Visual Public Relations

Strategic Communication Beyond Text

Simon Collister, Sarah Roberts-Bowman, Simon Collister, Sarah Roberts-Bowman, Simon Collister, Sarah Roberts-Bowman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351662055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book brings together a broad and diverse range of new and radical approaches to public relations focussing on the increasingly vital role that visual, sensory and physical elements factors play in shaping communication. Engaging with recent developments in critical and cultural theories, it outlines how non-textual and non-representational forces play a central role in the efficacy and reception of public relations.

Challenging the dominant accounts of public relations which center on the purely representational uses of text and imagery, the book critiques the suitability of accepted definitions of the field and highlights future directions for conceptualizing strategic communication within a multi-sensory environment. Drawing on the work of global researchers in public relations, visual culture and communication, design and cultural theory, it brings a welcome inter-disciplinary approach which pushes the boundaries of public relations scholarship in a global cultural context.

This exciting analysis will be of great interest to public relations scholars, advanced students of strategic communication, as well as communication researchers from cultural, media and critical studies exploring PR as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

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Visual and spatial public relations

Strategic communication beyond text

Simon Collister and Sarah Roberts-Bowman

The inspiration for this book arises from a conference we organised in 2015 which set out to explore alternative perspectives on public relations – specifically focusing critical attention on the spatial, visual and performative dimensions of the field. The debates and conversations resulting from this event gave a clear indication that a further, deeper exploration of these dimensions of strategic communication would provide a valuable and timely contribution to the academic literature in two distinct ways.

Firstly, we believe that non-textual domains of media and communication have been left largely unexamined within the field of public relations and strategic communication. Starting an exploration of the visual and spatial aspects of the fields will play a significant role in closing – or at least, beginning to close – a conceptual gap in the literature. Secondly, such a project will initiate and encourage interdisciplinary thinking and approaches to public relations and strategic communication. As this chapter (and the collection itself) progresses the need to seek out and bridge conceptual divides with other, related fields, such as cultural and critical theories, design and anthropology will hopefully become clear.

In short, we are confident that by connecting broader perspectives on the visual and spatial dimensions of culture and media with public relations and strategic communication, a much-needed opportunity for furthering theories about, and research into, these fields can be developed.

This is particularly important in an increasingly complex and networked world in which traditionally distinct and disparate conceptual areas are becoming increasingly entwined. As will be argued in this chapter, thanks to rise of the internet, low-cost, multimedia-rich and location-based communication platforms the reality for strategic communication is that focusing on distinct channels or methods of communication (and communication management) is becoming increasingly problematic.

Based on this reality we argue that taking into account the wider visual and spatial domains of strategic communication will be crucial in allowing scholars to trace the parameters of and start to understand what contemporary media and communication scholarship could look like. Moreover, in so doing, the future directions for research and investigation can be identified and prioritised for further study,

Situating public relations and strategic communications in a socio-cultural context

In order to expand public relations and strategic communications’ theoretical and applied horizons it is necessary to situate the disciplines in a conceptual context which allows the scholars contributing to this collection to effectively bridge and connect public relations studies with wider bodies of knowledge from the fields of, in particular, cultural and critical theory, design, sociology and anthropology. This is of no small importance given the relatively recent incursion of public relations scholarship into more critical and cultural accounts of the field and, crucially, the body of knowledge that underpins it.

