Taking stock of corporate benchmarking practices: Panacea or Pandora's box?

Abstract

Benchmarking corporate communications/public relations (CC/PR) is an increasingly useful approach used by some CC/PR managers to demonstrate the “value” of their activities to sceptical organizational executives. This article describes a series of independent observations of a number of proprietary CC/PR benchmarking efforts which have been performed in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. between 1991–1993. As such, it is one of the first attempts to offer an assessment of the effectiveness of CC/PR management benchmarking and to suggest several avenues for potentially productive research on the topic. The article provides several robust reasons why CC/PR should be benchmarked, details several common myths about benchmarking CC/PR, describes the types of CC/PR benchmarking that can be performed, overviews the general processes used for performing CC/PR benchmarking, and identifies critical decisions which need to be considered prior to undertaking CC/PR benchmarking. Dr. Fleisher is an Associate Professor of Policy and Law in the School of Business and Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU), Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He is the director of the North American Public Affairs Research Group (NAPARG) located at WLU and serves on the boards of both Canadian and U.S. public affairs professional associations. Sara Burton is Manager, North American Public Affairs Research Group (NAPARG). She is currently involved in NAPARG's benchmarking research efforts with the CC/PR groups of several large Canadian organizations.