With visions it is quite a matter apart; quite a few people were seized by them and got celebrated for creating a new reality. Others were not able to draw a clear line between them and illusionary hallucinations and had to pay for it. Sometimes the transitions are fluent - from the Super Man to someone who embraces a carriage horse. But nowadays the matters are clear: Having a vision means having to see a doctor. We are too rational for that, are we not? We prefer relying on reasoned goals which do not remain in the sphere of metaphysical vagueness but pay tribute to cold calculation.
Apart from their psychiatric harmlessness, goals have the advantage over visions that they can be inserted into a chain of action. No sooner have they dissolved, they can be reinterperted as a means for a further goal. They can be recombined. As opposed to visions they give practice a structure. Visions in contrast make the invisible process. But however manifest goals may be; perfidity can be relied on; for goals require concentration, and they are relative. Goal conflicts can occur, and even the most ambitious plans might shrink into the hope to come out of it unscathed.
Let us take for instance the Marketing and the Public Relations Department of a company. Harmonious cooperation does not seem quite to be the phrase. The conflict of goals is caused by the fact that both departments will do two different jigsaw puzzles - except for one crucial element claimed by each department for itself: the target group, or, to be more precise, the divergent ideas that are associated with it.
From a marketing point of view, target groups are commercial persons to turn to, customers in short. As opposed to that, PR strategists identify target groups with the public. The difficulty is that the set of intersection is not considerable enough to reconcile marketing and PR. To put it oversubtly: Even in case one is neither acquiring customers nor winning the public opinion marketing and PR remain clearly detached, for their original Reason of Being is competing with each other. Maybe because they are tired of the constant quarreling over budgets and workrooms, senior executives like to talk about Integrated Corporate Communications and shake the marketing mix. Thus convinced of their intelligence they cooperatively lean back and allow the opponents to keep plotting and scheming against each other.
So we see target groups is a misleading term suggesting they are homogeneous social strata. But not only target group I, II, III etc. differ, but it is even unclear what makes a single target group. Of course we can formally resort to demography - but who would really dare consider the 24-49 year old people, men and women, unemployed and pensioners to be a united group? So we continue specifying and parcelling out new target part-groups, e.g. the female start up company founders with cellulitis and a latent desire for babies or the football fans who boldly drive a car while they are drunk. Social change (or its expectation) goes out of the way. Like political parties companies' chances to serve regulars are decreasing. New markets and voters must be developed, old ones are to be said goodbye to till they will be greeted lateron as the new ones. So the dynamics of goal-making adds up to the revolving door effect: Today's non-target groups must now be courted as tomorrow's target groups.
It is left to PR to do the impossible; for the target groups are as different and contradictory as the part-goals. They embody the fundamental difference between an information and a message, between what is said and what is meant, between intended addressee and collateral recipient. What is meant to please a special target group, just will not apply to the rest of the public; at best it will remain indifferent. Where growth is said, elsewhere pollution, social frigidity or scandal is understood. And at worst public attention is generated because one cannot do justice to everybody. Compassion will be missing. Therefore chief bankers' statements will cause only their their peers' ovations, but catcalls from the outside.
Corporate communications can tell a thing or two about it; it is about the shareholders and the stakeholders - the investors, brokers and speculators on the one side, the residents, the environmentalists, the trade unions on the other one. PR have reacted in a traditionally modern way, distributed the trouble and outsourced the Investor Relations. Now the boundary has been cemented. Who gives to whom when what information about what decision with what consequences with what intention? If no differences are made, the more important target groups will feel offended; if a difference is made, the other groups will feel alarmed, which can undermine credibility and jeopardize the existence of the company as well. In the end, everybody will dissatisfied.
Why target-groups are still stuck to? Well, for one thing the unknown must be given a name, and for another the creative aspects of finding target-groups can even be extended: We invent our own ones. Especially media programmes that are privately financed prove their TV viewers are modern YUPPIE layers disporting themselves at after work parties and making self-trivilization a way of life until they will be made redundant in their end thirties, too. These persons confuse being individual with being a member of that imaginary target-group. But it is in particular the political parties which pursue the target-groups most resolutely: As they are deemed to please everybody and to blame the smaller competitors for mere clientele policy, their public statements must reach that exact degree of semantic vagueness which just detaches twaddle from majority acceptability. As the political chat shows teach us, the scope is gradually shrinking.
