Discussions on Public Relations and Marketing : Trends in Spanish University Degrees . Comparative Study on Portugal , the US and the UK

The following is a reflection on Spanish undergraduate studies that combine the concepts of marketing and public relations. Sharing origins and often functions and specialists, both concepts have run parallel paths that have merged on multiple occasions. This evolution has been studied from different points of view. Initially, marketing experts included PR techniques as an additional tool to grant it a greater specific instrumental relevance over time. On the other hand, PR scholars have tried to dissociate themselves from marketing in order acquire an independent position within the field of communication. In Spain, these conceptual differences are currently blurred due to the creation of new university degrees and double degrees combining both disciplines. This trend is evidenced within the Spanish university market which, throughout this article, will be compared to other markets, namely the American and the British ones, as a scientific reference for both concepts, and to the Portuguese one, given its geographical proximity. We will reflect on the reasons that have led the Spanish university market to combine both concepts and to offer official studies that include them in their nomenclature, far from the historical tradition in this country, where studies in public relations have been related to the 1 Profesora Titular en el área de Comunicación Audiovisual y Publicidad en la Universidade de Vigo. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2685-0604. 2 Profesora Titular en el área de Comunicación Audiovisual y Publicidad en la Universidade de Vigo. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3076-6037. 3 Profesor Titular en el área de Comunicación Audiovisual y Publicidad en la Universidade de Vigo. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1922-9644. REVISTA INTERNACIONAL DE RELACIONES PÚBLICAS, No 19, VOL. X [Páginas 157-178] 2020 158 ISSN: 2174-3681 field of communication, while those in marketing have been related to the field of economics. The identification of this trend in the job market of organisational communication professionals poses new challenges to training institutions, especially to universities.

field of communication, while those in marketing have been related to the field of economics. The identification of this trend in the job market of organisational communication professionals poses new challenges to training institutions, especially to universities.

INTRODUCTION
Public relations and marketing share significant features: origin and period of emergence, a parallel development, and the fact that they make sense when they are practiced within the framework of an organisation. However, the former is responsible for creating relations and generating goodwill for an organisation, while the latter deals with consumers and selling products and services. Their managerial functions overlap and use analogous communication tools to reach different audiences.
Public relations seek to create a favourable environment before carrying out transactional negotiations involved in marketing, hence their interaction, as pointed out by Philip Kotler, when deciding to use the support of public relations in marketing, to the extent of stating that public relations are one of the "Ps" in marketing strategy. With this "P", public relations efforts are integrated within marketing actions and, within the corporate organisational chart, they would be placed in the marketing department.
It can also be interpreted (Caro and Elosúa, 2004) that this wording implies restricting public relations to the purely commercial sphere, which contradicts PR's managerial nature. Thus, marketing could be understood as a tool at the service of public relations, an idea that could be illustrated through situations such as the difficulty to access the advertised products due to a bad distribution policy, generating frustration among consumers and prompting rejection towards the manufacturer. Similarly, an excessive price increase without an equal increase in quality would lead to firms no longer hiring that service, discrediting the ISSN: 2174-3681 company that offers it. Reducing a product's quality or quantity would not only generate mistrust towards that product, but would also cause the manufacturer to lose credibility, etc. Authors such as Arceo (1988) point out that marketing is almost exclusively salesoriented, while public relations, or communication, have a wider scope. Sanz-de-la-Tajada (1986) states that public relations have a managerial role and rely directly on general management, while admitting their contributions to marketing, but always in an indirect way and through communication. Ehling, White and Grunig explain that difference more explicitly: "Public relations and marketing both are essential functions for a modern organization. Marketing managers identify markets for the products and services of the organization. Then, they supervise marketing communication programs to create and sustain demand for the products and services. Public relations managers, in contrast, supervise programs for communication with publicsgroups of people who organize themselves when an organization affects them, or they affect it. Markets are can arise within many stakeholder categories -such as employees, communities, stockholders, governments, members, students, suppliers and donors, as well as consumer" (1992: 384).
According to Rey, Zambrano and Zambrano (2015), we are dealing with an integration process between both disciplines, as companies have shifted from a model of coexistence between marketing communication and organisational communication to a model of integration that combines them in a higher unit: integrated communication, understood as a company's communicative actions carried out to interact with its different audiences. Thurlow, Sévigny and Dottori (2018: 139) agree on this when stating that "as the marketing public relations disciplines become intertwined, there is a need for public relations and marketing to share appropriate roles by mutual consent and understanding, rather than by only trying to differentiate the domains between the two".
Perhaps this market trend justifies the current implementation of degrees and double degrees in Spanish universities with both designations in their nomenclature.

