Reading this article entitled PR is not Marketing's Stepchild had me deciding to be a little more upfront about my frustrations with the current practices adopted by so many people who employ corporate communications professionals 'to help put the company's communications in place'.

I don't know how many of you working for client-side businesses in the PR industry often feel frustrated when your bosses completely ignore what's printed on your job description sheet and assign you editorial duties like 'checking for English grammar', or 'making the sentence look more branding-friendly' (whatever that means), or, 'ensuring the logos stay in the right place', or 'writing a press release' and 'making sure that particular release gets adequate coverage in the papers'. How many of you get hoodwinked into the idealistic territory of making 'strategic public relations decisions' if you sign in to become a corporate communications professional in a company, only to find out that your superiors are not able to connect the dots that links marketing and PR as mutually supportive , but essentially separate functions.

It seems that in the local business arena,the PR professional inevitably suffers. Old school managers find it hard to understand the proper functions of the PR department, and for some reason, we're the promoters for the company. And to top it up, so many of us are stuck in a deadend reporting to Marketing Managers who're unable to distinguish between the marketing communications for a product, and the branding for the company that helps to elevate the brand promise of that particular product. Or perhaps, it's really a matter of semantics, but as long as there are labels which carry the word 'communications' in them, the responsibility gets inevitability to Public Relations.

'Marketing Communications'. Communications. Hmm… it's a communications function. So I'm going to call the PR/Corp communications Manager, and ask him/her, 'Eh what are you doing to communicate the status of this product to my customers? What strategies do you what to do?'

Sheesh. You tell me. Give me your instructions. I'll support you. Right now, I'm here, trying to make sense of that piece of dishevelled graphical disaster you call a product advertisement. Woops, that corporate logo, it's out of place, it's not supposed to look like that. You can't put it there. We've outlined the guidelines for your reference, can you please follow that. Hey, I've got to get back to my annual report, to my CEO interviews, to my article submissions. And then I've got to get that media tour and media skills workshop out of the way.

'I know all these things are important, but I need your direction in completing the sales cycle. You need to give me a direction for my product.'

Excuse me. I thought You're the Marketing Person In Charge? Or since when did this become a game of pass the ball?

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Or maybe it's just a very Malaysian thing. It happens all the time I guess.

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And then I read this, 'What Public Relations Is Not' and I wondered why is it, with so many proper write ups on what the vocation entails available online, we're still so bloody confused.