The Four Models of Public Relations

Public relations have been regarded as an important tool in maintaining and enhancing the relationships between an organisation and its publics. There are different models of public relations that organisation adopt to reach mutual understandings between their publics or to demonstrate its organisational desire to its publics. Grunig and Hunt (1984) define the communication theory as a fundamental tool of enhancing and maintaining the relationship between an organisation and its publics, which can assist an organisation to address different issues efficiently and effectively. Grunig and Hunt have developed four theoretical communication models of public relations which are press agentry, public information, two-way symmetric and two-way asymmetric (Grunig & Hunt, 1984). This essay will focus on the Grunig and Hunt’s four communication models and give examples of each model to identify different applications in different business practices.

Press agentry model has been regarded as the focus of the one-way communication model since practitioners adopt this model to obtain publicity and acceptance through different media channels. The main concept of this model is to function as propaganda to deliver an organisation’s faith to publics in order to draw attentions and interests from the publics (Grunig & Hunt, 1984). Recently Apple launched their new application of Apple Maps in competing with Google’s android Maps through a press conference in March. The updated iOS system contains the latest application of Apple map that is claimed to be “an entire new mapping solution from the group up” (Apple unveils ‘next generation’ Macbook Pro and Apple Maps, 2012). The new launch of Apple maps has caused consumers’ attention and interests and it may further bring Apple more market shares after the new launch of Apple Maps (Apple has revealed plans to drop Google Maps from its smartphone in favour of its own virtual street directory, 2012). It can be seen that Apple has adopted