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This paper aims to examine the marketing strategies designed by three innovative early 1900s food companies. It traces the coordination of these businesses’ research funding, advertising, direct mail and promotional tactics to show how they intersected and impacted consumers and health professionals in the period when scientists were first able to quantify the relationship between good health and food. The paper analyzes internal company documents, advertisements and marketing materials from Knox Gelatine, Borden and Sunkist.

Research for this paper benefited from the author’s unlimited access to the private documents of the Knox Gelatine Company and its executives. These documents were analyzed chronologically and thematically. They chronicled the company’s attempts to influence the medical world and the ways it cultivated home economists. The paper also used publicly available digitized documents from Sunkist and Borden. The paper would benefit from further detailed analysis of these documents to parse Knox’s targeting by race and ethnicity.

In the 1920s, Knox, Borden and Sunkist developed a marketing strategy which leveraged a new class of experts – the hundreds of thousands of medical professionals, home economists, teachers and government agents who advised American women. By distributing specific laboratory research on the nutritional benefits of their products to this emerging class of health professionals and the consumers who trusted them, these companies developed relationships with opinion leaders designed specifically to influence product sales.

This research benefited from access to the private documents of Knox Gelatine Company which divulge the company’s attempts to influence the medical world and cultivate home economists. The paper would benefit from further analysis of these documents to parse the company’s targeting by race and ethnicity as well as a deeper comparison to companies that tried to work with health professionals unsuccessfully and companies that adopted this tactic in the household products or tobacco area. Opportunities also exist to do a fuller analysis of variations in food marketing by rural versus urban as well as race.

By reconstructing the sequencing and content of these three companies’ 1920s marketing strategies, this research uncovers a form of early 20th century food marketing directed at health and science professionals which has been neglected in advertising histories.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a historical development of public relations from its early days until 1970. The study aims to show that in the early stages of development public relations was closely linked with public opinion research.

A historical content analysis is used to establish a “story of identity” through a review of selected articles from Public Opinion Quarterly from 1937 to 1970.

A clear finding is that public relations was once an integral part of public opinion science but later changed its focus to the management field, interested in reaching different publics. From the very beginning public relations was a subject of academic interest.

This paper has a few limitations; one that stands out is that selected articles were analysed from only one journal, which does not offer the recent material (after 1970 and especially from the 1990s). At the end, the paper raises some questions, which should aid the discussion about the identity crisis of public relations discipline (and managerial function) in the postmodern era.

The paper attempts to cover the gap in an interactive relationship between two disciplines: communication studies and public relations. It contributes to the knowledge of historical development of public relations as an academic discipline.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between organizations and their PR firms during crisis situations. It contributes to the field by identifying the role of communication consultants in contemporary organizational crises, tasks they are entrusted by their clients, as well as providing their perspective on current crisis communication practice and its future development.

The research is based on 13 semi-structured in-depth interviews with two groups of senior staff in 11 Croatian PR agencies: CEOs, directors, managing partners and senior consultants, all in charge of their clients’ crisis communication projects.

The research results suggest that PR firms define crisis differently than their clients, who tend to consider every risk a crisis, which causes a significantly broadened scope of work for their PR firms. The findings also suggest crises to be periods when new PR firm–client relations are often established and caution PR firms to balance between openly expressing their opinion when unfavorable for their clients and providing the best advice possible to achieve a sustainable business model with the clients that they consult.

This research provides rare insight into crisis communication consulting practice, especially consultant–client relations during crises. Methodologically, it includes a representative group of senior communication practitioners acting as consultants and can provide the management of PR firms and scholars valuable insight into the current and future trends of the crisis communication field in Croatia.

The aim of this work is to explore Edward L. Bernays' early evolution in thought concerning the rationale for public relations and to briefly discuss how these emergent ideological concepts have proven foundational for contemporary public relations.

Bernays' ideological development in the decade after the First World War is traced through: his very early tactical work; his exposure to significant writings concerning the use of persuasion to manage the masses; and his own writings.

Bernays, widely considered a pioneer in the field of public relations, exhibited a somewhat halting evolution in thought concerning the role of the new public relations professional. From 1920 through 1927, he normally described the public relations counsel as using propaganda to move masses toward the acceptance of good causes. However, by the end of the decade, his concept of the public relations person shifted toward emphasizing using propaganda as a pro‐social mechanism to convey the ideas of minority voices to targeted audiences. The latter view is a precursor to modern‐day understandings of public relations as an endeavor that attempts to build mutually beneficial relationships between a client and its relevant audiences.

This paper offers a distinctive look at how, during a crucial decade, a pathfinder in US public relations developed rationales for the emergent field. The exploration of his evolving ideology provides a deeper view of how Bernays contributed to enduring concepts of a socially constructive practice of public relations.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the social debate on women, health and smoking in the New York Times from 1870 until 1929. The paper aimed to establish whether smoking for women was a form of oppression and whether it was publicly known that smoking is harmful in decades preceding the “Torches of Freedom” campaign run by Edward L. Bernays. This criticism for engineering women’s smoking, and thus harming women’s health up to today causes harm to the reputation of the public relations (PR) industry.

Articles were analysed per decade and a total of 294 articles from the New York Times was analysed. The coverage was analysed using two themes, smoking and health and women and smoking and discourse analysis have been carried out on articles in these themes to explore what was known of smoking and whether the social perception of women smoking was oppressive and could be seen as a woman’s issue that “Torches of Freedom” addressed.

