El retorno de la inversión en las relaciones públicas, una revisión bibliográfica

Abstract

This research has carried out a systematized bibliographic review to analyze how the return on investment (ROI) in communication, and specifically in public relations, has been theoretically treated. The financial measurement of communication outcomes represents a topic of great interest for the academic community because organizations need to know the real results of their communication efforts. At the same time, economic measurement turns out to be a variable that can be understood by the management of the organizations and allows them to know where the money is being spent. However, despite more than forty years of theoretical work, a homogeneous nor globally accepted solution has not yet been achieved. The bibliographical study of the return on investment in communication, and especially in public relations, shows the difficulty of turning the success of the activity of public relations professionals into money. On the one hand, there is no doubt that the ROI is directly related to financial data; on the other hand, in communication it is usual to introduce non-economic values to evaluate the results achieved. The bibliographical results indicate in the first instance that, on a quantitative level, the economic aspect is predominant in the calculation of the ROI (96.3%). In this context measurement by equivalence in advertising (AVE) is an economic model as used by professionals as it is rejected by researchers. It is based on comparing the cost of a presence in the media with the equivalent cost if it were advertising. Nevertheless, this model is criticized for the differences between advertising (a completely controlled message) and publicity (a message that is altered by the media). However, taking the previous works about the subject, it can be said that the evaluation of public relations actions can be dealt with from the perspective of opportunity cost: the loss of other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. In this way, the evaluation of the cost of a traditional advertising action can be compared with the cost of other options available to public relations professionals. For example, native advertising is a resource of public relations teams whose cost can easily be compared to traditional advertising. Native advertising is a paid promotion that matches the audience's consumption and contains information of interest to the advertiser. Hence opinions that reject the advertising equivalence measurement (AVE) are not justified when the product generated by public relations has the characteristics of native advertising because in both cases (advertising vs. native advertising) the professional can exactly compare the investment made with one instead of the other.