Putting on a Show

Preparing for and eventually launching a comprehensive public relations campaign is a lot like putting on a show. This notion was reinforced recently in a mini-profile on stage director Bartlett Sher that appears in the November, 2015, edition of Vanity Fair. In it, author Andre Bishop describes the steps Sher follows from point of conceiving a show to after the curtain on that productions has dropped for the last time. Sher follows four steps: (1) preparation, research and study; (2) rehearsal where he sits with the actors to explore, discover, ask questions and gain a greater understanding of the play they are putting on; (3) performing the actual show, which includes staging and constant restaging and/or changes; and (4) assessing or evaluation the quality of the production, including tally-up ticket sales and assessing reviews and reactions of their audiences.


For many, a typical public relations campaign also involves four steps. As first articulated by communication scholars James Grunig and Todd Hunt in 1984, the steps are: (1) research, which includes identifying the problem and/or challenge and assessing the steps taken previously to address it; (2) planning, including devising a budget, timeline and targeted audience; (3) communication or launching the campaign; and (4) evaluation or measuring the actual success of the overall outreach effort.


Putting aside any degree of coincidence that both processes contain four steps, it is worth noting that for any of these overtures to succeed in connecting with an external audience to succeed, one must develop a strong sense of what has transpired before, including determining how successful previous efforts were, before they can identify steps to take in the present and eventually set them in motion. Without that sense of history, then one is largely operating in the dark with little more in their arsenal than hunches and gut feelings. Whether it is putting on a show or initiating a public relations campaign, there is too much at stake to operate with such meager weapons.