Findings show that it was not known that cigarettes were harmful to health and that smoking can be seen as constituting part of women’s oppression in the US before the “Torches of Freedom” campaign. The oppression of women who smoked intensified during the 1920s and Bernays’ Torches of Freedom campaign directly addressed an existing social issue rather than engineering a campaign and manipulating women to start smoking.

The paper highlights the revolutionary potential in Bernays’ campaign. This could inspire researchers and consumers to keep on critically reflecting on PR campaigns while still appreciating any progressive agenda they might contribute to. Simultaneously, PR practitioners may take away from the article that a message of social relevance may just be more memorable than the advertised brand itself.

This paper engages with the coverage of the New York Times, a newspaper that is often mentioned in the context of the “Torches of Freedom” campaign success and explores in detail what the debate on smoking, health and women were in nearly 60 years preceding the much-criticised campaign.

The purpose of the article is to examine whether, if Bernays can be cast as “Dr Jekyll”, the personification of “good”, respectable public relations, and Goebbels as “Mr Hyde”, “evil”, disreputable propaganda, a comparison of their writing and work provides an insight into public relations as an activity distinct from propaganda or rather adds weight to the conclusion that both are behaviours of “self-presentation for attention and advantage”.

A comparative analysis of writings and work of contemporaries, Bernays and Goebbels, gathered from original documents, speeches and interviews from the 1920s to the mid-1940s, as well as secondary academic and historical sources, was carried out. The analysis of their views on propaganda and “public relations” was organised using the point-by-point method.

The findings support the conclusion that both activities are behaviours of “self-presentation for attention and advantage”. For Bernays and Goebbels, public relations and propaganda were always self-advantaging communication that drew attention to the positive values and behaviours of the interests they represented and masked the negative ones.

There are striking parallels between contemporaries, Bernays and Goebbels, including working in public opinion management for their respective governments and embracing propaganda as a means of “engineering consent”. Yet, while Bernays has been lauded as the “father of public relations” and “the PR profession's first philosopher and intellectual”, Goebbels is remembered as a “master manipulator”, “probably the most overt and arguably the most important, exponent of propaganda in history”. To the researcher's knowledge, there are no other point-by-point analyses of their work with a view to distinguishing public relations as an activity distinct from propaganda.

The paper traces negative and limiting media depictions of public relations (PR) to their origins in the 1920s in order to determine whether modern media characterizations of “public relations” are new or a legacy of the past.

A qualitative content analysis was used in order to look more deeply at media characterizations of public relations. The New York Times and Time magazine were chosen to sample because of their dominance and unique reflection of the era, respectively.

Reporting about “public relations” was primarily fair. Early practitioners were often quoted defining the profession, including “great men” of PR history and more common practitioners. These practitioners of PR are as much to blame for confounding the terms “public relations” and “press agent” as are the media of the 1920s.

This historical study sheds a light on and provides context for both the media and society's understanding of public relations today.

While much research has looked at media portrayals and public perceptions of the public relations field, few if any have traced attitudes about the profession to the decade when the term “public relations” was first popularized. The paper remedies this deficit.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the practices of strategic crisis communication of most successful Croatian companies and the perception of these practices from the perspective of media. A framework of reactive strategies is applied to determine how Croatian companies from five major industries would communicate during crisis situations and how their communication is interpreted within the media as a group that conveys and presents their behavior and communication to the broader public.

A quantitative survey among 60 individuals in charge of communications in Croatian companies was conducted to identify which strategies they are likely to use when in crisis situations. In-depth interviews with 20 journalists regularly reporting on these companies were undertaken to determine their perception and experiences regarding how these companies would communicate during crisis situations.

Croatian companies are likely to communicate un-strategically, passively and without any risk. Journalists see the communication of the companies even more passive and reactive which seriously influences the manner they report about these companies during crisis situations.

Although 60 companies and 20 journalists both represent a significantly representative sample in Croatian terms, the study provides an insight into only Croatian corporate environment. Conducting the research in different surroundings and other countries could provide additional insight. Nevertheless, the analyzed variables that influenced the selection of strategies provide notable insight for drawing conclusions on this subject.

Besides showing how analyzed companies are likely to communicate during crises, this paper provides an insight into the media’s perception of this communication. The research has shown that the media sees their communication as more passive and reactive than it actually is, which implicates a serious need of shift in communication patterns if these companies want to strive to gain mutual understanding and remotely positive attitude from the media during crisis situations.

A significant catalyst in global economic success has been the information revolution. The Internet, in particular, has facilitated a vast increase in the quantity of available information and multimedia, in general, has allowed corporate players to dramatically increase their market share by exploiting new channels of persuasion, inducing the consumption of yet more goods and services. Globalisation has enabled the discovery of new cultural influences, often transformed by marketers into yet another sales device. Marketers have routinely employed a number of psychological techniques with the cynical intention of subverting human emotions into a marketing tool. Beginning with Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, who has been credited with pioneering these methods in the 1920's, a technologically‐aided ‘spinning’ of the ‘truth’ continues to be employed in the private and public sphere today. It has been alleged that governments have favoured such techniques in order to reinforce support for the global economy; whilst at the same time their own susceptibility to manipulation and coercion by the global forces of corporatism has resulted in action taken against the wider public interest. It is suggested in this article that societies need to re‐empower themselves against the global information manipulators who comprise a powerful elite. In order to realise a reflective, rational and truly reciprocal society, corporate practices must be subject to stringent statutory control and, finally, demonstrate a commitment to ethical, conscionable behaviour.