Such an approach places this text firmly within the wider – ongoing – project initiated by Ihlen and Van Ruler (2009) and pushed forward by Edwards and Hodges (2011) which seeks to situate public relations scholarship in a wider societal and cultural domain and move the study of public relations beyond the functional preoccupation of management approaches as articulated in the early days of public relations scholarship by authors such as Grunig and Hunt (1984). It is important to note, however, that this does not mean that public relations falls into a functional-societal binary mode, but instead offers a more complementary perspective. Such a sociological account of public relations should be understood as

not so much as an alternative [view of public relations] but as a macroview, one that is additional to the meso (management-orientated) and micro (people-oriented) views. PR as an academic discipline needs an understanding of how the PR function works and how it is influenced by and influences social structures

(Ihlen, Ruler, & Fredriksson, 2009: 11) [our emphasis]

Such approaches to public relations importantly recognise the role of social structures in shaping the practice and reception of strategic communication and have been effectively applied to investigate and account for a range of important societal issues concerning power, legitimacy and the construction of meaning in everyday life (Cottle, 2003; Davis, 2000, 2002; Demetrious, 2013; Edwards, 2012; Grunig, 2000; Heath, 2010; Heide, 2009; Holtzhausen & Voto, 2002; Ihlen et al., 2009; McKie & Munshi, 2007)

Despite the importance of this growing body of work, it tends to root itself theoretically in socially constructed epistemologies whereby the phenomenological nature of communication, its symbolic and linguistic meaning, is foregrounded (Edwards & Hodges, 2011: 3). As Collister (2015) asserts, in order to maintain parity with contemporary theoretical accounts of culture, communication and society, public relations scholarship must seek out and address a fuller range of structures that are at work shaping society.

‘Drawing on a neo-materialist ontology, Collister argues that when analysing the factors and forces structuring society it is much more powerful to start from a position of a ‘generalized symmetry’ (Callon, 1986: 200) between the materiality of the physical realm and the phenomenologically representative one; where ‘the said as much as the unsaid’ (Foucault, 1977: 195) becomes a central concern for the analysis of communication.¹

Taking this perspective as its tentative start point, the book argues for a revised, interdisciplinary approach to the field of public relations and strategic communication that addresses how the visual and spatial domains of communication can be understood as extending the theoretical and practical range of the field into broader and cross-disciplinary non-textual realms. In so doing, the book aims to bring a set of refreshing multi-disciplinary perspectives to public relations and strategic communication scholarship and, additionally, provide fertile applied insight on which communication practitioners can reflectively engage and use to inform future practice.

Why visual and spatial?

Given that the scale and range of scholarly areas which could be addressed when thinking about the ‘unsaid’ in strategic communications is potentially extensive, it has been necessary to focused this book’s attention on the two specific domains of image and space. These two areas have been selected due to the specific historical, conceptual and inter-disciplinary contexts in which this book originated, and which it now seeks to explore further.

First and foremost, the internet, and the digital media technology arising in parallel, has driven an exponential growth in visual (and multimedia) communication through the creation and sharing of images ‘of all kinds, from photographs to video, comics, art and animation’ (Mirzoeff, 2015: 6). The sheer proliferation in the use of images to mediate everyday life is, as Mirzoeff observes: ‘astonishing’ (ibid).

Larson (2015) notes that in 2017, 74 per cent of internet traffic is video (Larson, 2015) while in the same year there are on average 300 million photographs uploaded to the social network Facebook everyday (Anonymous, 2017)… While the ephemeral photo and video-based messaging platform, Snapchat, reports more than three billion ‘snaps’, i.e. images or videos, are created every day (Constine, 2017).

In addition to increased video efficacy, studies have demonstrated that Twitter posts containing images increase the likelihood if being shared with (i.e. ‘retweeted’), interacted with and saved by other users (Cooper, 2016). Similarly, Facebook posts that make use of imagery are likely to generate a 100 per cent increase in interaction among the social network’s users (Pinantoan, 2015) and online articles that selectively include images demonstrated on average a 100% increase in the of shares it receives compared to text-only article s (ibid).

This evidence for the quantitative transformation in visual communication, although arising from recent and largely web-based studies, is reinforced through older studies that point to the increased efficacy of visual communication based on the assessment of stronger, psychological effects. For instance, Naijar asserts a 300 per cent improvement in information recall for visual communication over oral communication (Najjar, 1998), while recognition of information from visual communication on average doubles compared with text (Endestad, Helstrup, & Magnussen, 2003; Stenberg, 2006).

