INTRODUCTION - FIRST INSIGHT

Public Relations is evolving everywhere in the world, because it has been gaining relevance over the last years. It has become an important discipline in front of advertising, even though people still think about both professions as exactly the same.

The first misunderstanding of our profession is inside the industry and that's exactly our first problem to face. How can we work in Public Relations if we do not understand what that means? Cases of different ways of misunderstanding the profession are found at every PR Agency in Mexico. I used to have a workmate who thinks that Public Relations is the profession where frustrated advertising professionals go, because they are lacking in creativity. That is of course an atrocity. Public Relations practitioners work from creativity, which is one of the first concepts we must understand. A glossary will be found below for these basic terms we should comprehend before discussing them. I'm especially worried about clarifying all those concepts that people misuse in our everyday work and that's unforgivable for me.

I can't understand how PR practicionters ignore the difference between organizational identity and organizational image. Assuming this statement I find a very serious problem because what we do in Public Relations is to work on our clients' public image. But what happens when we do not know what the word 'image' means? It is very important to work on the understanding of those terms in the academic world. For that, we have wonderful academic Jesús Meza, who is about to release the first book that gathers all the basic concepts. But we need to break the barrier between "practice" and "theory" because both MUST work together. It is absurd to ignore theory in practice and that seems to be the pattern today. PR practitioners think that they know the reality of Public Relations which according to them theorists ignore. I must say that's untrue because the great theorists I know have a lot of experience and maybe more than a lot of those practitioners who criticize them. So this absurd separation must be broken. This definition of terms that Meza is offering should go beyond the academic world and help practitioners know their basic concepts before getting their hands dirty.

I will be posting different definitions of these terms the first time I write about them. I think it will be a very good exercise to start sharing what I know and showing the way I understand my profession with a theoretical background. That way I will talk about the conception of PR in Mexican practice, making use of theory.

Of course confidentiality will be very well considered when talking about practice. Clients will not be mentioned when discussing cases.