Public relations, or PR, is about your reputation: it is the result of what you do, what you say and what others say and think about you.

At its simplest level, public relations helps to build and look after your reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its desired audiences.

Public relations can be used for a plethora of purposes. For example, you might want to publicise a new product or service, boost momentum for an existing product, change an audience’s opinion or minimise damage to your reputation following a problem.

The communications methods used in PR vary widely, and depend largely on the audience you wish to reach. For example some businesses want to communicate solely with other businesses, while others want to send a message out to consumers. You can get an idea of the sort of methods we use on the Our Services page of this site.

To be effective public relations must be both carefully planned and targeted. That is why we have the solid systems in place described on our How we do it page.

One thing is for sure – there are very few businesses that could not benefit from sharper public relations.