These potentially powerful effects of visual communication, taken together with the growth and adoption of visual culture as a distinct field of study has allowed scholars from different disciplines to engage theoretically and analytically with images as vehicles for communication and meaning-making. In turn, this fosters a conceptual environment that opens up new opportunities for research and practice within the field of public relations and strategic communication.

The increase in adoption of digital technology is also a driving factor in the book’s interest in the role that space and place can play in shaping communication. The rise of GPS-enabled smartphones has created a situation whereby users produce, share and consume vast volumes of images, video and audio (as well as text) in real-time. Such media contains metadata, a type of data – often hidden or unseen by users – that expresses information pertaining to the physical environment, such as a user’s location, the date, time as well as the type of device being used.

This means that increasingly individual and collective communication in physical space can be tracked and represented remotely (Boczkowski, 2010; Newman, 2011; Revers, 2015). In turn, this produces a scenario whereby conventional notions of distinct (digital) communication and the physical environment in which it occurs become intimately related to produce a locative media (Frith, 2015; Revers, 2015).

With such a locative media increasingly playing a central role in creating and shaping the physical and social conditions in which communication is produced and consumed the book’s concerns with the visual and spatial can be brought together as a part of the conceptual field of affect theory. Here, affect refers to the ‘encounters’ and ‘senses’ (Gregg & Seigworth, 2009: 2) produced through inter-personal interactions between individuals, collective groups and the everyday material infrastructure of society.

From this perspective the book is keen to explore the notion of encounters with images and space as functioning as a form of ‘pre-communicative context’ whereby the visual, spatial and discourse environment surrounding or within which messages are produced and received play a vital role in influencing their reception, decoding or effect. Such a notion brings a number of cultural and philosophical fields into contact with the public relations discipline and opens up fertile research opportunities in both theory and applied practice. Moreover, while Cialdini (2016) has made initial steps towards this conceptual space in his recent work, pre-communication or ‘pre-suasion’ (Cialdini, 2016) as a line of scholarly enquiry remains largely overlooked in analyses of strategic communication.

Ultimately, these preceding developments, and the research opportunities they afford, bring to the fore the importance of addressing public relations and strategic communication studies from a number of different theoretical and practical stand-points. The next section of this chapter will set out the structure of the book and provide an overview of individual authors’ contribution to this conceptual exploration.

Structure of the book

The first part of the book explores the visual dimensions of public relations showing the growing importance of visuality to strategic communication practice and discourse. chapter two addresses the issue of visual meaning-making and public relations. Locating her discussion within the pictorial turn in modern society (Mitchell, 1994) Kirsten Kohrs puts forward a framework to understand how visual communication works from a strategic communication perspective. Setting out a comprehensive account of the visual dimensions of communication, taking in semiotics, anthropology, non-verbal cues, such as body language, and visual rhetoric, Kohrs addresses the key questions of what do images do and how do images work in order to build out a framework for understanding and analysing the strategic use of images in communication.

In chapter three, Ian Horton provides a (mostly unwritten) history of the role of comic books and illustration with public relations. The role of such media forms provide a much valued perspective on the ways in which novel and visual narrative forms were adopted by public education campaigns in the US and UK. While Horton argues for historically-relevant reading of the use of the comic form, he also highlights the importance on understanding the ways in which the communicative outcomes of the form have influenced the medium’s development – a notion which may well have contemporary parallels in digital multimedia communication.

Finally, Jon Cope and Mark Wells in chapter four look at data visualization, one of the most fertile grounds for adopting new approaches to statistical narratives. They take both an historical and theoretical perspective drawing on the work of Otto Neurath, one of the earliest and leading figures in visual communication and his work known as ‘isotypes’ (that is, showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Visual and spatial public relations: strategic communication beyond text
• PART 1 Visual dimensions of public relations
• PART 2 Spatial dimensions of public relations
• PART 3 Researching visual and spatial public relations
• Index