Ties between both concepts: Marketing and PR
In 1989, scholars of marketing and public relations held a meeting to try to clarify concepts and functions within management. While they agreed on the use of the same techniques to build and maintain relations with audiences, the relation was quite different, although they concluded that PR and marketing should work together in order to achieve organisational targets (Broom, Lauzen and Tucker, 1991: 124), "Marketing builds and maintains a market for an organization's goods and services, whereas public relations builds and maintains hospitable social and political environments. Both marketing and public relations are essential to organizational survival and success". Ehling, White and Gruning (1992: 358) think that "marketing and public relations they should complement each other, but the assignment of organisational responsibilities are murky, often overlapping and frequently conflicting". Other authors delved further (Kotler, Mindak, 1978;Lauzen, 1992;Moriarty, 1994;Gruning, 1998;Hutton, 2001Hutton, , 2010Hallahan, 2007), until the concept of integrated marketing communications (IMC) was developed in the 80s as a combination of all communicative marketing efforts (Estanyol, 2012;Anantachart, 2006). Twenty years later (Estanyol, 2012: 56), "IMC is still critically discussed and in the Spanish context, relations between marketing and PR departments have not settled into a stable marriage and fundamental disagreements remain". Within this framework, the increasing collaboration between both disciplines is pointed out (Daymon and Holloway, 2004;Kent and Taylor, 2002), although this collaboration is limited to the corporate world (Estanyol, 2012). This is an existing trend according to the Global Communications Report (2017), where internal departments and external agencies agree in the increasing closeness between both: "almost half of PR professionals and more than 60% of marketing executives believe that their two disciplines will become more closely aligned in the next five years.
Some think PR will dominate. Others think it will be dominated." Estanyol reflects this stating that "the relationship between marketing and public relations is considered essential and this may be because PR actions help achieve marketing objectives, or vice versa, because PR ISSN: 2174-3681 strategy needs the support of marketing actions to achieve a specific communication objective" (2012: 86).
This piece of information is also interpreted from another point of view, as nowadays there are many PR companies affected by the intrusion of companies closer to marketing and business management, specifically consultancy firms. According to the article published in PRComunicación on the 4 th of July 2018, large multinational companies are starting to change their business model and occupy new sectors, entering the world of consultancy and even in companies specialised in human resources. "This is due to the fact that large multinational companies are struggling greatly to compete in the world of corporate, financial or mass consumption communication, due to a change in the market trend, which has tipped the scales in favour of local agencies" 4 .

State of affairs in Spain
Historically, both disciplines have gone hand in hand and have developed extensively since the 20th century, and scholars often defend that their origins are even more remote. The However, scientific journals written and edited in Spain would not appear until the 90s, when the ESIC (Business and Marketing School) launched the journal Revista Española de Investigación en Marketing (1997). Other journals would appear, such as IPMARK, a fortnightly journal on marketing and communication; Anuncios, a weekly journal on advertising and marketing; Estrategias, the first Spanish magazine specialising in direct and promotional marketing; Marketing+ventas, a journal focused on the world of economics, marketing and sales; or key websites with up-to-date news on the field of marketing, such as Marketingnews or Puromarketing. With their integration into academia, their research activity has increased significantly.
Public relations have a similar history. This discipline was born in the 20th century in the United States and arrived in Europe after World War II, always subject to North American influence, which has imposed its theory, techniques and research on the field to this day.

