Serendipidy

     While I was doing my research for the "Planning and Communication Skills for PR" assignment at the beginning of this year, I realised that the very first of the 10 steps model (or 12 in later editions)  for planning public relations campaigns developed by Anne Gregory represent in fact a method of inducing creativity.
   
     The first three steps in the model (part of the situational analysis) are: the external environmental analysis, the internal environmental analysis, and the stakeholder and publics analysis. The first one, most commonly represented by the PEST (Political, Economical, Social, Technological) analysis, essentially presupposes gathering all the possible information about everything that is happening on the outside of the organisation: governments, laws, public opinion, new findings, economical statuses, future events, tendencies, and so on. The internal environmental analysis (mostly represented by the SWOT - Strenghts, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats - analysis) reflects on the situation of the organisation: the financial power, the corporate reputation, corporate brand, brand communities, as well as the potential impact of the exterior on the organisation and vice-verse (the Opportunities and Threats mostly being determined by the PEST analysis) and the list continues. Then, the stakeholders and public analysis, the process where the organisation identifies what groups of individuals are more likely to be influenced by the actions of it, according to their desires and expectancies.
    
     As soon as I have finished the research on this particular stage, I was surprised to find that this process of, essentially, getting informed about everything that surrounds and in the same time, represents the company per se, as well as who are the people who are and the ones that might be interested of the product/service that the organisation is intending to promote, has sparked off my creativity process. Having the adequate knowledge of all the above-mentioned has triggered a web of connections between the external status, the internal status, the target, and the product I had to promote. Ideas of creative solutions started racing in my mind so fast that I was afraid of losing them if I didn't write them down as quick as possible.

     This is my personal theory regarding creativity: Facilitating connections, in all directions, between the first three steps of the situational analysis and the product/service the organisation is willing to promote through thorough information gathering can lead to creative thinking.

  



 My quest throughout the dissertation is to further test this hypothesis, to prove the importance of creativity in the PR sphere, as well as to find training methods of inducing creativity in public relations programmes.