The Importance and The Role of Marketing Public Relations: A Research on Smes

Today, heightened competition is directing firms towards more and more communication works like advertising, public relations and personal sales. Under these circumstances, lately, firms have started to work on public relations within marketing activities in addition to customer relationship management and brand creation. Generally, public relations are studied in two basic sections as corporate public relations and marketing public relations. So, in this work, in order to shed light to the relation between marketing and public relations and to investigate the role of the marketing public relations (MPR) concept, the development and actual place of the MPR is displayed by a literature review. Moreover, the point of view and the opinions of the professionals will also be shown in this study using the focus group technique where a sample of marketing directors of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) situated in Istanbul, actives in different sectors is gathered together in 3 groups to discuss and to provide us insights about the subject.