable to say that ‘PR’ is a term in marginal decline along with ‘Communications’ and ‘Chartered’. Meanwhile ‘Spin’, which unarguably has negative connotations, is on the rise.
Undertaking the same analysis for terms ‘CIPR’ and ‘PRCA’ would seem to provide a picture of an organization showing a marginal decline verses another on the ascendancy.
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