PR Strategy and Application: Managing Influence

PR Strategy and Application is a comprehensive text that situates public relations in a twenty-first-century context, as a set of tools not just for the advertising executive and the reputation manager, but also for the activist, the diplomat, the crisis manager, and the homeland security officer.

Coombs and Holladay offer clear explanations of the traditional role of PR, while also including extensive discussions of exciting contemporary issues often neglected in other texts, including transparency, corporate social responsibility, reputation management, activism, risk communication, and social marketing. The authors' broad approach includes both corporate and non-corporate uses of public relations and expands traditional thinking about who practices public relations.

PR Strategy and Application demonstrates a strong, consistent focus on ethics that challenges readers to critically examine public relations techniques. Essential reading for students and professionals, this book provides a strong foundation for the fundamentals of public relations while exploring significant emerging disciplines of the field.

This textbook is unique in its focus on how public relations impacts society. This is a minor or assumed topic in other textbooks. In addition to having effects of PR as it main focus, the book will include cases and ethical challenges in each chapter and cover in-depth a number of topics that are seldom considered elsewhere (e.g. the internet, International, public policy). The focus of such a text is on discussion, not answers, making it ideal for fostering classroom discussion.

Classroom Features:

1. Discussion Questions

2. Suggested Readings

3. Case Studies to be used for Class Analysis and Discussion

4. Recommended Viewing: DVDs that can be used to illustrate key ideas covered in the chapter. Not all chapters will have this feature

5. Sample Exercises

W. Timothy Coombs is Professor of Corporate Communication at Eastern Illinois University.  He is the author of Code Red in the Boardroom (2006), Today’s Public Relations (2006), and It's Not Just PR (with Sherry Holladay, 2007), and co-editor (with Sherry Holladay) of the Handbook of Crisis Communication (Wiley-Blackwell 2010).

Sherry J. Holladay is Professor of Corporate Communication at Eastern Illinois University. She is the author of numerous articles related to corporate communication.