Such is their influence that Spanish scholars still follow the North American and British
examples -due to closeness-, largely deviating from Central European theories that developed greatly during the past century, even though the dictatorship clearly conditioned the access of public relations in Spain, given the economic and freedom limitations of the regime.
The first book written and published in Spain would appear later in the 70s (Noguero, 2004;Arceo Vacas, 2006) Estanyol's study (2012), Spanish PR practitioners consider that the relationship with marketing departments is necessary (2012), states that: "the interviewees discussed the evolution of marketing professionals' knowledge of public relation as evidenced by this comment from years ago in marketing departments, investment in communication was assigned almost completely to advertising, whereas nowadays marketing professionals are aware of the benefits of investing in public relations. They also have a similar opinion of positive change from previous marketing departments 'were quite clear about advertising and left little space for public relations. But this tendency has changed in recent years. Today, marketing professionals are aware that investment in public relations offers returns, as well as affordable costs" (2012: 205).
This trend within the Spanish professional field seems to confirm the tendency towards uniting both disciplines, leaving behind the theoretical approach in which public relations and marketing were rivals. Is this due to the university market perceiving the professional trend and is therefore trying to translate it into the curriculum?

The higher education system as a foundation
The Spanish, Portuguese, American and British university systems are different. The American one has a more flexible structure: the student chooses subjects from different degrees in order to make their own curriculum. In Spain and Portugal, the system is heavily structured, while in the British one, students are focused on one field of study.
In the US, the first years of university involve general subjects, and later on they focus on a specific field of study with subjects related to the chosen area of expertise in order to obtain a diploma, which is called a "major". Some also choose a "minor", a smaller set of subjects in a secondary area of expertise and subordinate to the "major". After that, they can access a master's degree for further specialisation.
In the UK there are bachelor's degrees in different areas of expertise: BEng, BSci, BA, etc. It is also possible to add a one-year master's degree to a bachelor's degree (MEng, MSci, MA). The Portuguese and Spanish cases also have peculiarities. In Portugal, higher education is divided into two subsystems: university and polytechnic education. The former is researchoriented, while the latter is focused on the professional field. In this regard, the current study is limited to universities. It is important to know the foundations of the higher education system in the analysed countries in order to understand the comparison and equivalence of diplomas.

METHODOLOGY
A qualitative methodology based on content analysis has been used to address this study, which is intended to help achieve the main objective of the research: conducting a historical review of existing ties between the disciplines of marketing and PR. 5 http://www.eees.es/es/eees-paises-participantes-reino-unido. ISSN: 2174-3681 Analysing the official degrees offered by universities including the denominations of "Public Relations" and "Marketing" for the 2018-19 academic year. We will include four countries: the EEUU, the UK, Portugal and Spain, with our main focus on the Spanish case. It must be noted that this objective will be achieved through the conceptual analysis of the discussed university degrees, without delving into the number of subjects related to those degrees or their content.
The initial hypothesis states that, after years of separation, the academic scenario combines public relations and marketing in degrees and double degrees where both have an equally leading role regarding the nomenclature of the degrees. In the next stage of the study, we will analyse the content developed for the different subjects taught on the discussed degrees since, agreeing with Fitch & L'Étang (2017), it "is not surprising that PR is situated either in communications, media, journalism or business marketing contexts. However, it is not good academic practice, and it raises some interesting questions over curriculum and pedagogy". ii. The United Kingdom with 29.
B) On the other hand, both countries are selected based on 2015 data from the same ranking in the specific subject of Economics, in which we will frame the object of the study, these are the first two countries.
2. The other selected countries are Spain and Portugal, because of the proximity for the authors.
A comparative study between these four countries is thus proposed. To do that, we have examined the official degrees offered by public and private universities in these four countries. Due to their different education systems, research has been limited to higher university studies in both public and private institutions.
In Spain and Portugal, we have used the database from Universia 7 , which gathers data from universities that offer degrees, double degrees and triple degrees including the denominations Public Relations and Marketing:  It is important to highlight the differences between American and European higher education models, which hindered the search in the American case. However, we did find departments or schools integrating both concepts in the USA. In this process, we have analysed the following studies: Regarding the UK, we have used the professional association CIRP (a national PR benchmark) 9 , and the search engine 10 (searching for both Public Relations and Marketing), as well as the ranking made by The Guardian (including Journalism and Media Studies) 11 . novelty. Once again, we highlight that this research allows us to understand the trends in university education in Spain, taking as a reference the cases of neighbouring countries (such as Portugal) and international academic powers in communication (EEUU and the UK).
Therefore, to approach the study, qualitative research based on content analysis has been chosen as a research technique. The object of study has been delimited in a specific time and geographical space with the aim of collecting data on the universities that offer undergraduate degrees in whose nomenclature the variables "public relations" and "marketing" are linked.

