Ethical Segmentation of Publics and Relationship Building in the Global Context

As aforementioned, public relations is ethical when decisions can be justified. To do this, public relations’ definition should be revisited. Public relations consists of two parts: publics segmentation and relationship building. Because organizations have limited resources, they cannot build relationships with everyone and ought to segment and prioritize certain publics with whom they would build relationships to help organizations make more effective decisions. As public relations practitioners are the boundary spanners to be entrusted with the expertise to predict how to best achieve the optimal outcomes ethically for both the organization and its publics, it is of crucial importance that they systematically follow some principles to predict how to best reach their expected outcomes ethically.

In risk situations, public relations practitioners are advised to engage in communication to empower the recipients of a message in order to make an ethical decision which would optimize the outcomes of all affected parties. However, ethical decision-making is challenged by many obstacles. For example, an organization may seek to keep the public informed and seek consent from them before making an ethical decision, but what the public consents to may not necessarily optimize the outcome for all affected parties. What public relations practitioners predict to be the most optimal outcomes for both parties and the approaches taken to reach the expected outcomes could be challenging. Applying this globally could pose even more ethical challenges.