Research & Analysis

The research part covers three specific areas of a PR plan, the client or organization, the opportunity or problem the organizations faces and the audience being targeted. Research is also used for media relations PR plans; they have the same aspects such as a target audience, a problem or opportunity that accounts for communication with media and investigating the client or organization to begin. The research aspect is not always called "Research" sometimes it is called Background, Analysis, Summary and Overview. Summary is just that, it is an overview of the rest of the plan, some plans are brief so this part can be skipped. The summary  has to be over the entire plan and not just the objectives, people are most likely to be interested in the end result and not the objectives/tactics. Research is a simple way of collecting information, you can collect it from employees, current customers/clients, former customers and focus groups. As I said earlier, these sections are not always titled research because the PR team has a goal and it goes deeper than the words below a title, it starts with the title. When looking at different case studies I started to reason with why the titles are not all the same. When I see "Situation Analysis" the first thing that comes to my head is that this case study is going to talk about a problem that the company is facing and the events that lead to this problem, sometimes it is not a problem and situation analysis can be talking about a positive opportunity for the company. When I see "Summary" I can assume that the content below is going to inform me about a company or event, for example on page 248 the title of the entire case study is, The Devt Diva Campaign, by reading this title I have the slightest clue as to what this campaign was about and that is when summary is used to give me the information as if I was at the campaign.

 From the ones that I have looked at in more detail and that I feel could relate to my plan, I saw the effectiveness of a proper title for their research component. I personally like the case studies under Consumer Relation Cases, mostly because this was on the same path as what my plan is headed on. Some information that really stood out to me when reviewing their situation analysis was it started off with stating the recent success and quickly mentioning the opportunity or problem it faces. After it moves on to history, the example in the book talks about Hallmark which is known for their greeting cards, the subtopic is about adding music to their cards that is relevant to todays generation. The history focuses on Hallmark and then moves its focus creating a card that will add music with this generatsion use of electronics. Moving forward, more useful infomation I found was the talk about how the company did test runs and the response from doing this. At the end of situation analysis is where the end results are expained. This is important because it helps guide the audience into whats coming next, such as objectives to improve or the steps that lead the company to such great success. 

This has helped me form a baseline for how I wish to go about my PR plan and either talk about and opportunity or a problem and how to fix it.