Hey guys.. I hope you had fun reading my intro blog. I know there was not much going on previously, a normal one where I wanted to give you a highlight on my internship days and what to look forward in my next blogs.In this post, I am going to talk about the wonder it does when you mix public relations and marketing. At the right portion, it will give you an amazing result.

For an educational institution like Curtin Malaysia, looking into both PR and marketing while executing them simultaneously is essential. We have to be heavy in marketing in order to attract more students, but we also have to be aware of the messages we are sending to the prospective students (also, current students) on uni experience, benefits and other things they can get from studying with Curtin Malaysia. In this case, marketing has flocked event schedules while PR has a line up of write-ups to be done.
One of the marketing events that I partook in was the “Academic Open Day”. This was the event prepared by the marketing department as a small showcase for prospective students in and around Miri area. For this event both departments combined together, then only I could clearly differentiate marketing and public relations.

As part of the marketing duty, we had to trigger the willingness of kids to study at Curtin Malaysia taking courses based on their interests. We also included corners to highlight the strength of the university and also courses offered where kids can experience and be interactive with it, such as the green screen from the Humanities Department and VR corner for a campus tour. This is a hard-selling point.

On the other hand, PR is doing its soft-selling. At this event, we should be able to approach the students and engage them in interesting storytelling which later would draw their interest towards the university. We talked about how important a certain course for an ever-growing job industry, how lively their uni experience can be, how would they find the surrounding, and more – of course with given facts and current students’ testimonial. We also prepared press releases and contents on the event for our social media page.

It was a tiring day but a fruitful one. Everything is clear, the thin line between PR and marketing that people always get confused with is pristine to me. What I got: PR and marketing have to go hand-in-hand. There is no superiority, just priorities based on the organisation. For my office, they would like to attract more students, so marketing is a heavy element then will be topped up with PR in delivering the message to those future students.

This is how my day went at the Academic Open Day..

Watch for my next blog and see what I have to say about PR-ing university students. Hihihi :p

Signing off,

-Shima