Image & Opinion Research in PR

Public Relations Research serves the following three functions:

1. It confirms assumptions and intuitive feelings about the state of public opinion on an issue, or a company.
2. It clarifies questions on which limited information is available, or on which apparently contradictory data are to be found. Research can help sort out what people really mean and when they say they like or dislike an organization--- the reasons they cite for these feelings, and even the origin of the feelings.
3. It re-orients our thinking on public relations problems. It helps us to define and focus on our objectives and target group, and in assigning priorities to Public Relations problems and Public Relations actions.

Image Research: Large-scale corporate image studies among different target audiences. Image research determines the institutional profile of the public toward an organization, how well they understand it, and what they like and dislike about it. It seeks to understand how well the company is known, its reputation, and what the public thinks about its products, services, prices, advertising, personnel, and practices.

Attitude and Attitude Research: Attitudes are the feelings or moods of a person for or against some person, organization, issue, or object. They represent the predisposition of an individual to evaluate controversial questions in a favourable or unfavourable manner. Simply stated, an attitude is a way of looking at situations. An expressed attitude is an opinion.

Change in attitude may occur under various conditions e.g. the existing attitude no longer provides us the satisfaction or if our aspirations get raised. Changes in attitude can be brought about by through communications by creating new beliefs, or by appealing to the emotions to arouse favourable or unfavourable attitudes. Appeals to the physical, social and economic needs of people are considered to be effective in changing their attitude e.g. the ads for insuring life, property etc., have considerable acceptance and response by general public.

Attitude research seeks to discover what shapes the public attitude toward an organization. To understand the motives which influence an individual's opinion, it is necessary to explore the psychological factors which shape his attitudes toward a company.

A company's public image may be affected not only by its own policies and actions, but also by the attitude of the public toward the industry of which the company is a part.

Techniques available for research:

There are number of techniques available for conducting public opinion research. A few of them are mentioned below:

Content Analysis: A very old and still useful method is to carry out a content analysis of how a topic or an organization or a problem is treated in the press, textbooks, radio, or television. Such research gives a pretty fair measure of the saliency of the problem and often useful hints as to which aspects of it seem to be arousing greatest public interest.

Several points must be observed with respect to content analysis studies-- what weights, if any, should be assigned to the length of converge, position on the page, the page number itself, and so on.

Opinion Survey: Public opinion surveys and their various techniques, each of which has its merits and its limitations. Properly used, these different techniques can complement one another and produce a mosaic of data giving new insights into longstanding problems.

Depth Survey: This is nothing more than an effort to let the public tell the researcher, in its own words, how it views a company, a public issue, or a particular individual. In these surveys the researcher carefully avoids imposing his point of view on the respondent. Depth studies are useful in the earlier stages of programme in giving clues to the perimeters of a problem.

Good research takes time. And if undertaken must not be unnecessarily hurried, even if the findings are required in a hurry. It must take its own course with all the procedures completed fully and the analysis of data done properly to throw up the required leads to evolve the Public Relations strategy and programme.

How to use the tools?

It is not realistic to expect formal research studies to be part and parcel of the everyday routine in a department or counseling firm. There is simply not enough money to support such studies. But they can be helpful tools when employed at the right time by practitioners who make reasonable demands on them.

Good research takes time-- management often needs answers in a hurry. Management frequently feels it must have research results immediately if they are to be of any value in planning action programs. But a good research requires a reasonable time to organize, pre-test, execute, analyse, and write up.

Public relations problems are frequently elusive and may occasionally defy systematic research study. There is still plenty of room for the educated, intuitive guess in situations where events are moving fast, and there are critical variables influencing these events.

Evaluating research:

There are no clear-cut criteria by which management may evaluate the worth of a public relations research study. The boss cannot know whether a particular study meets the needs until there has been a chance to translate some the findings into action. In fact, initial reactions to a research study may change-- growing more or less favourable as the relevance of the findings is tested out in day-to-day operations.

Evaluation of research study is a complicated business. It would be very wrong to assume that top management has the training or resources for translating research findings into public relations programs. It is likely that a particular piece of research was bad when, in fact, his real problem was that he did not have the staff or the personal ability to translate research findings into successful programs.

Public relations research often deals with those frail and invisible entities--attitudes and information. Such data are by their very nature intangible and far more elusive than, for example, findings from advertising research studies whose data can be validated by comparison with subsequent sales figures, share of market data and so on.

New directions:

In the past, corporate public relations research programs concentrated their time and money on reaching certain predictable audiences thought to be of greatest importance to the corporation-- shareholder, employees and their families, customers, key government officials, the financial community, and other opinion leaders

But political and social forces that emerged in the late Sixties and early Seventies have changed this simple and safe way of categorizing the corporation's critical publics; and these forces, in turn, have redefined the focus of public relations research. Three massive social and political movements had profound impact on the corporate world and appeared for the first time on the agenda in board room where policy is shaped. These are:

a. A concern with protecting and improving our physical environment.
b. Consumerism (including concern about protecting investors)
c. Demands for upgrading the career opportunities for women and disadvantaged ethnic and racial groups.

These political ad social movements, and the resulting legislation that they generated, caused corporate public relations programs to become more "issue" oriented and less "public" oriented.

Today, PR researchers recognize that criteria previously thought to be sound for studying their publics-- place of residence, level of education and income, sex, and race--are no longer reliable indicators of an individual's lifestyle and his or her social and political, intellectual, and emotional orientation.

Example: In the areas of attitudes on environmental issues, the long-haired activist on a college campus may well agree with a conservative village housewife in campaigns to protect the environment and prevent companies from building new plants and facilities in a particular community.

The lebels 'politically conservative', 'liberal', 'right wing', 'leftist' no longer belong to a particular sub-groups in our population. And this complicates enormously the job of the public relations researcher in trying to identify key target groups whose attitudes might affect well-being of his or her organization.

Perhaps the single greatest challenge facing public relations researchers today is devising better early -warning networks help identify the still small and inarticulate public-interest movements that may one day impact on the company's future well-being.

Some companies are employing an in-house early-warning network to gather data on public attitudes towards them. They are looking to the observations and experiences of key employees as a source of their information. These employees often provide timely early warnings regarding new problems on public relations issues that are only beginning to yeast in the publics' mind.

Conclusion: The focus of public relations research has been changing from the study of traditional publics to a greater attention to the study of "issues' and how best to modify public attitudes on them.