Apart from their psychiatric harmlessness, goals have the advantage over visions that they can be inserted into a chain of action. No sooner have they dissolved, they can be reinterperted as a means for a further goal. They can be recombined. As opposed to visions they give practice a structure. Visions in contrast make the invisible process. But however manifest goals may be; perfidity can be relied on; for goals require concentration, and they are relative. Goal conflicts can occur, and even the most ambitious plans might shrink into the hope to come out of it unscathed.
Let us take for instance the Marketing and the Public Relations Department of a company. Harmonious cooperation does not seem quite to be the phrase. The conflict of goals is caused by the fact that both departments will do two different jigsaw puzzles - except for one crucial element claimed by each department for itself: the target group, or, to be more precise, the divergent ideas that are associated with it.
From a marketing point of view, target groups are commercial persons to turn to, customers in short. As opposed to that, PR strategists identify target groups with the public. The difficulty is that the set of intersection is not considerable enough to reconcile marketing and PR. To put it oversubtly: Even in case one is neither acquiring customers nor winning the public opinion marketing and PR remain clearly detached, for their original Reason of Being is competing with each other. Maybe because they are tired of the constant quarreling over budgets and workrooms, senior executives like to talk about Integrated Corporate Communications and shake the marketing mix. Thus convinced of their intelligence they cooperatively lean back and allow the opponents to keep plotting and scheming against each other.
So we see target groups is a misleading term suggesting they are homogeneous social strata. But not only target group I, II, III etc. differ, but it is even unclear what makes a single target group. Of course we can formally resort to demography - but who would really dare consider the 24-49 year old people, men and women, unemployed and pensioners to be a united group? So we continue specifying and parcelling out new target part-groups, e.g. the female start up company founders with cellulitis and a latent desire for babies or the football fans who boldly drive a car while they are drunk. Social change (or its expectation) goes out of the way. Like political parties companies' chances to serve regulars are decreasing. New markets and voters must be developed, old ones are to be said goodbye to till they will be greeted lateron as the new ones. So the dynamics of goal-making adds up to the revolving door effect: Today's non-target groups must now be courted as tomorrow's target groups.
It is left to PR to do the impossible; for the target groups are as different and contradictory as the part-goals. They embody the fundamental difference between an information and a message, between what is said and what is meant, between intended addressee and collateral recipient. What is meant to please a special target group, just will not apply to the rest of the public; at best it will remain indifferent. Where growth is said, elsewhere pollution, social frigidity or scandal is understood. And at worst public attention is generated because one cannot do justice to everybody. Compassion will be missing. Therefore chief bankers' statements will cause only their their peers' ovations, but catcalls from the outside.
Corporate communications can tell a thing or two about it; it is about the shareholders and the stakeholders - the investors, brokers and speculators on the one side, the residents, the environmentalists, the trade unions on the other one. PR have reacted in a traditionally modern way, distributed the trouble and outsourced the Investor Relations. Now the boundary has been cemented. Who gives to whom when what information about what decision with what consequences with what intention? If no differences are made, the more important target groups will feel offended; if a difference is made, the other groups will feel alarmed, which can undermine credibility and jeopardize the existence of the company as well. In the end, everybody will dissatisfied.
Why target-groups are still stuck to? Well, for one thing the unknown must be given a name, and for another the creative aspects of finding target-groups can even be extended: We invent our own ones. Especially media programmes that are privately financed prove their TV viewers are modern YUPPIE layers disporting themselves at after work parties and making self-trivilization a way of life until they will be made redundant in their end thirties, too. These persons confuse being individual with being a member of that imaginary target-group. But it is in particular the political parties which pursue the target-groups most resolutely: As they are deemed to please everybody and to blame the smaller competitors for mere clientele policy, their public statements must reach that exact degree of semantic vagueness which just detaches twaddle from majority acceptability. As the political chat shows teach us, the scope is gradually shrinking.
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