RESULTS
In Spain, there are eight universities offering degrees including both disciplines in their title  Portugal, it is traditional to combine public relations and advertising, as is the case in Spain.
These are not double degrees, as the workload is significantly smaller. They also prioritise subjects on marketing (6) over those on PR (2). d) USA: the education system is less structured, and students have more freedom to make their own curriculum. We only observe a degree with "Marketing and PR" in its official Remarkably, these studies refer to marketing communications, not to marketing. Both terms appear in schools, departments, and on a great number of master's degrees, as well as diplomas specialising in marketing communications.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
The conceptual borders between marketing and public relations evolved towards an integration that is also seen in the professional and academic fields.
The portal Top Universities 12 points out that "students who graduate with communications degrees typically veer toward public relations (PR) or marketing careers. PR focuses more on maintaining relationships, while marketing works to actively promote the company or the brand." According to these data, the first trend we have identified is that students consider that it is natural to include communication (PR) and marketing as complementary disciplines.
The question arises as to whether or not educational institutions identify that students tend to complement their initial training in communication with marketing, and vice versa, or whether or not the creation of new degrees based on existing ones to provide an outlet to new graduates is just a fad.
Perhaps the labour market trends make the academic field identify its needs and create degrees and double degrees in which students are simultaneously trained in PR and marketing. Bear in mind that, according to the 2017 Global Communications Report, "the PR professionals and the Marketing professionals believe that Public Relations will become more closely aligned with marketing (47%) and less than a 7% of them believe than PR will become a distinct and separate function from marketing".
If these trends about the fields of public relations and marketing stemming from the labour and academic spheres are so evident, why are they not equally evident in every country?
According to this study, the trends only translate into an academic offer with degrees combining both names in the United Kingdom and Spain. Are these countries more sensitive to these trends? This would suggest that American and Portuguese academic markets are oblivious to those trends, as we only found one degree/licentiate fulfilling that characteristic.
In this regard, it could also be expected that the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) would offer a common framework to all the countries where it operates, but this statement 12 https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/careers-advice/communications-careers-pr-vs-marketing. ISSN: 2174-3681 is not feasible either, as our study points out that only the Spanish and British cases support the identified trends, excluding the Portuguese one regarding the offer of degrees/licentiates. It would also be interesting to compare these data to those referring to master's degrees and other postgraduate and specialised programmes. We must emphasise that this concern also exists at a more professional level, as the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communications Management is working to establish a global body of knowledge which may be proposed as a foundation for professional credential schemes and academic curricula across the world (Manely and Valin, 2017).
Despite the great number of university studies offering subjects on marketing and public relations in the analysed countries, those combining these disciplines in their official nomenclature are quite scarce, at least regarding degrees/licentiates.
The analysed countries do not show a common pattern regarding the trend towards the creation of new degrees combining both concepts. While there are more of these studies in the United Kingdom and Spain, they are rather anecdotal in Portugal and the United States.
This is not to say that there are no degrees with subjects in both disciplines, but rather that there are few institutional efforts by the universities to officially combine both concepts in their official denomination.
We could assume that the European and North American cases are different due to their respective university systems, given that the North American one is less rigid and allows students to create their own academic curriculum based on their interests. The creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) was supposed to provide a framework to standardise this trend, but this is not the case, as evidenced by the comparison of the Spanish and British cases to the Portuguese one.
We could also assume that educational institutions plan their offer according to the needs of the professional field. In this regard, everything seems to suggest that public relations and marketing professionals are looking for a greater collaboration between both disciplines.
After a historical evolution in which they tried to separate from each other, we have moved towards integration through marketing communication.